eeding
generations endorsed his choice so that the book remains a classic to
this day. Teika's son, Tameiye, won such favour in the eyes of the
Kamakura shogun, Sanetomo, that the latter conferred on him the manor
of Hosokawa, in Harima. Dying, Tameiye bequeathed this property to
his son, Tamesuke, but he, being robbed of it by his step-brother,
fell into a state of miserable poverty which was shared by his
mother, herself well known as an authoress under the name of
Abutsu-ni. This intrepid lady, leaving her five sons in Kyoto,
repaired to Kamakura to bring suit against the usurper, and the
journal she kept en route--the Izayoi-nikki--is still regarded as a
model of style and sentiment. It bears witness to the fact that
students of poetry in that era fell into two classes: one adhering to
the pure Japanese style of the Heian epoch; the others borrowing
freely from Chinese literature.

Meanwhile, at Kamakura, the Bakufu regents, Yasutoki, Tokiyori and
Tokimune, earnest disciples of Buddhism, were building temples and
assigning them to Chinese priests of the Sung and Yuan eras who
reached Japan as official envoys or as frank propagandists. Five
great temples thus came into existence in the Bakufu capital, and as
the Chinese bonzes planned and superintended their construction,
these buildings and their surroundings reflected the art-canons at
once of China, of Japan, and of the priests themselves. The same
foreign influence made itself felt in the region of literature. But
we should probably be wrong in assuming that either religion or art
or literature for their own sakes constituted the sole motive of the
Hojo regents in thus acting. It has already been shown that they
welcomed the foreign priests as channels for obtaining information
about the neighbouring empire's politics, and there is reason to
think that their astute programme included a desire to endow Kamakura
with an artistic and literary atmosphere of its own, wholly
independent of Kyoto and purged of the enervating elements that
permeated the latter.

This separation of the civilizations of the east (Kwanto) and the
west (Kyoto) resulted ultimately in producing asceticism and
religious reform. The former, because men of really noble instincts
were insensible to the ambition which alone absorbed a Kyoto
litterateur--the ambition of figuring prominently in an approved
anthology--and had, at the same time, no inclination to follow the
purely military creed of