Japan: Its History, Arts, and Literature/Volume 4/Chapter 3
Chapter III
CRIMINAL PROCEDURES AND THE CRIMINAL CLASS IN TOKUGAWA TIMES
The city of Yedo was under the administration originally of two magistrates and subsequently of three, each having twenty-five "aids" (yōriki) and one hundred and twenty-five "greffiers" (dōshin). The magistrate wielded executive, judicial, and a measure of legislative authority, but the citizens themselves enjoyed a large degree of local autonomy. Elders (machi-doshiyori) were selected by the people to discharge general municipal duty, and a headman (nanushi)—for which office the principal citizens became eligible in turn—supervised each ward. As to funds for public purposes, they were supplied, in the first place, by prominent landowners (jinushi), who subsequently collected the money from the people in their district in the form of a land rate and a house tax. Seven per cent of the assessed rental of lands and houses was levied for municipal purposes, and as the total of this assessed rental amounted to a little over half a million pounds sterling in 1843, when the city had two and three-fourths millions of inhabitants, it would seem that only thirty-five thousand pounds were expended for municipal purposes, whereas one hundred and seventy-two thousands were levied as State tax. Evidently an expenditure of thirty-five thousand pounds would have been totally insufficient for municipal administration according to modern ideas, but the fact is that the citizens themselves undertook duties which usually devolve on officialdom. All the houses were divided into groups of five each, and each group was held responsible, not only for the acts of its individual members, but also for the discharge of many municipal functions. Thus scavenging was effected by the hinin (outcasts), householders paying for the work; roads were repaired and bridges built by forced labour, by voluntary effort, or by means of special levies; there was no public system of street-lighting, each house providing a lamp for itself; police functions, as will be presently explained, were largely discharged by private individuals, and prison expenditures were defrayed by a system which did not include the citizens at large. It must be understood that in all statements of revenues accruing from lands and houses, and in all estimates of public outlays, the military class were not included: they did not pay any taxes.
Even in the provinces, side by side with feudal autocracy, an autonomic system prevailed, having for its basis the same "five men" grouping as that adopted in the cities. These groups were, in effect, administrative units. They enacted rules for themselves with regard to matters of religious observances, apparel, household relations, marriage, quarrels, robberies, and natural calamities. To render succour to each other in time of distress was also a duty of those forming a group, and their collective responsibility towards the law was strictly enforced. They were further required to give information of any unlawful act coming within their notice, and to conduct investigations into the circumstances of a crime so as to be able to furnish evidence to the tribunals of justice. Each group chose one house to be its head (kumi-gashira), and the farmers in every village elected a headman (shōya), the headmen, in turn, being grouped according to local convenience under a chief headman (ō-jōya), while functions closely resembling those of police were discharged by representatives of the farmers (hiyakushō-dai) in rural districts. Indeed, among the notable improvements standing to the credit of the Tokugawa administration police efficiency must be placed. Bands of robbers no longer roamed the provinces nor openly harassed the citizens of the great towns. There was an abundance of all other kinds of thieves,—burglars, highwaymen, pickpockets, shoplifters, and swindlers,—but open defiance of the law ceased to be possible.
The most daring disturbers of the peace were the so-called "wave-men" (rōnin), or unattached samurai, to whom allusion has already been made in a previous chapter. Originally the rōnin were retainers of feudal chiefs who, having lost their estates in the sequel of intrigues or combats, could no longer support a military establishment, and thus the samurai serving under them had no choice but to become soldiers of fortune, ready to enlist under any banner or engage in any enterprise. Their desperate condition often betrayed them into sanguinary outrages, and their readiness to transfer their allegiance from one feudal chief to another did violence to the principles of loyalty and fidelity forming the bases of the samurai's creed. The Taikō endeavoured to check this abuse by forbidding any samurai to enter a new service without the consent of his former chief, and the Tokugawa rulers sought to impose a similar veto. But no signal success attended these efforts. The rōnin continued to be a feature of feudal Japan, not necessarily as soldiers of fortune, but sometimes as men who, for a purpose of their own,—to avenge the death of a relative, or to travel through the provinces on fencing tours, or to promote some political aim,—found it inconvenient to be tied to the service of one master. It was by these men that all the political outrages of later Tokugawa days were perpetrated,—the assassinations of prominent officials, the cutting down of foreigners, the assaults upon legations, and the violent acts of opposition to the conclusion of commercial treaties.
In the same context may be placed another class of men about whose origin and habits various accounts have been published. The Tokugawa Government not only employed Buddhist priests as aids in the suppression of Christianity, but also made use of them as political detectives. The religionists that thus combined sacred with secular duties were adherents of the Fuke-shu, or "sect of universal mutability," which, founded by a Chinese bonze, was introduced during the thirteenth century into Japan, where, owing to the propagandism of Rōan and Kiusen, its temples of Myōan-ji in Kyōtō and Kogane in Shimosa attained some celebrity. The creed was based on the philosophy of Laotsze and Chuang Tsu, who taught the doctrine of abstraction from all worldly affairs, and held that were there no such implements as rule and measure in the world, neither would there be any sin. Hence the representatives of the sect called themselves kyōmu-so (generally pronounced kōmuso), or "priests of nothingness." However sincere they may have been originally, their ranks gradually became a refuge for men who, from motives of expediency rather than piety, desired to segregate themselves from society without observing the forms preliminary to entering the ordinary priesthood and without publishing the fact of their anchoritism. They carried a sword, and wore a sacerdotal scarf as well as a peculiar large hat in the shape of an inverted basket which completely concealed the head, but otherwise their garb did not differ from that of a layman. In effect, they were beggars, but they never begged. Their method was to play a flute from door to door or to recite some religious formula, and to receive in silence the alms invariably tendered. Identification was impossible in such a costume, and since by entering the sect immunity might be secured from the consequences of crime at the expense of observing celibacy and abstaining from meat diet, some samurai whose hands were stained with blood or who had otherwise broken the law, some who had pledged themselves to a vendetta, many who regarded a wandering life and its privations as the best kind of military training, and a few who were commissioned by the authorities to conduct secret quests in this effective disguise, joined the ranks of the kōmuso. They were entitled to special privilege at inns and ferries, and inasmuch as the people could not distinguish whether these mysterious figures, travelling always in pairs and never allowing their features to be seen, were official detectives, avengers of blood, soldiers inuring themselves to hardship, or desperadoes whose crimes compelled them to shun the light of day, the kōmuso always found plentiful charity, and had little to fear from the consequences of the excesses and extortions they often committed. Such strange beings, moving silently and ominously among the citizens in whose daily life they constituted an element of perpetual terror, would not have been tolerable in a society less subservient to military officialdom. The rōnin and the kōmuso were natural products of Japanese civilisation in feudal times, when the privilege of carrying arms being monopolised by a small oligarchy, a mood of unreasoning submissiveness became instinctive among the bulk of the nation, and abuses were tamely endured which, under other circumstances, must have provoked violent resentment.
