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224 HONDA THE SAMURAI.
was Tokugawa's. Then there was one of five balls
set around a central disk;
another had three lady's
hats also in a circle ;
another looked like a windmill ;
still another, a triangle with a square at each line,
suggested a problem in trigonometry ; the last of all
being nothing else than the design of a pair of spectacles.
The flags, streamers, pennants, tufted poles,
horse-hair banners, ensigns and standards of all sorts
numbered thousands, yet a true national flag Japan
did not yet possess, despite the official permission to
the daimios to use the red ball or sun-flag. The
truth was the nation was cut up into hundreds of
petty feudal factions, and when a Japanese said
" my country " he meant merely his province or
local neighborhood. The country needed pressure
from without to give it unity. As the stately barge
moved through the cordon of boats, all hands and
all heads of sailors and officers were laid prostrate
to do homage to envoys of the Yedo government.
On land there had been a sudden concentration of
population at the little village " across the strand "
from Kanagawa. Probably twenty thousand people
who had never seen Yokohama before looked upon
it now. First there were soldiers. These had been
called out of their homes in the raw days of early
winter and spring to live in the camps which lined
the bluffs and lowlands, though the Americans saw
but few of these men of war. Nobody
knew but
that the American barbarians might begin rapine,
and hence the presence of the military armed with
old matchlocks and Brown Bess and Dutch muskets.