explaining that the stars presaged a revolution
in the following year. At the same time, Minamoto Hikaru, son of the
Emperor Nimmyo; Fujiwara Sadakuni, father-in-law of Daigo, and
several others who were jealous of Michizane's preferment or of his
scholarship, separately or jointly memorialized the Throne,
impeaching Michizane as a traitor who plotted against his sovereign.

ENGRAVING: SUGAWARA MICHIZANE

Supplemented by Miyoshi's "friendly" notice of a star-predicated
cataclysm, this cumulative evidence convinced, and doubtless the
number and rank of the accusers alarmed the Emperor, then only in his
seventeenth year. Michizane was not invited to defend himself. In the
first year (901) of the Engi era, a decree went out stripping him of
all his high offices, and banishing him to Dazai-fu in Kyushu as
vice-governor. Many other officials were degraded as his partisans.
The ex-Emperor, to whose pity he pleaded in a plaintive couplet, made
a resolute attempt to aid him. His Majesty repaired to the palace for
the purpose of remonstrating with his son, Daigo. Had a meeting taken
place, Michizane's innocence would doubtless have been established.
But the Fujiwara had provided against such an obvious miscarriage of
their design. The palace guards refused to admit the ex-Emperor, and,
after waiting throughout a winter's day seated on a straw mat before
the gate, Uda went away in the evening, sorehearted and profoundly
humiliated. Michizane's twenty-three children were banished to five
places, and he himself, having only a nominal post, did not receive
emoluments sufficient to support him in comfort. Even oil for a
night-lamp was often unprocurable, and after spending twenty-five
months in voluntary confinement with only the society of his sorrows,
he expired (903) at the age of fifty-eight, and was buried in the
temple Anraku-ji in Chikuzen.

ENGRAVING: SHRINE OF SUGAWARA MICHIZANE AT KITANO, KYOTO

No figure in Japanese history has received such an abundant share of
national sympathy. His unjust fate and the idea that he suffered for
his sovereign appealed powerfully to popular imagination. Moreover,
lightning struck the palace in Kyoto, and the three principal
contrivers of Michizane's disgrace, Fujiwara Tokihira, Fujiwara
Sugane, and Minamoto Hikaru, all expired within a few years'
interval. At that epoch a wide-spread belief existed in the powers of
disembodied spirits for evil or for good. Such a creed grew logically