The legislative theory of feudal Japan down to the Tokugawa era was that knowledge of the laws need not be possessed by any save their administrators. It sufficed that the people should be instructed in the general principles of right and wrong. On the ruling class alone devolved the duty of determining whether a certain act violated those principles. This doctrine, based on the old Confucian precept, "Make the people obey, never make them know" (Tami wo shite yorashimu beshi shirashimu bekarazu), had not been recognised in ante-feudal days. The Taihō Code, promulgated in the eighth century, embodied rules sufficiently explicit for the guidance of rulers and ruled alike. Further, it was applicable to the whole nation, whereas under military feudalism each fief legislated independently for its own vassals. Had the lawgivers of Japan performed their task with anything like the measure of textual precision and respect for details deemed essential by Western jurisconsults, the result must have been a mass of statutes as heterogeneous as were the conditions of the various districts for which they were enacted. But inconvenience of that kind was averted by the theory that the letter of the law need not be formulated provided that its guiding principles were enunciated, and since legislative principles are tolerably uniform everywhere, Japanese local enactments do not exhibit so much diversity as might be anticipated. The "Seventeen Precepts" of the House of Asakura, the "Hundred Rules" of the Cho Sokabe Clan, the "Twenty-one Statutes" of the Hōjō, the "House Laws" of the Takeda Chief, the "Wall Writings" (Heki-sho) of the Uyesugi, and other bodies of feudal regulations, could be compiled into a whole without any serious clashing of sanctions or vetoes. Still each fief exercised the right of independent legislation, as was consistent with the autonomy it enjoyed in other respects. The Taikō, in pursuance of his project of national unification, contemplated re-enacting the ancient Taihō Code and making it universally applicable. But he died on the threshold of this reform, and the enactments issued over his own signature were evidently dictated by the immediate needs of the time rather than by any broad legislative principle. At first the Tokugawa Shōguns adopted the old method of making known the laws to those only that were required to enforce them. But the eighth Shōgun, Yoshimune (1716–1745), one of the most enlightened rulers ever possessed by Japan, arrived at the conclusion that obedience to laws could not justly be expected from people ignorant of their provisions, and that many of the offences committed throughout the country were attributable to that mistaken theory of government. He therefore directed that every law thenceforth promulgated must be read in the presence of the people, and explained to them by either the Daikwan (provincial deputies) or the headmen of villages, and must further be inscribed on notice-boards set up in conspicuous places.
Yoshimune's era, or, speaking broadly, the first half of the eighteenth century, is remarkable on account of improvements then effected in criminal laws and judicial procedure. Feudal legislation at the close of the seventeenth century was very harsh. While, on the one hand, regulations were issued providing for the kind treatment and protection of animals, birds, and even fishes, laws were enacted perpetuating one of the most terrible injustices of ancient times, the implication of children in a parent's crime. If a man or woman, sentenced to be crucified or burned, had male children above fifteen years of age, they were similarly executed, and younger children were placed in charge of a relative until they reached that age, when they were banished. Even when a parent suffered the ordinary capital punishment of beheading or hanging, it was within the discretion of the judges to execute or exile the male children. Wives and daughters were exempted from the rule of implication, though they might be reduced to the rank of slaves. In the year 1721, however, under Yoshimune's rule, a juster spirit inspired legislation. It was enacted that even in the case of crimes punishable with crucifixion and exposure of the head, the penalty must be limited to the criminal himself, and that with regard to the most heinous of all crimes, parricide or the murder of a teacher, a special tribunal should determine whether the children and grandchildren ought to be implicated. But this leniency applied to farmers and merchants only: the samurai were not included. To punish the offence of a man of rank more severely than that of a commoner is exceptional procedure, though justice suggests that the guilt of an offender should vary directly with the degree of his education and the circumstances of his life. In this matter, however, Japanese law-givers were influenced by expediency rather than by philosophy, crimes committed by samurai being of more consequence to the State than crimes committed by farmers and tradesmen.
Side by side with the above evidence of improved legislative conception, it is strange to find barbarously stringent measures for checking theft. Death was the penalty for stealing anything, no matter how small, or for entering another's house secretly, even though nothing was carried away, or for lying, swindling, or attempted extortion by force. Yet an inexplicable discrimination was made in favour of the pickpocket. For him tattooing (ire-zumi) seemed a sufficient punishment, so that he stood in the same category with a person absconding without paying his score at an inn or a restaurant. In either case, however, repetition of the offence involved death. On the whole the records show that mediæval Japan's legislation partook of the severity which formerly characterised penal laws everywhere. To render punishments deterrent by their severity was the only course that suggested itself. Even such a petty offence as concealment of dutiable property so as to escape taxation might be visited with death; not before the close of the eighteenth century was the execution of a pregnant woman deferred until after the birth of her offspring, and six years previously to that reform a new regulation provided that if a criminal who had wounded a parent or a master died in prison, his corpse should be preserved in salt and the penalty of the law inflicted on it, even though the wounded man had recovered. It will naturally be supposed that in order to increase the deterrent effect of penalties, their infliction was made as public as possible. That was the case up to the year 1633. But the authorities then forbade any persons to attend an execution except those whose presence was necessary. The veto never became really effective, however. Executions continued to be public, though they seldom attracted many observers, the people of Japan not being troubled by a morbid desire to witness scenes of bloodshed. On the other hand, the Government took care that the prelude and the sequel of an execution should force themselves on general attention. The condemned man, his hands and arms tightly bound, was placed on horseback and carried to the execution-ground under escort of a band of beggars, the melancholy procession lengthening its route so as to pass through all the principal streets. After execution the head was exposed for several days under a placard setting forth the criminal's offence.
