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Under Nintoku's sway riparian works and irrigation improvements took place on a large scale, and thus the eminent historian, Rai Sanyo, may not be without warrant for attributing to this ruler the sentiment quoted in the Chronicles: "A sovereign lives for his people. Their prosperity is his enrichment; their poverty, his loss."
The craft was then brought round by sea to Naniwa, "where it was enrolled among the Imperial vessels." Evidently from the days of Ojin and the Karano a fleet formed part of the Imperial possessions. This two-forked boat figures in the reign of Nintoku's successor, Richu, when the latter and his concubine went on board and feasted separately, each in one fork.
From the time of Nintoku's birth, the prime minister, head of the great Takenouchi family, had taken a special interest in the child, and when the lad grew up he married this Takenouchi's granddaughter, who became the mother of three Emperors.
Nintoku's reign is remembered chiefly on account of the strange circumstances in which he came to the throne, his benevolent charity, and the slights he suffered at the hands of a jealous consort. His father, Ojin, by an exercise of caprice not uncommon on the part of Japan's ancient sovereigns, had nominated a younger son, Waka-iratsuko, to be his heir.
It was in Nintoku's era that the pastime of hawking, afterward widely practised, became known for the first time in Japan. Korea was the place of origin, and it is recorded that the falcon had a soft leather strap fastened to one leg and a small bell to the tail. Pheasants were the quarry of the first hawk flown on the moor of Mozu.
Light is also thrown in Nintoku's annals on the method of boatbuilding practised by the Japanese in the fourth century. They used dug-outs. The provincial governor* of Totomi is represented as reporting that a huge tree had floated down the river Oi and had stopped at a bend. It was a single stem forked at one end, and the suzerain of Yamato was ordered to make a boat of it.
Yet it is in connexion with Nintoku's repairs of the Manda river-bank that we find the first mention of a heinous custom occasionally practised in subsequent ages the custom of sacrificing human life to expedite the progress or secure the success of some public work.
Nintoku's first act on ascending the throne explains the ideographs chosen for his posthumous name by the authors of the Chronicles, since nin signifies "benevolence" and toku, "virtue." During those three years the palace fell into a condition of practical ruin, and tradition describes its inmates as being compelled to move from room to room to avoid the leaking rain.*
Immediately after Nintoku's death this evil state of affairs was inaugurated by Prince Nakatsu, younger brother of the heir to the throne, who had not yet assumed the sceptre. It does not redound to the credit of the era that the debaucher found support and was enabled to hold his own for a time, though his treachery ultimately met with its merited fate.
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