but in this case a woman's smiles and caresses and importunate words were more powerful than the advice of sages. Ashikaga had bribed the mikado's concubine Kadoko, and had so won her favor that she persuaded her imperial lord to bestow excessive and undeserved honor on the traitor.

The distribution of spoils excited discontent among the soldiers, who now began to lose all interest in the cause for which they had fought, and to murmur privately among themselves. "Should such an unjust government continue," said they, "then are we all servants of concubines and dancing-girls and singing-boys. Rather than be the puppets of the mikado's amusers, we would prefer a shōgun again, and become his vassals." Many of the captains and smaller clan-leaders were also in bad humor over their own small shares. Ashikaga Takauji took advantage of this feeling to make himself popular among the disaffected, especially those who clung to arms as a profession and wished to remain soldiers, preferring war to peace. Of such inflammable material the latent traitor was not slow to avail himself when it suited him to light the flames of war.

Had the mikado listened to his wise counselor, and also placed Kusunoki in an office commensurate with his commanding abilities, and rewarded Nitta as he deserved, the century of anarchy and bloodshed which followed might have been spared to Japan.

Go-Daigo, who in the early years of his former reign had been a man of indomitable courage and energy, seems to have lost the best traits of his character in his exile, retaining only his imperious will and susceptibility to flattery. To this degenerate Samson a Delilah was not wanting. He fell an easy victim to the wiles of one man, though the shears by which his strength was shorn were held by a woman. Ashikaga was a consummate master of the arts of adulation and political craft. He was now to further prove his skill, and to verify the warnings of Nitta and the ministers. The emperor made Moriyoshi, his own son, shogun. Ashikaga, jealous of the appointment, and having too ready access to the infatuated father's ear, told him that his son was plotting to get possession of the throne. Moriyoshi, hating the flatterer, and stung to rage by the base slander, marched against him. Ashikaga now succeeded by means of his ally in the imperial bed in making himself, in the eyes of the mikado, the first victim to the conspiracies of the prince. So great was his power over the emperor that he obtained from the imperial hand a decree to punish his enemy Moriyoshi as a chōtéki, or rebel, against the mikado.

Here we have a striking instance of what, in the game of Japanese state-craft, may be called the checkmate move, or, in the native idiom, > Öte, "king's hand." It is difficult for a foreigner to fully appreciate the prestige attaching to the mikado's person—a prestige never diminishing. No matter how low his actual measure of power, the meanness of his character, or the insignificance of his personal abilities, he was the Son of Heaven, his word was law, his command omnipotent. He was the fountain of all rank and authority. No military leader, however great his resources or ability, could win the popular heart or hope for ultimate success unless appointed by the emperor. He who held the Son of Heaven in his power was master. Hence it was the constant aim of all the military leaders, even down to 1868, to obtain control of the imperial person. However wicked or villainous the keeper of the mikado, he was master of the situation. His enemies were chōtéki, or rebels against the Son of Heaven; his own soldiers were the kuan-gun, or loyal army. Even might could not make right. Possession of the divine person was more than nine-tenths-it was the whole of the law.

Moriyoshi, then, being chōtéki, was doomed. Ashikaga, having the imperial order, had the kuan-gun, and was destined to win. The sad fate of the emperor's son awakens the saddest feelings, and brings tears to the eyes of the Japanese reader even at the present day. He was seized, deposed, sent to Kamakura, and murdered in a subterranean dungeon in the Seventh month of the year 1335.

His child in exile, the heart of the emperor relented. The scales fell from his eyes. He saw that he had wrongly suspected his son, and that the real traitor was Ashikaga. The latter, noticing the change that had come over his master, left Kiōto secretly, followed by thousands of the disaffected soldiery, and fled to Kamakura, which he had rebuilt, and began to consolidate his forces with a view of again erecting the Eastern capital, and seizing the power formerly held by the Hōjō. Nitta had also been accused by Ashikaga, but, having cleared himself in a petition to the mikado, he received the imperial commission to chastise his rival. In the campaign which followed, the imperial forces were so hopelessly defeated that the quondam imperial exile now became a fugitive. With his loyal followers he left Kiōto, carrying with him the sacred emblems of authority.