From the beginning of the Tokugawa era judicial procedure was ostensibly governed by principles showing considerable enlightenment. In order to prevent frivolous litigation, it was enacted that any one instituting a suit in the face of oral or documentary evidence clearly showing him to be in the wrong, should be either fined or imprisoned. Every case fell within the jurisdiction of the nearest local tribunal, and the integrity of the latter's procedure being nominally guaranteed by the central government, suitors were warned against appealing to Yedo, the consequence of a groundless appeal being death or imprisonment. All persons discharging judicial functions were enjoined to practise absolute impartiality, to observe the canons of the samurai, to live strictly within their means, not to engage in any transactions of trade, and to hear cases uniformly in the order of their institution. A wholesome rule applied to documentary accusations preferred against officials. The charge had to be shown at once to the incriminated official, who affixed his seal in proof of his readiness to attend in court when summoned for the purpose of answering the accusation. But there was no such thing as a regularly trained judiciary. The functions of judge were discharged by magistrates (bugyo), deputies (daikwan), or officials serving under them, and justice sometimes became quite inaccessible, owing to the incompetence or corruption of those dispensing it. Serious hardships resulted also from tardiness of procedure. Men charged with paltry offences lay in prison sometimes for years pending trial, so that death frequently ended their durance, or, driven by desperation to attempt escape, they became liable to capital punishment. In civil cases also the delays of the law exposed litigants to such heavy expenditure and inconvenience that it became habitual to expedite matters by bribing the judges. The first resolute attempt to correct these abuses was made when (1716) Yoshimune succeeded to the Shogunate. Rules were then enacted that no person accused of a lesser offence than murder or robbery must be held in custody for more than one hundred days without final trial, and that cases not disposed of within that time were to be specially reported to the authorities. Civil suits which had remained unsettled for six months, must be similarly reported, and as a judicial official upon whose hands a number of undecided cases had accumulated, became thus an object of derision to the authorities in Yedo, and was liable to removal for incompetence, it is recorded that marked improvement soon manifested itself. The petition-box (meyasu-bako), spoken of in a previous chapter, contributed materially to the same end, for complaints about undue delay in adjudicating law-suits were among the documents that people received a special invitation to forward through that channel.
Encouragement given to informers was a marked feature of the Tokugawa system. Not only pardon, but in many cases substantial rewards, were bestowed on persons turning "King's evidence." Thus, in the days of the third Shōgun, Iyemitsu (1623–1650), when the pastime of hawking was passionately affected by the Yedo Court, the law provided that anyone finding a hawk's nest should be handsomely remunerated, and that to him and to the other four members of the "five-men guild" to which he belonged should be entrusted the remunerative duty of taking care of the young hawks; whereas if anyone concealed the nest or robbed it, he and his fellow-members became liable to death, and an informer, although particeps criminis, was to receive a reward of fifty pounds. Again, in cases of incendiarism, one of the guilty parties might not only avoid punishment, but also obtain thirty pieces of silver by giving information, and a sum of about one hundred pounds together with the privileges of wearing a sword and taking a family name could be earned by a farmer who warned the authorities of seditious intentions on the part of his fellow-rustics, such as combining to present petitions or absconding in large numbers to elude taxation. Many other instances might be adduced of enactments designed to enlist coöperation for the detection of crime.
But although such measures were adopted to obtain evidence, the law required that an accused person must be induced to confess before his guilt was finally determined. It resulted that torture was freely applied. No instruments in the nature of the rack, the boot, the thumbscrew, etc., were employed. The commonest device was to bind a man with ropes in some con- strained position which became more and more agonising the longer he retained it; or to make him kneel upon a grating of wooden bars with their edges upward and then to pile weights upon his knees. In the case of minor criminals a method sometimes pursued was to insert the handle of a pen between the fingers, which were then pressed together forcibly, great pain being thus caused without inflicting any serious injury. But on the whole the tortures employed judicially in Japan were not at all so cruel as those used in mediæval Europe.
The first system of prison organisation in Japan seems to have been introduced at the beginning of the eighth century, when the Taihō Code was promulgated, and doubtless China furnished models in this matter, as she did for nearly all the institutions of the time. The code shows that expenses connected with food, clothes, and medicine for prisoners, as well as the cost of repairing jails under the new system, were defrayed out of the proceeds of confiscated goods supplemented by grants from the treasury; that there were periodical inspections; that in case of severe illness a prisoner's fetters were removed, and that in the event of death his body was either handed to his relatives or decently interred by the authorities. The influence of Buddhism displayed itself in educating a practical sense of the sanctity of life, for not only had the sovereign's permission to be obtained by an elaborate process before inflicting capital punishment, but also on the day of execution all musical performances were suspended in the capital. A holiday was allowed to the inmates of a jail every tenth day, and if a prisoner's parents died he was permitted to mourn for seven days. Diagrams still extant indicate that the dual system common to all institutions having a Chinese origin was adopted in the case of jails: they were divided into the "right prison" and the "left prison," but concerning the purpose of the division nothing is now known. From the same diagrams it is learned that the cangue was imported from China, and that, in addition to chain fetters, there were manacles for the hands and stocks for the feet both made out of a single piece of wood. Had the civilisation of the masses kept pace with the religious spirit evoked among the upper classes by Buddhist teachings, the treatment of criminals in Japan would probably have become exceptionally enlightened, for the Emperor Shōmu (724–728), adopting the principle, "the dead cannot be recalled to life, nor the condemned judged again," abolished capital punishment and sought to make compassion the rule of government. But practical experience showed that such an administrative principle was incompatible with the morality of the age, and in less than half a century another sovereign—Kōnin (770–781)—went to the opposite extreme by decreeing that incendiaries and thieves must be led through the city after condemnation and then publicly scourged to death. The treatment of prisoners may be inferred from that one fact; but the records are silent on the subject, nor is it possible to distinguish whether the marked prevalence of crime in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries is attributable chiefly to the savage severity of the criminal laws then in force or to the general unrest of the epoch. When Yoritomo assumed the administrative power at the close of the twelfth century, he greatly improved the judicial procedure, organising metropolitan and local tribunals of first instance and of appeal. But his whole system was informed with a spirit of militarism, and though his drastic methods had the effect of greatly reducing crime, neither he nor the Hōjō nor the Ashikaga left any models worthy of imitation by subsequent generations. It was when the Tokugawa came into authority that more enlightened procedure began to be adopted. As to Iyeyasu himself, what is chiefly memorable is his organisation of three bodies of judicial officials—one charged with jurisdiction in matters relating to temples and shrines; another with jurisdiction in the case of artisans, tradesmen, and other commoners; the third with jurisdiction in questions concerning the agricultural classes—and his creation of collegiate courts, in pursuance of the principle that the graver the case the larger should be the panel of judges appointed to try it. In the matter of prisons, however, there is no evidence that he effected any improvement. That task was left to his successors Iyetsuna (1651–1680) and, above all, Yoshimune (1716–1745). The former caused a new and extensive jail to be built, consisting of five sections: the first (agari-zashiki) for the detention of persons whose rank entitled them to audience at Court; the second (agari-yo) for ordinary samurai and priests; the third (tairō) for "commoners" of the mercantile and manufacturing classes; the fourth (hiyakusho-rō) for farmers, and the fifth (jorō) for females. The office of chief jailer was hereditary in the Tatewaki family, and the representative of the family controlled this, the principal
