Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/109

 other, responsible officials who either believed that society was not yet ripe for the full enfranchisement of newspapers, or were unwilling to place in the hands of their political opponent weapons which threatened to prove inconveniently effective against themselves. The public, of course, took the part of the editors, and each sentence of imprisonment or fine pronounced against them brought a fresh access of popular sympathy. If there was occasional abuse of power on one side, there certainly were frequent abuses of privilege on the other. Devices, often unscrupulous and sometimes ingenious, were employed by the editors to gain popularity or to bring the Government into ridicule. On one occasion they organised imposing funeral rites in honour of journals that had been suppressed by Ministerial order. The defunct sheets, placed in a coffin, were borne in solemn procession to the temple of the Goddess of Mercy, where Buddhist priests chanted litanies for the dead, journalists and political agitators read threnodies or burned incense, and all the pomp, parade, and ceremony proper to aristocratic obsequies were observed. The story of this struggle for liberty reads strangely in the context of such a history as that of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, when the Government made its autocratic power felt in every sphere of daily life, and the people never thought of resisting any order, however arbitrary, whether it related to the nature of their food or