“It is the Emperor’s wish!”
Fate dealt neither vigorously nor kindly with Kudo. It let him drift. While his bonds ran their income was sufficient for all his needs, but when the time of their redemption came he looked in dismay at the heap of money they brought him. Nothing in all his experience told him what to do with it. Skillfully invested, it would have furnished ample return, but investment was a science utterly beneath the contempt of a Samurai. It was the business of merchants and traders, the men who devoted their lives to the despicable profession of gaining money. He took his fortune home, from the bank where it had been paid to him, wrapped up in a blue cotton bundle-kerchief, and gave it to his wife with the unconcern of complete scorn. He knew that that bundle alone stood between him and necessity, but he did not care. He lived contentedly on his little capital, nor ever let an anxious thought cross his mind because of its constant decrease.
II
Scarce two hundred yards distant from the house of Kudo Jukichi, around the corner in Azalea Street, there is a most striking evidence of the change the new Western life has brought to the Island Empire. The little shingle at the gate duly sets forth that Mr. Kutami Chobei, a Commoner, occupies that comfortable dwelling, but all the city knows it as the home of Chobei, the Eta. Prosperity radiates from the substantial house and wide grounds with their pleasant garden, and all the place is enfolded in its ample mantle. What cares the Commoner Kutami that his humble station is placarded over his hospitable doorway? But a handbreadth back in the space of years even that poor title seemed a measure of hopeless distinction to him. In the yesterday when neighbor Kudo wore the haughty swords of a Samurai his weapon would have leaped from its scornful scabbard if Chobei the Eta had dared pollute his presence. It was a great advance to be one of the multitude in the oblivion of the Commoners instead of one of the marked few of the Etas, despised, outcast, living apart from all his fellows except the unfortunates of his class. It had been a bitter life for Chobei, for although his sheer force of will had made him Chief of his village, a man of distinction among his own, that very strength of character made only more keen and poignant the disgrace of his position. The wealth he had accumulated in his business of tanner had little pleasure to give him, and it was the business itself, inherited from his fathers, generation after generation, that made him an Eta. That great stroke of the Emperor’s which had shaken off the shackles of his caste restored him to manhood, and he blessed the fate that had brought the Western ideas to Japan and had set noble and Samurai and outcast all equal before the law, face to face together with the problems of individual responsibilities and rewards.
Money is not yet everything in Japan, however rapidly its power may be advancing. But it is something to the Commoner and it was little better than nothing to the Eta. Kutami was proud of himself, in an humble way; proud that he had something to do with when opportunity to do came to him. More than all he was proud of the new nation, and loyal to it with the last drop of his blood. He was no soldier, but he did his part when the forces of the Empire went over sea to meet the armies of the Chinese in Korea and Manchuria. The business of his outcast days had grown with great strides under the incentive of his new ambition, and from being merely a tanner and dealer in leather he had become as well a manufacturer of boots and shoes. Now it was that the money he had won furnished the means of making return to the nation, and thousands of soldiers marched and fought in the boots Kutami the Commoner gave to his country.
There was no thought in Kutami’s heart of anything but loyalty and gratitude to his Emperor in this, but there was a result he did not foresee. Kudo Jukichi had been shaken out of his retirement by the war. All the old fire was revived in him, and his heart was heavy because he was neither able to offer service himself nor was his son old enough to take a soldier’s part. In spite of the fact that they had lived for years at so little distance from each other, for Kudo it was as if Kutami had never existed. For though he might admit that there was advantage to the nation in some of the great changes of his later years, Jukichi was still at heart the Samurai of the old régime, and to him Chobei was still an Eta. But the gift of the boots touched his heart.