prison in the capital, with a staff of one hundred 
Fujiyama from Numigawa
it had not been usual to send samurai to jail. If a samurai's offence was not sufficiently grave to call for immediate suicide, exile, or decapitation, he was ordered to go into confinement (heimōn), which meant that all the doors and windows of his residence must be kept shut; that there must be complete cessation of ingress or egress; that no business might be transacted except such as was unavoidable, and then only at night, and that a physician must not be admitted during the day. In short, a man sentenced to heimōn was virtually imprisoned in his own house with all his family and servants, and had to live in perpetual exile from daylight. A milder form of the same penalty—hissoku, or compulsory seclusion—differed in the essential particular that windows need not be closed, and that ingress or egress was permitted by a narrow opening, while in yet a third form—enryō (retirement)—the shutting of the main gate alone sufficed. Another plan pursued with offenders of the samurai class was to entrust them, pending trial, to the charge of some family, which then became responsible for their safe custody. This practice continued to be used occasionally even to the close of the Tokugawa dynasty. It may be regarded as a kind of bail, and was, indeed, the only kind known in Japan. In the system suggested by Iyetsuna's advisers separate prisons were assigned for the accommodation of military men, but the fact that they were imprisoned at all was a significant departure from old-time methods. Yoshimune greatly extended his predecessor's reforms. He softened the rigour of prison regulations, and caused two special buildings (tamari) to be constructed for sick prisoners, whereas the cruel custom had hitherto been to place them in a separate hovel with a supply of medicine and abandon them to their fate. The common jail of Yoshimune's time had double walls of wooden lattice-work, the space within the inner wall being for the prisoners, and the corridor between the walls for purposes of official inspection. Thus the prison was practically open to the four winds. One prisoner was selected to be "mayor of the jail" (rō-nanushi) and under him served a guard (yakutsuke) consisting of eleven prisoners taken from each room. When a man confined in the agari-zashiki or the agari-ya had to proceed to a court of justice, he was carried in a closed sedan-chair (kago); but other prisoners were marched through the streets, being allowed, however, to wear a slouched hat which concealed their faces. The general principle as to prison expenses was that they should be defrayed locally within certain limits. Thus the cost of a thousand kago annually for conveying the better classes of culprits to and from the tribunal of justice was levied from householders within a certain district, any additional outlay being paid by the Government, and the expenses of transporting provisions as well as those of repairing jails were imposed upon the inhabitants of other districts in the vicinity. There were four grades of diet, the worst of them sufficiently tolerable; garments were furnished by the Government to criminals whose friends or relatives failed to supply them; machinery for preferring complaints was provided; on the 15th of July every year a feast of fish and vermicelli was given to all the prisoners, and in the Ishikawa-jima suburb a species of workhouse (ninsoku ori-ba) gave shelter to time-expired convicts lacking means of sustenance or not fit to be trusted at large. All this suggests a tolerably complete system of prison management. But there were many defects and abuses that do not appear upon the surface. The sanitary arrangements were inexpressibly bad, and the prisoners suffered intensely from exposure, the clothing supplied by the Government being withheld until a man's garments had been worn to shreds. Pitiless cruelty and extortion disfigured the administration of the Ro-nanushi and the Yaku-tsuke. Themselves generally hardened criminals, they freely exercised the power of flogging and torturing entrusted to them for the preservation of order, and as complaints could not be preferred except through the medium of the Yaku-tsuke, against whom they were generally directed, a prisoner had virtually no redress. All the duties connected with the prison, except those discharged by the Rō-nanushi and Yaku-tsuke, were entrusted to men of the "degraded class," compulsory contact with whom was in itself a severe punishment, and even the sick had to depend on the ministrations of these outcasts. Thus the jails of Japan, though on the whole not inferior to those of contemporary Europe, were so mismanaged that many of their inmates perished miserably, and permanently broken health as well as moral degradation were almost inevitable results of long incarceration. Things remained in that state until the Restoration in 1867, when one of the first cares of the Government was to revise the criminal laws and reorganise the prison system. Within a short time the Rō-nanushi and the Yaku-tsuke were replaced by officials of different type; the employment of beggars and outcasts in connection with prisons was discontinued; citizens living adjacent to jails were relieved from the duty of supporting them, the Government assuming that burden; Buddhist and Shintō priests were appointed to give religious instruction in prisons, and all barbarous methods of execution,[1] such as burning, sawing asunder, and spearing on the cross, were abolished in favour of decapitation or hanging. The prison regulations issued under this new regimen had for preface a declaration that the purpose of imprisonment was to reform men, not to torment them; that pity, not retaliation, should be the motive of the penal law-giver, and that punishment was only justifiable in the interests of the State. Of course so fine a theory could not be at once carried into practice; there were stages of progress. But from the first the statesmen of the era proposed to themselves nothing less than to substitute for the capricious laws and cruel procedure of their predecessors codes which should be in accord with the most advanced principles of Occidental jurisprudence. In pursuance of that purpose they despatched a commission to inspect the prisons in several of the British colonies, and they engaged an eminent French jurisconsult to work at the compilation of penal laws in association with a committee of Japanese experts. Such a wholesale importation of alien systems seemed almost reckless, and did indeed receive that epithet from some observers. But Japan was exceptionally untrammelled. Her one code, a collection of theoretical maxims and skeleton regulations, borrowed originally from China in the seventh and eighth centuries, had ceased to be effective after a brief period, and had lost even nominal validity after the establishment of military feudalism at the close of the twelfth century. Thenceforth until the days of Yoshimune (1716–1745) the nation remained without any knowledge of law, being required to study only the principles of public morality and to obey whatever instructions the governing class promulgated. But the principles of public morality being virtually the same everywhere, Japanese statesmen could feel assured that codes borrowed from France would not present any startling novelties or disturb any time-honoured precedents. They chose to be indebted to France because