JAPAN
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
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