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And without paying heed to any advice about her journey, she departed from the house, and made great haste to Kyoto. Reaching the quarter Sanjo in the city of Kyoto, she asked the way to the street Kajiyamachi, which is the Street of the Smiths. And finding it, she saw three smithies side by side.

These men soon came to exercise great influence over the Court nobles especially Konoe, Takatsukasa, Ichijo, Nijo, and Sanjo and were consequently able to suggest subjects for the sovereign's rescripts.

But neither their capacity nor his own found opportunity for exercise in the presence of Michinaga's proteges, and, while profoundly disliking the Fujiwara autocrat, Ichijo was constrained to suffer him. Prince Okisada, younger brother of the Emperor Kwazan, ascended the throne at the age of thirty-six, on the abdication of Ichijo, and is known in history as Sanjo.

Sanjo Sanemori, a former councillor of State, was arrested on suspicion, but his examination disclosed nothing. Kameyama, however, conveyed to the Bakufu a solemn oath of innocence, with which Fushimi was fain to be ostensibly content. But his Majesty remained unconvinced at heart.

He has been commanded by the Emperor, who has seen a dream of good omen on the previous night, to order a sword of the smith Munéchika of Sanjô. He calls Munéchika, who comes out, and, after receiving the order, expresses the difficulty he is in, having at that time no fitting mate to help him; he cannot forge a blade alone.

Alike in Satsuma and in Choshu, there were a number of clever men who had long laboured to combine the forces of the two fiefs in order to unite the whole empire under the sway of the Kyoto Court. Saigo and Okubo on the Satsuma side, Kido and Sanjo on the Choshu became leading figures on the stage of their country's new career.

"Perhaps the writer is one of those princes of the Ichijo, or Nijo, or Sanjo families, all famed for their skill in writing. "Or, if this guess of mine be wrong, then I should say that these characters have certainly been written by Oguri-Hangwan Kane-uji, now so famed in the province of Hitachi.... I shall read the letter for you." And then she met with such phrases as these:

Michinaga, however, caused Atsunari to be appointed Prince Imperial, ignoring Sanjo's son, since his mother belonged to an inferior branch of the Fujiwara. Further, it did not suit the regent's convenience that a ruler of mature age should occupy the throne. Go-Ichijo was constrained to endure at Michinaga's hands the same despotic treatment as that previously meted out to Sanjo.

It may well be imagined how indignantly this attitude of the neighbouring kingdom was resented by Japan. The prominent leaders of national reform at that time were Sanjo and Iwakura, originally Court nobles;* Saigo and Okubo, samurai of Satsuma, and Kido, a samurai of Choshu.

The spirit of the ill-fated Sugawara Michizane was appeased by building shrines to his memory, and a similar resource exorcised the angry ghost of the rebel, Masakado; but no such prevention having been adopted in the case of Motokata, his spirit was supposed to have compassed the early deaths of his grandson's supplanter, Reizei, and of the latter's successors, Kwazan and Sanjo, whose three united reigns totalled only five years.