she was distinguished by the possession of codes that had stood the test of practice, and they went to England for prison models because object lessons were easily accessible in her adjacent colonies; but no profound significance should be attached to these selections. The work of the code-compilers necessarily took time. It was not completed, indeed, until 1880, and the new codes—criminal and criminal procedure—went into force in 1881. The Japanese Government, however, had not been content to stumble along with the old system while awaiting the new. Coming into office at the close of 1867, it immediately appointed commissioners who, without recourse to foreign aid, were able to publish in 1871 a body of laws applicable to the whole empire, and to supplement them, two years later, by a code showing many conspicuous improvements. These enactments served as stepping-stones to the Franco-Japanese codes of 1881, and truly it is difficult to determine which of the two constituted the more radical departure from the spirit of original Japanese jurisprudence. The Japanese commissioners, working alone, recognised as fully as did their French successors that the certainty of punishment, not its severity, is the true principle of penal legislation, and that the object of laws is to deter crime, not to avenge it. Of course traces of old customs remained in the compilations. All men were not equal before the law, the military retaining some of their special privileges; robbery with violence continued to be punishable with death; a husband detecting his wife in the act of adultery, might still slay the woman and her lover, and a master did not render himself liable to any penalty for beating a servant unless death resulted. But on the whole it is apparent, from the work of these Japanese commissioners, that they were guided by highly enlightened principles, and that, although without foreign aid the great legal reforms of modern Japan could not have been so quickly consummated, they would certainly have been undertaken and carried through. The fact well deserves attention, for it furnishes a complete answer to the often preferred charge that Japan's modern laws and legal procedure are the outcome, not of a sincerely progressive impulse, but of a romantic desire to recover her judicial autonomy. "Had the foreigner within her gates been from the first judiciable by her tribunals, had she not been humiliated by his refusal to entrust his person and property to her keeping, she would have remained content with her old system." That is what her detractors say. It is evident that they never studied the codes compiled solely by Japanese experts long before the question of judicial autonomy had become a living issue.
These important changes did not stop at revision of the laws. They extended also to separation of the judiciary and the executive, hitherto always combined; to the creation of judges, procurators, barristers, notaries, and a new system of police, as well as to the establishment of law schools. Speaking broadly, Japan may now be said to resemble France closely in the matter of penal laws and penal procedure. In one respect she has fallen behind France: the preliminary examination of prisoners is conducted in secret, the assistance of counsel not being allowed to the accused. Public opinion is gradually arraying itself against that feature of the Code, and it will certainly be soon modified.
A reform that lagged slightly was the abolition of torture. In 1874 a notification ordered its discontinuance, reserving, however, to the examining judge discretionary power to employ it in exceptional cases. In 1876 the veto became complete. There has been a curious amount of misconception on this subject. Again and again European and American writers have alleged the existence of the old abuse, and on one occasion an English tourist carried home a conviction that unspeakable horrors were perpetrated in Japanese jails, cries of challenge and onset issuing from a fencing-school for policemen having been mistaken by him for the agonised shrieks of prisoners undergoing torture. The delusion no longer survives in an active form, but its protracted tenacity of life suggests that it might be revived at any moment.
Barristers are spoken of above as an outcome of the legal and judicial reforms of 1872. They are not the first of their genus in Japan. Their prototype was the kuji-shi (public-business man) of Tokugawa times. A modern barrister (bengo-shi) would be much offended, however, were he described as a kuji-shi, and his mood may be explained by saying that the nearest equivalent of the Japanese kuji-shi is the American "scheister." The kuji-shi did not require to be versed in law. There were, in effect, few laws for him to study. His equipment consisted of wiliness and craft. He found no opportunity to plead his client's cause in open Court, and if he had attempted to make capital out of legal quibbles, he would probably have been himself removed to the dock without delay. His function was to circumvent the other side by trickery, by falsehood, by forgery, or by treachery. He cared nothing for loyalty. To acquire an intimate knowledge of a client's case and then to sell that knowledge to the adversary, was a common device. So detestable did his practice render him that, in 1838, the Shōgun's Government forbade the employment of kuji-shi, and directed that all persons following that profession should be driven from their dwellings. The modern bengo-shi is a very different kind of person. He has graduated at the law schools, he has received his diploma, and he has a recognised official status. But his countrymen regard him with distrust such as used to attach to the "lawyer, in Anglo-Saxon communities. Old prejudice is partly responsible. But the barrister himself is also to blame. The fact is that law is a very cheap luxury among the Japanese. People who would not venture within the shadow of a law court in Europe, enter boldly in Japan. The barrister has to adapt himself to his circumstances. He must be prepared to conduct a case for a fee of a few shillings. It is difficult for him to preserve the dignity of his profession when handling such petty issues, and competition forbids him to stand aloof. Nearly a thousand names of graduates from the eight law schools of the Empire or from the Imperial University, are added yearly to the roll of barristers. The struggle for existence does not allow them to be fastidious about the work they undertake. An eminent writer says[2] that the study of the law seems to have for the Japanese a sort of abstract and theoretical interest. That is probably true, but if a Japanese is asked to explain frankly why so many choose law as a profession, he assigns two reasons: first, that the bench can easily be reached from the bar; and secondly, that the possession of a diploma confers official rank. Whatever the truth may be, the Japanese bar threatens to become overcrowded, and the shifts to which its members are driven to earn a livelihood tend constantly to impair the repute of their profession.
The assertion that the bench is easily reached from the bar requires a word of explanation. There are only three hundred and fifty-eight tribunals of justice in Japan, presided over by eleven hundred and ninety-seven judges and procurators. The judges are not old men of long practical experience, as in America and Great Britain, nor have they won their way to the bench by distinguished ability shown at the bar. A barrister, immediately on receiving his diploma, may pass by way of examination to three years of probationary practice as a judge, after which he becomes, again by way of examination, a permanent occupant of the bench or a public procurator. Access to the bench is therefore easy. But the remuneration attached to judicial offices is insignificant. A junior judge receives a salary of only £70 a year; the president of the Court of Cassation has £550. Soon, possibly before this volume is published, there will be a substantial addition to these exceedingly slender stipends. But even supposing them increased by fifty per cent, they will still be too small to inspire ambition. Yet it is the hope of reaching the bench that animates many students of law; for although the pecuniary reward is not large, its recipient is beyond the range of official caprice, being secure in the possession of his office for life, and further, in no other profession can a young man anticipate such quick attainment of independence and social consideration.
