Hence the Japanese calendar of saints is not filled with
reformers, alms-givers and founders of hospitals or orphanages, but is
over-crowded with canonized suicides and committers of _hara-kiri_. Even
today, no man more quickly wins the popular regard during his life or
more surely draws homage to his tomb, securing even apotheosis, than the
suicide, though he may have committed a crime. In this era of Meiji or
enlightened peace, most appalling is the list of assassinations
beginning with the murder in Ki[=o]to of Yokoi Heishiro, who was slain
for recommending the toleration of Christianity, down to the last
cabinet minister who has been knifed or dynamited. Yet in every case the
murderers considered themselves consecrated men and ministers of
Heaven's righteous vengeance.[10] For centuries, and until
constitutional times, the government of Japan was "despotism tempered by
assassination." The old-fashioned way of moving a vote of censure upon
the king's ministers was to take off their heads. Now, however, election
by ballot has been substituted for this, and two million swords have
become bric-a-brac.
A thousand years of training in the ethics of Confucius--which always
admirably lends itself to the possessors of absolute power, whether
emperors, feudal lords, masters, fathers, or older brothers--have so
tinged and colored every conception of the Japanese mind, so dominated
their avenues of understanding and shaped their modes of thought, that
to-day, notwithstanding the recent marvellous development of their
language, which within the last two decades has made it almost a new
tongue,[11] it is impossible with perfect accuracy to translate into
English the ordinary Japanese terms which are congregated under the
general idea of Kun-shin.
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