Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/73

Rh which was quick to punish him in case of local risings by transferring him to a smaller daimiate. In his own interest at least, the daimyo was a lover of peace, and in the seclusion of his palace, he imitated the customs of the courts of Kyoto and Yedo. The common duties of life were invested with elaborate formalities, and his councillors who studied to beguile his listless leisure made of him as idle a figure-head as his military liege the shogun. Military arts were encouraged, it is true, but only as a matter of duty in later times, by the class whose profession was the sword. This ease and luxury pervaded the whole samurai class, whose offices under their lords had become hereditary; and few of them could have exhibited that martial prowess which had won for their ancestors the positions they now held as their birthright. The same listlessness also made itself manifest in the other three classes, the agricultural, industrial, and mercantile; and time which hung so heavily on their hands was accounted of no value. They showed the same deliberateness in their occupations as the samurai who lived at ease on the implicit understanding that he should always be ready to lay down his life at his lord’s bidding.

If all classes of men took their time in the serious business of life, they were even more leisurely in the pursuit of their pleasures. To pleasure they were addicted, and pretexts were never wanting. Local fêtes, flowers of every season, family events, all furnished plausible excuses for convivial parties. Especially, the flowers, snow, and the full moon gave the better classes opportunities for gathering in companies in picturesquely-situated tea-houses; and such meetings were naturally protracted by the national custom of drinking saké hot in tiny cups which go twenty or more to the pint. As, at these parties, the tea-house waitresses were too busy with their own duties, a new class of entertainers arose, known in Yedo as geisha (or accomplished ones) whose function was to serve the saké, to play music,