Next to the abolition of torture for the purpose of eliciting confession, nothing is more notable in connection with the legislative reforms of the Meiji era than that all classes were placed on an absolutely equal footing before the law. During the eight centuries of military feudalism, from the establishment of the Kamakura Shogunate to the fall of the Tokugawa, the samurai was a being apart. Special canons applied to his conduct, and special tribunals judged his offences,—the Monju-sho and the Samurai-dokoro under Yoritomo's system, and the Ometsuke, the Hoyōjō-sho, and the Metsuke under the Tokugawa. But the Meiji legislation removed such distinctions altogether. Whatever a man's rank or social status, if he falls into police hands he is carried at once before the nearest procurator, and if the latter deems that there are grounds of procedure, the case goes to a juge d'instruction, who interrogates the prisoner and the witnesses independently. These proceedings, as before remarked, are secret. The witnesses do not see each other's faces, nor are they cross-examined. If the result of this preliminary examination is to establish a primâ facie case, the accused is remanded for public trial by a public tribunal where three judges form a collegiate court. Meanwhile he may be released on bail. There is no jury, nor is there any law exactly corresponding to the habeas corpus, and though the framers of the Code endeavoured to provide safeguards which should guarantee an accused person against long detention pending conviction or acquittal, that form of abuse is certainly incidental to Japanese procedure. From this tribunal of first instance there is a right of appeal to a higher court where five judges form a panel, and finally to the Court of Cassation, where seven judges sit. There are also local courts where one judge tries police offences and misdemeanours which the procurator thinks unworthy of reference to a collegiate panel. It will be observed that the public procurator discharges highly important functions. He not only determines whether a case shall be sent forward for trial, but he also conducts it, on behalf of the Crown, through all its subsequent stages. Finally, to complete this brief sketch of the new criminal system, it may be mentioned that witnesses are divided into two classes, direct and collateral. Direct evidence is of the ordinary character. Collateral is the evidence of persons who, though their relationship to the accused partially invalidates their testimony,—as wife and husband, child and parent, master and servant,—may nevertheless be usefully heard for purposes of comparison.
In modern times witnesses in a Japanese law court are not "sworn" to give true evidence: they are merely required to asseverate solemnly. Yet it is an error to say, as has been often said, that Japan never had any form of oath based on religious principles. When, for example, the Emperor visited Hideyoshi's castle at Fushimi in the eleventh century, the six principal officers of State made certain promises and pledged their faith in this formula: "That these engagements shall be observed we swear by Bonten Teishaku, by the Four Maharajahs, by all the other deities, great and small, of the sixty provinces of Nihon, defenders of castles, tutelary divinities, Kasuga Daimyōjin, Hachiman Daibosatsu, Temma Daijisai Tenjin, and other correlated deities, whose punishments are solemnly invoked on the head of any violaters of this oath." This written declaration was stamped with the blood of those pledging themselves, or was burned and the ashes drunk with water, a beverage supposed to prove fatally poisonous to any one violating the oath. It will be seen that the formula includes Buddhist and Shintō superstitions. But in modern Japan, there being no recognised State religion, to prescribe for witnesses in law courts a form of oath based on some special creed would be plainly contradictory. The result, it cannot be denied, is that perjury in the witness box is not regarded with the superstitious horror attaching to it among Occidental peoples in general, and the testimony given in courts of law seems to be correspondingly untrustworthy.
A question of the greatest interest is the practical influence that has been produced upon crime in Japan by these sweeping modifications of criminal law and criminal procedure. It has never been possible in the case of any other nation to observe such a rapid sequence of cause and effect. Elsewhere all legislative and judicial modifications have been deliberate even to timidity. The conditions demanding change have made themselves palpable before change was essayed. But Japanese law-givers seemed to take no thought whatever for the nation's fitness. They made a wholesale adoption of Western jurisprudence, and applied it at once without pausing to consider its applicability. Yet the result seems to justify their temerity. In Tokugawa times, the number of citizens consigned to jail in Yedo was about seven thousand annually, and over three thousand of them went to the execution ground. At present the yearly number of capital punishments for the whole Empire averages above eighty. Did the old system waste life fruitlessly? It would seem so. Unfortunately the science of statistics is of modern growth in Japan. There are no means of making an exact comparison between the criminal conditions of to-day and those of a cycle or a century ago. It is possible, however, to trace pretty clearly the influence that the radical jurisprudential changes of the Meiji era produced during the early years of their full operation. The statistics divide themselves broadly into two heads, major crimes and minor crimes,—the former category including homicides, incendiarisms, and robberies with violence; the latter, robberies without violence, thefts, and frauds. It appears, then, that whereas 12,291 major crimes were committed in 1884, the number in 1896 was only 4,092, or less than one-third, whereas the minor crimes in 1896 aggregated 273,990 against 225,029 in 1884. Major crimes have, in short, diminished steadily and considerably, whereas minor crimes have increased. The former result goes to prove that the sudden leap from the old criminal system to the new did not in any way disturb the nation's moral equilibrium. But do the latter figures suggest the opposite inference, or should they be interpreted as showing that the novel civilisation which Japan is assimilating tends to foster immorality? The question might be very difficult to answer were not another guide available, the guide of suicides. In 1884 the number of suicides throughout the Empire was 5,603; in 1896, it was 7,459. It seems, therefore, that life is becoming more strenuous and its burden heavier. Indeed, that conclusion might have been reached without the aid of statistics, for even the most superficial observer must perceive that if the race for wealth in the West offers splendid prizes to the winners, it condemns the losers to abject suffering such as was seldom witnessed in old-time Japan. Success and failure lie much farther apart in the one region than in the other, and the crowd that struggles in the interval between the two extremes shows more vivid contrasts of fortune and failure. Therefore the temptations to chicanery are becoming stronger. And so, too, are the opportunities. The day's work is much more complex in Japan now than it was fifty years ago; its affairs are more multitudinous, its evil suggestions more numerous. There seems to be no doubt that fraud and chicanery are increasing as the civilisation of greed obliterates the last remnants of the samurai's fine indifference to gain.
