Tales of Old Japan - Maybe You Like It

entirely composed of dead men's remains, waited to receive the dishonoured
corpse, over which three or four Etas, squalid and degraded beings,
were mounting guard, smoking their pipes by a scanty charcoal
fire, and bandying obscene jests. It was a hideous and ghastly warning,
had any cared to read the lesson; but the passers-by on the high road
took little or no notice of the sight, and a group of chubby and happy
children were playing not ten yards from the dead body, as if no strange
or uncanny thing were near them.
The Ghost Of Sakura. 73
How true is the principle laid down by Confucius, that the benevolence
of princes is reflected in their country, while their wickedness
causes sedition and confusion!
In the province of Shimôsa, and the district of Sôma, Hotta Kaga no
Kami was lord of the castle of Sakura, and chief of a family which had
for generations produced famous warriors. When Kaga no Kami, who
had served in the Gorôjiu, the cabinet of the Shogun, died at the castle of
Sakura, his eldest son Kôtsuké no Suké Masanobu inherited his estates
and honours, and was appointed to a seat in the Gorôjiu; but he was a
different man from the lords who had preceded him. He treated the
farmers and peasants unjustly, imposing additional and grievous taxes,
so that the tenants on his estates were driven to the last extremity of
poverty; and although year after year, and month after month, they
prayed for mercy, and remonstrated against this injustice, no heed was
paid to them, and the people throughout the villages were reduced to the
utmost distress. Accordingly, the chiefs of the one hundred and thirty-six
villages, producing a total revenue of 40,000 kokus of rice, assembled together
in council and determined unanimously to present a petition to
the Government, sealed with their seals, stating that their repeated remonstrances
had been taken no notice of by their local authorities. Then
they assembled in numbers before the house of one of the councillors of
their lord, named Ikéura Kazuyé, in order to show the petition to him
first, but even then no notice was taken of them; so they returned home,
and resolved, after consulting together, to proceed to their lord's yashiki,
or palace, at Yedo, on the seventh day of the tenth month. It was determined,
with one accord, that one hundred and forty-three village chiefs
should go to Yedo; and the chief of the village of Iwahashi, one Sôgorô, a
73.The story, which also forms the subject of a play, is published, but with altered
names, in order that offence may not be given to the Hotta family. The real names are
preserved here. The events related took place during the rule of the Shogun Iyémitsu,
in the first half of the seventeenth century.
165