i no
Haseo, and Koze no Fumio, formed a quartet of famous masters of
Chinese literature. From one point of view, Michizane's overthrow by
Fujiwara Tokihira may be regarded as a collision between the
Confucian doctrines which informed the polity of the Daika epoch and
the power of aristocratic heredity. Kibi no Makibi and Sugawara no
Michizane were the only two Japanese subjects that attained to be
ministers of State solely in recognition of their learning, but
several litterateurs reached high office, as chief chamberlain,
councillor of State, minister of Education, and so forth. Miyoshi
Kiyotsura ranks next to Michizane among the scholars of that age. He
was profoundly versed in jurisprudence, mathematics (such as they
were at the time), the Chinese classics, and history. But whereas
Michizane bequeathed to posterity ten volumes of poems and two
hundred volumes of a valuable historical work, no production of
Kiyotsura's pen has survived except his celebrated memorial referred
to above. He received the post of minister of the Household in 917
and died in the following year.

It must be understood that the work of these scholars appealed to
only a very limited number of their countrymen. The ako incident (pp.
239-240) illustrates this; the rescript penned by Tachibana no Hiromi
was not clearly comprehended outside a narrow circle of scholars.
Official notices and enactments were intelligible by few men of the
trading classes and by no women. But a different record is found in
the realm of high literature. Here there is much wealth. The Nara
epoch gave to Japan the famous Manyo-shu (Myriad Leaves), and the
Engi era gave her the scarcely less celebrated Kokin-shu, an
anthology of over eleven hundred poems, ancient and modern. As
between the two books, the advantage is with the former, though not
by any means in a marked degree, but in the abundance and excellence
of its prose writings--pure Japanese writings apart from the Chinese
works referred to above--"the Heian epoch leaves the Nara far behind.
The language had now attained to its full development. With its rich
system of terminations and particles it was a pliant instrument in
the writer's hands, and the vocabulary was varied and copious to a
degree which is astonishing when we remember that it was drawn almost
exclusively from native sources. The few words of Chinese origin
which it contains seem to have found their way in through the spoken
language and are not t