These remarks are well illustrated by the records of fraud. In 1888 the number of convictions in this category stood at 8,853; in 1893 it reached 16,100,—an increase of nearly 100 per cent in six years. A large part of the increase was due to the development of bogus-company promoters, an abuse that could not have flourished under the old guild system, to be spoken of by and by. Travelling facilities also have brought the rustic population within reach of the rusé gentlemen of the city. Now that a man can step into a train and, at the cost of few pence and two or three days' idleness, visit Tōkyō or Ōsaka or Kyōtō, which were virtually inaccessible in former times, many sight-seers from the country fall into the hands of city sharpers who practise an endless variety of the "confidence trick." The pickpocket has benefited similarly by the altered conditions of the time,—by the hurrying crowds at railway stations, the stream of folks frequenting banks and exchanges, the mobs at election contests, the concourses at political lecture meetings. In Japan the pickpocket (suri) takes a pride in his business. He regards a burglar with contempt, and is scarcely disposed to admit his own dishonesty, since he merely takes advantage in broad daylight of the culpable carelessness of his fellow-citizens. There are master-pickpockets and apprentices—about twenty-seven of the former and seventy-seven of the latter in Tōkyō. The apprentice usually comes from the rank of boy-beggars who have shown aptitude for the trade, and when a master-beggar transfers the services of such lads to the pickpocketing trade, he retains a pecuniary interest in the youngsters' future earnings. The apprentice gets at first only ten per cent of his "takings," but is always fed, clothed, and supplied with small money by the master, who also pledges himself, and faithfully observes the pledge, that the boy shall be well taken care of in prison. A master-pickpocket in Tōkyō is said to have an income of about thirty yen a month, and his field of operations is strictly defined. He is sometimes utilised by the police, for if the recovery of some stolen article is specially desired, the "masters" are warned that it must be produced at once. Occasionally, too, when an exceptional event seems likely to create special opportunities for theft, the "masters" are quietly apprehended and held in custody until the occasion is past. It is characteristic of the difference between Kyōtō and Ōsaka that the pickpockets of the latter city work on a much larger scale than their Tōkyō confrères, and apply the proceeds of their earnings differently; the Tōkyō practitioner being a dissipated spendthrift, who seldom ventures beyond the limits of the metropolis, never grows rich, and is content to hide his true calling under some petty disguise; whereas the Ōsaka man extends his operations to Tōkyō itself, engages in much larger and more risky enterprises, applies his illicit gains to the purposes of honest trade, and is not infrequently found in the position of a merchant at the head of a considerable business while in secret he employs a band of boy pickpockets. An instance of the ingenuity of these lads is their device to take a lady's clogs from her feet. As she stands in a crowd at some fête, she feels an irritation on her left foot, for example, and removing the right from its clog, she uses the toes to scratch the offending place. Presently the irritation transfers itself to the right foot, and the process of scratching is effected with the left. Finally the lady walks away, ignorant that she has slipped her feet, one by one, into common cheap clogs, leaving her handsome lacquered foot-gear in the possession of the boy with the straw. The race of pickpockets seems to be steadily increasing. Latest statistics showed 2,500 convictions in one year against 1,033 in 1891.
The loafer (gorotsuki), one of the pests of modern Japan, has no exact counterpart elsewhere. He nominally pursues a legitimate profession, but devotes the greater part of his time and attention to nefarious practices. There are about a thousand of these persons in Tōkyō, and, like the pickpockets, they are regularly organised in groups, each under a "parent" (oyabun). The "parent" usually lives in sumptuous style. His income is derived from several sources, the chief being fees or blackmail levied from gamblers, and presents received for acting as agent in all kinds of shady enterprises. Gambling, it should be noted, was a practice against which the Tokugawa Government legislated strenuously. A law of 1655 contained several penalties for every one taking part in games of chance. Another law of 1664 provided that if any one, having fallen into distress or lost his estate by gambling, made application to a magistrate, disclosing the fact, he would not only escape punishment, but also have his property returned to him. Yet another law of 1666 extended the veto to lotteries. Still, according to the records, gambling had become so prevalent throughout the provinces of Shimoosa, Kōzuke, and Shimotsuke in 1767 that the payment of taxes was effected, agriculture neglected, and a large tract of land left lying waste. The Government then ordered that vigorous scrutiny should be made, and that persons suspected of gambling might be arrested,—which meant that they were thrown into prison or probably subjected to torture. Again, in 1788, the prohibition was renewed, and its terms declared applicable to all classes, the magistrates being at the same time directed to undertake strict investigations in quarters of serving-men, in temples and shrines, and even in mansions of feudal nobles. But all these measures failed to achieve their purpose. The Japanese, like the Chinese, seem to have an inborn love of gambling. Great fortunes are not lost and won, as was formerly the case in Europe, but in no other nation does the passion extend so deeply into the lower orders of society. Crimes, numerous and serious, have been caused by the practice, and there is no violation of the law against which the police adopt more stringent measures. The "parent-loafers" place their houses at the disposal of gamblers, employing their "children" to give warning of any symptoms of police authority. They further organise a system of espionage which enables them to interrupt games in private houses and to levy hush money from the inmates. There are also in the great cities many buildings called machiai-jaya (assignation tea-house), where rooms may be hired and dinners or suppers obtained from neighbouring restaurants, the society of dancing-girls being an almost invariable element of the programme. These places are a source of regular income to the "loafer," for he keeps himself accurately acquainted with everything that goes on there, and is prepared to turn informer or to intimidate the customers unless his silence be expensively purchased by the tea-house and the dancing-girls alike. The master-loafer extends his blackmailing system to other sections of society, generally for simulated purposes of protection, but sometimes in the guise of open menace. Exchange-brokers find it worth their while to conciliate him, and even men in leading positions occasionally procure immunity from the machinations of the loafer class by purchasing the tutelage of a section of it. All businesses that depend on the good faith of their patrons—the aikyō-kagyō, or "amiability trades," as they are called—must placate the gorotsuki, for he not only acts as guardian of their secrets, but also protects them with reckless loyalty against enterprises of any other section of his class, and finally lends his services to compound their not infrequent quarrels with rival panderers to immorality. These parasites on vice go so far as to curry favour with the police by helping to unravel the mystery of crimes too heinous to be concealed. Desperate quarrels with fatal issues often break out between the gorotsuki in connection with their gambling transactions or when they cross each other's paths of illicit gain-getting. But the law is never invoked: the parent settles everything. If there is still time to prevent recourse to violence, he invites the hostile parties to a wine feast and summons them to be reconciled, requiring both to drink sake from the same cup and then to clap their hands a certain number of times in unison with the whole party. These banquets are conducted with great solemnity. A majority, if not all, of the "parents" in the city attend, and should either of the dissentients refuse to obey, expulsion or even a worse fate awaits him.[3] There is in the relations between the oyabun and the kobun of this class much that recalls feudal times. The kobun regards himself as the vassal of the oyabun, and will sacrifice his life to execute the latter's orders, whereas the oyabun, on his side, is under a moral pledge to extend his full protection to the kobun, minister to the latter's wants, and provide for his family should he be thrown into prison. There is a set ceremony of initiation into the ranks of the gorotsuki, and a somewhat similar ceremony serves to cement friendship between the various "parents," who regard it as a sacred duty to succour and protect one another's kobun. It will presently be seen, when there is occasion to speak of the otoko-date of later Tokugawa times, that the gorotsuki of the present era perpetuates his vices and parodies his virtues.
