YAMATO-DAKE NO MIHOTA, SEMI-DIVINITY OF WAR.
During all this time the position of karo remained in possession of Sennoske’s descendants, and the family flourished and succeeded, knowing hardly any reverses of fortune. But, strange as it may appear, with the beginning of this peace the fortunes of the house of Numa declined. Some inexplicable bond seemed to connect their welfare with the fate of Muramasa’s swords. These swords, as long as strife and bloodshed were rife, were more esteemed than those of any other maker, in spite, or perhaps partly on account, of the constantly growing feelings of superstition with which they were regarded. Their possessors somehow or other never seemed content unless they had an opportunity for using them; and so generally did they succeed in gaining the victory over their opponents that at last even the bravest shrank with dread from fighting a duel with a man armed with a Muramasa.
Moreover, they were a fruitful cause of accidents. Often, when an interval of peace which had lasted for fifteen or twenty years had caused such a sword to remain unused for that time, upon first being drawn it brought about some dire calamity. It was a common thing, in spite of every care being taken, for the blade to fall out in some unaccountable way and strike the wearer, inflicting a fatal wound. Among those who suffered in this way were some of Numa’s descendants. These, however, were almost the only misfortunes which overtook them. With the return of peace these casualties increased to such an alarming extent that at last the Shôgun’s government issued a peremptory order, forbidding the use of these swords throughout the entire country. Nevertheless, they were still prized in private; but the power of the Tokugawa’s rule was too strong and the edict too imperative to allow of its being in any way openly disregarded. Muramasa blades after this were found mostly with a few of the most noted ronins and robbers, whom tradition speaks of as having been wonderfully successful.
An unfortunate affair of honor which happened just thirteen years after the beginning of the long peace, and in which the then karo of the Duke of Kuwana, a descendant of Sennoske, slew his master’s son by mistake, forced him to commit seppuku. In consideration of their illustrious and faithful services, the reigning Duke caused the family of the unfortunate man to suffer no further punishment than banishment from his province. They found an asylum with the neighboring Duke of Todo, who also gave to the oldest son, who was approaching man’s estate, a position at his court which, although far inferior to that which his father had held at Kuwana, was yet a high and an honorable one. This office was made hereditary with his descendants, who, in spite of faithful services, failed to improve it. The genius of the family evidently lay in a military direction; and although now and then some one of its members would perform a great deed of arms, opportunities for such deeds were rare, and the family barely succeeded in retaining their new position: this, however, they did as long as old Japan existed.
But the end of the power of the sword was rapidly approaching. In the first year of the period of Ansei (1855) came the establishment of treaties with foreign nations, and this sounded the death-knell of feudalism in Japan. For a time the descendants of Sennoske still subsisted upon a scanty allowance as dependants of the Duke of Todo. The complete abolition of feudalism by imperial decree in the third year of Meiji (1870) completed their ruin.
On the first day of the tenth month of that year there was breathless excitement in the town. All the samurai of any standing were convened by the Duke in the large hall of the palace; and there an imperial envoy, who had arrived the day before, read the decree, that from that day feudalism ceased to exist. “Everything is at an end,” some of the samurai, stupefied by the news, said as they passed out of the hall; and so to a great extent it was. At an end all their inherited and fancied superiority. The traditions of the past, the records of twenty-five hundred years of ancestors’ struggles and heroic deeds, the qualities which all samurai revered and held noble and strove to imitate, the bodily and mental gifts with which birth and education had endowed them,—all this in one day had become like a threadbare garment, fit only to be thrown away; while scarcely one of the losers had the means or possessed the faculty of procuring another that would suit the times.
Without education or qualifications adapting him to the new order of things, the last of the line of Sennoske found himself in a sad condition. The miserable pension allowed him by government was inadequate to his barest needs; but even this was soon lost to him, and the accomplishments of peace having never been his, he was unable to care for himself. Fortune befriended him no more; those in places of official power and affluence no longer reverenced the rank of samurai, but turned him from their doors, and he sank lower and lower in the social scale, until only the most degrading position of all, that of the poor, despised jinrikisha man, was left to him. So to-day he lives, a connecting link between old and new Japan, between the feudalism of the past and the encroachments of the foreign civilization of the present,—a monument to the ruin of chivalry, knightly pursuits, and glorious deeds of arms; a poor, ragged, despised jinrikisha man, but with a glorious heritage in the superb Muramasa blade which hangs on the walls of his hut.
MARSHAL’S BATON, WAR-FAN, AND HEAD-DRESS.