JAPAN
heimin began to write couplets (haikai) and read novels, a kind of literature never previously produced, but now suddenly carried to a remarkable degree of development, and rendered additionally attractive owing to rapid growth of the art of book illustration, at first by means of woodcuts only, but afterwards by a high type of chromoxylography. Again, while the classical music of the yokyoku and the solemn posturing of the no dances furnished pastimes for great folks, the humble enjoyed the pathos and passion of the joruri and the gidayu, the vivid historical romances of the raconteur, the wit and humour of the hanashika and the realism of the theatre,—purely popular amusements which never acquired any real vogue before the seventeenth century and even thereafter long excluded from aristocratic circles. In the field of art, also, this new departure was very conspicuous, for if the upper classes delighted in the graphic drawings of the Kano school and the stiff conventionalism of the literary picture (bunjin-ga), the lower grew to love genre paintings (ukiyo-ye), naturalistic drawings (shijo-riu), and coloured prints, which may be regarded as creations of the Tokugawa epoch.
This downward extension of the refinements of life was not accompanied at first by any levelling of social barriers. The nation continued to be divided into four sections, as sharply differentiated as ever—the Court nobles, the military men, the commoners and the degraded class.
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