These laws, then, destroyed nothing; they reasserted certain Japanese traditions and customs, but made out, through many details, the relations of dependence of all classes of society upon the shogun, as vassal indeed of the Mikado, but supreme ruler who held the key of all. All this did Iyémitsŭ carry out, as well as the consequent seclusion of the country; the only manner of avoiding ideals which might clash with those upon which this consolidation of the past was based. And to many of these ideals, to the idea of the sacredness of the family, to the idea of subjection to the law of the ruler, Christianity, by its ideal of marriage, by its distinctions of the duty to Cæsar,—to name only a few reasons,—might be found an insidious dissolvent. Therefore, if it be necessary to find a high motive, Iyémitsŭ did what he could to trample out the remains of Christianity, which were to expire, a few years after his death, in a final holocaust as terrible and glorious as Nero himself could have wished to see.
From that time, for two centuries, all went on the same, until the arrival of the foreigners found a system so complete, so interlocked and rigid, as to go to pieces with the breaking of a few links.
That break was supplied by the necessity of yielding to the Christian and foreign demand of entrance, and in so far abandoning the old ways.
With this proof of weakness the enemies of the Tokugawa and those of the system began to assert themselves, circumstances aiding, and in 1868 the last of the race resigned all powers and retired to private life.
The details of the enormous changes, as they followed one another, are too many and sudden, and apparently too contradictory, for me to explain further. Even now I repeat this deficient summary of the Tokugawa story only because of wishing to recall who they were that have temples and tombs about us, and to recall, also, that such has been the end of the beginning which is buried here.
STABLE OF SACRED HORSES.
The approach to the temple, to which most paths lead, is through a great broad avenue, a quarter of a mile long, bordered by high stone walls, above which rise high banks and higher trees. Between these dark green walls, all in their own shade,—in the center of the enormous path and in the full light of the sky,—a brilliant torrent rushes down in a groove of granite, hidden occasionally under the road. Here and there drop out from the walls noisy columns of clearest water.
In the distance beyond, through a mass of closer shade, made by two rows of dark cryptomeria, that are planted on banks faced with stones,—for here the road divides into three different grades of ascent by enormous steps,—shine the high white walls of the temple grounds, edged with a red-lacquered fence and a black roofed gate of red and gold. In the open space before it, with wide roads diverging through high walls, crowned with scarlet fences, stands a granite Torii, some thirty feet high, whose transverse stones are crossed by a great black tablet, marked with the gilded divine name of Iyéyasŭ. On one side a five-storied pagoda, graceful and tall, certainly one hundred feet high, blood-red and gold in the sunlight, and green, white, and gold in the shadows of its five rows of eaves, rises free from the trees around it and sends a tall spear, encircled with nine gilded rings, into the unbroken sky. Bindings and edges of copper, bright green with weathering, sparkle on its black roofs, and from their twenty corners hang bells of bright green copper. Above the steep steps, against the white wall, we pass through the first gate. It is recessed, and two gigantic columns of trees stand in the corners. Two monsters of uncertain lion-form occupy the niches on each side. From the upper side of the red pillars, as supports for the engaged lintel, stretch out the gilded heads of tapirs,—protectors against pestilence,—of lions and elephants, and great bunches of the petals of the peony. Above, the architrave and frieze are painted flat with many colors and with gold, and the ends of the many beams which support the roofing are gilded. Everywhere, even to the ends of the bronze tiles of the black roof, the crest of Iyéyasŭ's family, the Tokugawa, is stamped in gilded metal.