In the same context with the loafer, to whom he is closely related, must be mentioned the sōshi, or "stalwart of modern Japan." Much has been written about this curious product of the era. His methods perplex foreign observers, who, finding no parallel in any Western society, regard him as a confirmation of the common suspicion that the moral constitution of the Japanese is a thing apart. Yet, in one sense, the evolution of the sōshi might have been foreseen by any close observer of the course of events in modern Japan, and was, in fact, foreseen by several. Education disproportionate to the opportunities for its use, a creed that had survived the circumstances of its origin, and pride of caste outliving the distinctions that once justified it,—these are the parents of the sōshi. When the first application of Western standards taught the Japanese nation its glaring deficiencies, the rising generation crowded the portals of the new school of learning, and in acquiring the novelties of foreign sciences, acquired also, as they supposed, a title to public consideration and public employment. But since the State could not recognise more than a fraction of such titles, and since, further, many of these eager youths found their strength insufficient to complete the new studies, there gradually came into existence a class of men equipped either with a grievance against the time or with a sense of failure, deterred by pride of birth from descending to toil in the ranks of "commoners," and still cherishing the old Confucian belief in the divine mandate of every private individual to redress public wrong. To men cherishing such a mood the agitation and turmoil of party politics came like rain in time of drought. The Government had wronged them, had denied their deserts, had withheld from them all the prizes of office. So, when the banner of the Liberals was raised in 1878, these youths flocked to it. They had a vague notion that the injustice from which they believed themselves to be suffering would be remedied under constitutional institutions, and that duty claimed their allegiance to the Liberal side. But there was no legitimate place for such half-educated, light-headed youths. They could not figure either on the platform or in the press; they had no influence in society, and whatever cause they espoused had to receive some equivalent for supplying them with the necessaries of life. Thus they fell back upon the rudimentary resource of thew and sinew, and people dubbed them sōshi (stalwarts). It was neither a term of reproach, nor yet of modern invention. In China, that universal repository of origins, there had been sōshi two hundred years previously whom their countrymen regarded merely as "intrepids." But the sōshi of modern Japan soon sank to the level of a rough. Party politicians used him for purposes now of intimidation, now of protection. At one moment he was found assaulting some publicist, at another guarding a patron, and at another raiding the platform at a political meeting. It was a strange spectacle to see the Liberals[4] clamouring for freedom of speech and pen and for constitutional institutions, while at the same time they employed the bludgeon of the sōshi to silence hostile writers, to interrupt public meetings, and to establish a reign of force. The sōshi rapidly fell into disrepute. He was disfigured by venality, a blemish always incompatible with high motives in Japanese eyes, and his manner of life contrasted shockingly with the principles his services were enlisted to promote. At one time there existed as many as eighteen sōshi associations in Japan with a total membership of at least fifteen hundred. To-day there is not one recognised association, and it would probably be difficult to collect a score of sōshi for any purpose. Many of the sometime stalwarts now earn their bread as petty clerks, as itinerant venders of medicines or newspapers, or in some other humble calling. A few have taken to the stage, organising theatrical troupes of their own,[5] and a few live by nefarious practices. But the truth is that the sōshi shares with the devil the misfortune of being painted blacker than he is. Every chevalier d'industrie, not enrolled in the ranks of some recognised band of sharpers, is classed as a sōshi, and doubtless this vicarious discredit has contributed to the disappearance of the sōshi abuse.
The renowned burglars of former times, men that robbed the rich and succoured the poor, have no modern representatives in Japan. Neither do thieves succeed in guaranteeing themselves against interruption by terrorising the inhabitants of the locality where they ply their trade. In Tokugawa days an innkeeper or a merchant often saw a customer shadowed by robbers, yet did not venture to warn the victim, and it was owing to such enforced collusion that kago-carriers were able to supplement their legitimate business by that of highway robbery. The kago-carrier and the baggage-coolie acquired the name kumo-suke (vagrant) in allusion to their hand-to-mouth existence and lawless habits. It was a common practice of theirs to carry or lead a traveller to some lonely place and strip him of everything he possessed. The roadside hostelries knew these ruffians, but dared not inform against them, or take any steps to prevent an evidently contemplated crime. Such things are no longer possible. The burglar and the thief of modern time have become commonplace villains, not at all novel or interesting. They despoil the people to the extent of about three million yen yearly, and the police manage to recover nearly one-half of the stolen property. It is worth noting that, contrary to a generally entertained opinion, the number of persons killed or wounded by armed burglars is very small. Deaths under such circumstances do not average two yearly in Tōkyō, and injuries total from nine to ten.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 8.
Note 8.—Although men were sometimes condemned to be burned at the stake, or sawn in sunder or crucified,—i.e. bound to a cross and transfixed with lances,—it appears that they were generally strangled before the carrying out of the sentence.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 9.
Note 9.—Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 10.
Note 10.—This hand-clapping custom is common on occasions of congratulation among actors, keepers of tea-houses connected with a theatre, and professionals of all kinds. One may often observe that a party of such persons, arriving at or leaving a railway station, clap hands in unison with those that have come to greet them or to bid adieu.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 11.
Note 11.—It is right to note that the Liberals were by no means alone in their employment of sōshi. Other political parties employed them subsequently. But the Liberals set the example.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 12.
Note 12.—One of these troupes, headed by an ex-sōshi, Kawakami, and aided by the services of his wife, Yakko, an ex-geisha, made quite a sensation in Europe.