Japan and the Japanese

THE DAIRI AND HIS COURT. 119
conceived a jealousy against his nephew and colleague, whom, by
Blow and cautious steps, he stripped of all his authority, sending him
at length to a monastery of bonzes, where he soon received an
order to cut himself open. The thirty-one wives of the deposed
prince, with all their children, were publicly beheaded, and all his
closest adherents shared his disgrace, and many of them his trag-
ical fate.* An infant son, by name Fide Jori, borne to the emperor
from his new wife, the daughter of the Dairi, and to whom he
desired to secure the succession, was the innocent cause of these
cruelties. No sooner was the nephew out of the way than that
infant received from the Dairi the title of Kambucundono.
* Yet Taiko-Sama was not in general cruel.
'
A curious letter of Father
Org-mtino Brixiano, written in 15'J4, enumerates, among the reasons of
Taiko's great success, his clemency to the conquered princes whom he never
put to death after having once promised them their lives, and to whom he
granted a revenue, small, but sufficient to maintain them, and which served
to keep them quiet. Another reason was his having established for his sol-
diers during war a commissariat, of which he paid the expense, by which
they were rendered much more efficient. He also kept them employed, fur,
besides the army maintained in Corea, he set them to work in building or
repairing palaces and fortresses, or in other public work's. At this time he
had thirty thousand men at work upon one castle near Miako, and one hun-
dred thousand at Fusimi. -He also broke the power of the princes by trans-
ferring them to distant parts, while he inspired general respect by his strict
justice, from which he was swerved by no considerations of relationship, family
or influence, secular or religious. Another reason mentioned by the missionary
does not correspond so well with Taiko's letter to the viceroy of
Goa. He is said not only to have disarmed the country people, by whose
strength and wealth the petty kingdoms had been sustained, but also to
have reduced them to extreme poverty ; but this, perhaps, applies rather to
the petty lords than to the actual cultivators. This letter is in Hay's collec-
tion, and a part of it, in English, may be found in Hackluiyt's 4th volume.