tely he hastened to the rescue with a small band of followers.
Subsequently, one of his principal retainers remonstrated with him
for risking his life in an affair so insignificant. Yasutoki
answered: "How can you call an incident insignificant when my
brother's safety was concerned? To me it seemed as important as the
Shokyu struggle. If I had lost my brother, what consolation would my
rank have furnished?"

Yasutoki never made his rank a pretext for avoiding military service;
he kept his watch in turn with the other guards, remaining up all
night and attending to all his duties. When he periodically visited
the temple of Yoritomo, he always worshipped without ascending to the
aisle, his reason being that, were the shogun, Yoritomo, alive, the
regent would not venture to sit on the dais by his side. Thrifty and
eminently practical, he ridiculed a priest who proposed to
tranquillize the nation by building fanes. "How can peace be brought
to the people," he asked, "by tormenting them to subscribe for such a
purpose?" He revered learning, regarded administration as a literary
art rather than a military, and set no store whatever by his own
ability or competence.

THE JOEI CODE

The most memorable achievement during Yasutoki's regency was the
compilation of a code of law called the Joei Shikimoku* after the
name of the era (Joei, 1232-1233) when it was promulgated. What
rendered this legislation essentially necessary was that the Daiho
code of the eighth century and all the laws founded on it were
inspired primarily by the purpose of centralizing the administrative
power and establishing the Throne's title of ownership in all the
land throughout the realm, a system diametrically opposed to the
spirit of feudalism. This incongruity had made itself felt in
Yoritomo's time, and had suggested the compilation of certain "Rules
for Decisions" (Hanketsu-rei), which became the basis of the Joei
code in Yasutoki's days. Another objection to the Daiho code and its
correlated enactments was that, being written with Chinese ideographs
solely, they were unintelligible to the bulk of those they concerned.
Confucius laid down as a fundamental maxim of government that men
should be taught to obey, not to understand, and that principle was
adopted by the Tokugawa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
But in the thirteenth, the aim of Yasutoki and his fellow legislators
was to render the laws intelligible to all, and with that ob