Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/196

 have the name of being made there. There are but few houses in all the chief streets where there is not something to be sold, and for my part I could not help wondering whence they can have customers enough for such an immense quantity of goods. 'T is true, indeed, there is scarce anybody passes through Miako but what buys something or other of the manufactures of this city, either for his own use, or for presents to be made to his friends and relatives."

During the first seven centuries of its existence Kyōtō was scarcely ever in a condition adapted to the development of art industry. In 794, when the Emperor Kwammu moved the Imperial residence thither, the place was little more than an insignificant village. At first its growth was rapid, for, as is shown by the relics preserved at Nara, the previous seat of Government, even in those early days Japanese Court life was highly refined. But on the whole the habits of the nation were simple. Class distinctions did not yet exist. Every man capable of bearing arms was a soldier. When his services were required, he took the field, and when peace was restored, he returned to the bread-earning occupation which he had before pursued. The gradual advent of a social state in which one section of the people ministered to the luxurious proclivities of the other, was accompanied by the rise of three great families, the Minamoto, the Taira, and the Fujiwara, whose feuds devastated the country for five centuries. Students of Japanese history are familiar with the terrible succession of civil wars of that era, the effects of which culminated in the middle of the sixteenth century when Kyōtō was practically a mass of ruins, and the court nobility were