JAPAN
horses outnumber their arrows; new exercises of arms without any teacher to show their methods; Kyōtō and Kamakura seated side by side making verselets. All over the country poetasters abound and literary critics are still more numerous. Hereditary vassals and new retainers practise equal license; a lawless society of samurai. Dog-mimes which forestalled the ruin of Kamakura are all the fashion here. Men meet everywhere to drink tea and light incense, while the fires of the watch-houses in each street burn in rude sheds built with three boards and festooned with official curtains. Many samurai are still without residences, and many half-built houses disfigure the city. Vacant spaces swept last year by conflagrations are counted lucky sites to-day. Deserted dwellings stand desolate. Discharged samurai troop through the streets, preserving their official strut, but without any business except to make obeisances to one another. The old-time hills of blossom and groves of peach are unvisited. Men and horses crowd the Imperial city. Samurai with high-sounding titles, relics of past glory, would fain lay aside these encumbrances, but men who in the morning were foddering beasts of burden, find themselves in the evening with full purses and in high favour on account of some petty service rendered to the Emperor. Merit is neglected on the one hand, lawlessness is exalted on the other. The recipients of fortune doubt its reality, and can only trust blindly to their Sovereign who bestowed it. A strange thing, truly, the unification of the nation! A lucky fellow I, who have seen these singular events come to pass, and now jot down a fraction of them!
Of the confusion existing in the capital and of the critical eyes with which some men of the time viewed it, this anonymous writer gives us
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