Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/225

 are here commingled. What really happened was this. In the era of forced labour, when every adult rustic had to contribute a certain number of days' work annually to the service of the State or of his liege lord, it was usual for the official superintendent of these unwilling toilers to stand over them with a bare-bladed spear in hand. Any display of laziness justified fatal recourse to the spear, and the corpse of a man thus done to death was treated as so much inanimate material — thrown between the piles of an embankment or tossed into the foundations of a building. That species of fierce incitement was generally resorted to when extraordinary expedition had to be attained: when an inundation had to be averted, a river dammed before the flowing of the tide, a fortification constructed on the eve of attack, or a work concluded in anticipation of the advent of some great man. It proved, of course, highly efficacious, and may serve in some degree to explain the really wonderful achievements that stand to the credit of human effort in mediæval, and even in modern, Japan. Two corpses are said to be mouldering under the scarps of the futile forts hurriedly erected for the defence of Yedo (Tōkyō) in the interval between Commodore Perry's first and second comings; and looking down from Noge hill in the suburbs of Yokohama, one may see the shrine of a servant girl who sacrificed herself to expedite the reclamation of a swamp behind the foreign set-