lives. They refused to be beaten in anything by others, a word of insult was enough to draw their sword out of the scabbard, and the least grudge was repaid; they hated to work for profit and thought it undignified to count money. They went to eating-houses and ate their full; and if they had no money, they went away without paying. If they were pressed for payment, they used their fists; but if they were treated with respect and allowed to leave without payment, they came again when they had money and repaid more than their debt. These _otokodate_ infested every part of the city in the early years of the Tokugawa period and so much damage was caused by their quarrels that they were suppressed in the Genroku era. They were punished with such severity that their number gradually diminished; but their customs did not altogether disappear. Among the ordinary citizens of Yedo were many who esteemed the samurai spirit of the first years of Tokugawa and the manners of the _otokodate_. In what is called the Yedo spirit is to be detected much which originated with the _otokodate_; for the true-born natives of Yedo show to this day the same hatred of being beaten by others, love of quarrel, contempt for skin-flints, and inability to keep the day’s earnings until the next day. Amakawaya Gihei, in the tenth act of the _Chushingura_, is a good sample of a chivalrous-spirited merchant after the manner of the _otokodate_. THE GENROKU PERIOD Some eighty years after the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate began the Genroku period. The Shogun at the time was the fourth of Iyeyasu’s line. No insurrection was feared at home and there was as little danger of the country’s isolation being disturbed by foreign invasion, for no foreigner was allowed to trade in Japan with the exception of the Dutch and Chinese, whose trade was confined to Nagasaki. The country, in short, enjoyed absolute peace and grew in wealth and prosperity. Such was the condition of the land in the Genroku period, which takes its name from the Genroku era (1689-1701) and extended over some fifty years beginning with the Tenna era in 1681 and ending with the Kyoho era in about 1735. It was a period of great importance in the history of Japanese manners, institutions, and literature. The first years of the Tokugawa régime were a period of turbulent militarism and its last years that of indolence and immorality; in the Genroku period, however, the rough militaristic spirit was nearly gone, but the people had not yet fallen into weak and effeminate ways; luxury and extravagance had commenced their sway, but the brave military spirit had not yet vanished. It marked, like the Heian period of the ninth and tenth centuries, the highest stage of Japanese civilisation; and with the dark age of internecine wars intervening between these two periods, it was, indeed, our age of renaissance.