Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/33

 years. Early on the morning of February 11, 1889, the Minister of Education, Viscount Mori, one of modern Japan's most enlightened statesmen, was about to leave his residence for the purpose of proceeding to the Palace, when a youth of twenty-five stabbed him fatally with a kitchen knife. Scarcely had the assassin been consigned to the grave when the citizens of Tōkyō began to pay visits to his tomb. Tradesmen, artisans, but, above all, actors, wrestlers, dancing-girls, fencing-masters, and youthful politicians, flocked thither, so that every day a new forest of incense-sticks smoked and a fresh garden of flowers bloomed before the sepulchre. Foreign observers of the strange pageant stood aghast. Was it conceivable, they inquired, that civilised people should worship at the tomb of a murderer and pay homage to the memory of an assassin? It seemed, on the one hand, as though the masses of Japan hid savage instincts beneath a surface of courtesy and refinement; on the other, as though a government that permitted such demoralising displays must be very feeble, and a nation that feted the murderer of a minister, very disaffected. All such constructions and inferences were based on ignorance of Japanese character. The pilgrims to Nishino's tomb obeyed the same principle that assigns a niche in the Kanda Shrine to the image of a great rebel and a place in the Sano procession to the effigy of a notorious robber. Daring and prowess, in whatever forms