pe
gardening.

Ichijo was famed as a musician and a prose writer, and Saga as a
calligraphist. The Ako incident (see p. 240) illustrates the lengths
to which pedantry was carried in matters of administration. And the
story of the ill-success at the capital of the young soldier Taira
Masakado, contrasted with the popularity of his showily vicious
kinsman Sadabumi (see p. 253), illustrate what Murdoch means when he
says that the early emperors of the Heian epoch had an "unbalanced
craze for Chinese fashions, for Chinese manners, and above all for
Chinese literature." Remarkable though the power of the Japanese
people always seems to have been to assimilate foreign culture in
large doses and speedily, it is hardly to be expected that at this
period, any more than at a later one when there came in a sudden
flood of European civilization, the nation should not have suffered
somewhat--that it should not have had the defects of its qualities.

LUXURY OF THE COURT

Of Nimmyo's luxury and architectural extravagance we have already
spoken, and of the arraignment of prodigality in dress, banquets, and
funerals in the famous report of Miyoshi Kiyotsura (see p. 246).
Indeed, we might almost cite the madness of the Emperor Yozei as
being a typical, though extreme, case of the hysteria of the young
and affected court nobles. Two of the Fujiwara have been pilloried in
native records for ostentation: one for carrying inside his clothes
hot rice-dumplings to keep himself warm, and, more important, to
fling them away one after another as they got cold; and the other for
carrying a fan decorated with a painting of a cuckoo and for
imitating the cuckoo's cry whenever he opened the fan.

CONVENTION AND MORALITY

If the men of the period were effeminate and emotional, the women
seem to have sunk to a lower stage of morals than in any other era,
and sexual morality and wifely fidelity to have been abnormally bad
and lightly esteemed. The story of Ariwara Narihira, prince, poet,
painter and Don Juan, and of Taka and her rise to power (see p. 238)
has already been told; and it is to be noted that the Fujiwara
working for the control of the Throne through Imperial consorts
induced, even forced, the Emperors to set a bad example in such
matters. But over all this vice there was a veneer of elaborate
etiquette. Even in the field a breach of etiquette was a deadly
insult: as we have seen (p. 254) Taira Masakado lost the aid of a
great lieute