Ashikaga, though a triumphant victor, occupied a critical position. He was a chōtéki. As such he could never win final success. He had power and resources, but, unlike others equally usurpers, was not

clothed with authority. He was, in popular estimation, a rebel of the deepest dye. In such a predicament he could not safely remain a day. The people would take the side of the emperor. What should he do? His vigor, acuteness, and villainy were equal. The Hōjō had deposed and set up emperors. It was Ashikaga who divided the allegiance of the people, gave Japan a War of the Roses (or Chrysanthemums), tilled the soil for feudalism, and lighted the flames of war that made Kiōto a cock-pit, abandoned the land for nearly two centuries and a half to slaughter, ignorance, and paralysis of national progress. To clothe his acts with right, he made a new Son of Heaven. He declared Kogen, who was of the royal family, emperor. In 1336, this new Son of Heaven gave Ashikaga the title of Sei-i Tai Shōgun. Kamakura again became the military capital. The duarchy was restored, and the War of the Northern and the Southern Dynasties began, which lasted fifty-six years.

Ashikaga Takauji, Sei-i Tai Shōgun. (From a photograph taken from a wooden statue in a temple in Kiōto.)

The period 1333-1336, though including little more than two years of time, is of great significance as marking the existence of a temporary mikadoate. The fact that it lasted so short a time, and that the duarchy was again set up on its ruins, has furnished both natives and foreigners with the absurd and specious, but strongly urged, argument that the Government of Japan, by a single ruler from a single centre, is an impossibility, and that the creation of a dual system with a "spiritual" or nominal sovereign in one part of the empire, and a military or "secular" ruler in another, is a necessity.

During the agitation of the question concerning the abolition of the dual system, and the restoration of the mikado in 1860-1868, one of the chief arguments of the adherents of the shogunate against the scheme of the agitators, was the assertion that the events of the period - 1333-1336 proved that the mikado could not alone govern the country, and that it must have duarchy. Even after the overthrow of the "Tycoon" in 1868, foreigners, as well as natives, who had studied Japanese history, fully believed and expected that in a year or two the present mikado's Government would be overthrown, and the "Tycoon" return to power, basing their belief on the fact that the mikadoate of 1333-1336 did not last. Whatever force such an argument might have had when Japan had no foreign relations, and no aliens on her soil to disturb the balance between Kioto and Kamakura, it is certain that it counts for naught when, under altered conditions, more than the united front of all Japan is now required to cope with the political pressure from without. To talk seriously, as men outside the lunatic asylum still do in this 8th year of Meiji (Enlightened Peace), of the Japanese empire the 2536th, and of our Lord 1876, in Japanese and English about "the return of the Tycoon' to power" is to utter drivel and solecism exceeding those of Rip Van Winkle on his return to Sleepy Hollow.

XIX.

THE WAR OF THE CHRYSANTHEMUMS.

THE dynasty of the imperial rulers of Japan is the oldest in the world. No other family line extends so far back into the remote ages as the nameless family of mikados. Disdaining to have a family name, claiming descent, not from mortals, but from the heavenly-gods, the imperial house of the Kingdom of the Rising Sun occupies a throne which no plebeian has ever attempted to usurp. Throughout all the vicissitudes of the imperial line, in plenitude of power or abasement of poverty, its members deposed or set up at the pleasure of the upstart or the political robber, the throne itself has remained. unshaken. Unclean hands have not been laid upon the ark itself. As in the procession of life on the globe the individual perishes, the species lives on, so, though individual mikados have been dethroned, insulted, or exiled, the prestige of the line has never suffered. The loyalty or allegiance of the people has never swerved. The soldier who would begin revolution, or who lusted for power, would make the mikado his tool; but, however transcendent his genius and abilities, he never attempted to write himself mikado. No Japanese Cæsar ever had his Brutus, nor Charles his Cromwell, nor George his Washington. Not even, as in China, did one dynasty of alien blood overthrow another, and reign in the stead of a destroyed family. Such events are unknown in Japanese annals. The student of this people and their unique history can never understand them or their national life unless he measures the mightiness of the force, and recognizes the place of the throne and the mikado in the minds and hearts of its people.

There are on record instances in which the true heirship was declared only after bitter intrigue, quarrels, or even bloodshed. In the tenth century, Taira no Masakado, disappointed in not being appointed Dai Jo Dai Jin, left Kiōto, went to Shimōsa in the Kuanto, and set himself up as Shinnō, or cadet of the imperial line, and temporarily