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The Joei Shikimoku is not a voluminous document: it contains only fifty-one brief articles, which the poet Basho compares to the luminosity of the full moon. It has been excellently translated and annotated by Mr. J. Murdoch, in his admirable History of Japan, summarizes its provisions lucidly.
If so, the scheme was admirably worked out, for every member of the council had to sign a pledge, inserted at the end of the Shikimoku, invoking* the vengeance of heaven on his head if he departed from the laws or violated their spirit in rendering judgment.
Then follow two articles dealing with the ownership of vacant plots and rebuilding of houses and fireproof godowns in the devastated sections of the capital. *Kemmu was the Northern Court's name of the year-period 1334 to 1338: see p. 398. The Kemmu Shikimoku by Mr. Consul-General Hall, in the "Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan;" epitomized by Murdoch.
The use of sedan-chairs shall be confined to Ieyasu, Toshiie, Kagekatsu, Terumoto, Takakage, the court nobles, and high priests. Even a daimyo, when young, should ride on horseback. Priests are exempted from this veto. Very interesting, too, is the Taiko Shikimoku, consisting of seventy-three articles, of which thirteen are translated as follows: Free yourself from the thraldom of passion.
To these priests and literati was entrusted the task of compiling a code based on the Joei Shikimoku of the Hojo regents, and there resulted the Kemmu Shikimoku, promulgated in 1337.* This was not a law, properly so called, but rather a body of precepts contained in seventeen articles. They have much interest as embodying the ethics of the time in political circles.
Yet things should have been otherwise, for in Takauji's time there was enacted and promulgated the code of regulations already referred to as the Kemmu Shikimoku, wherein were strictly forbidden basara, debauchery, gambling, reunions for tea drinking and couplet composing, lotteries, and other excesses.
As regards the monasteries and priests outside the Bakufu domain, the case was entirely different; they were virtually independent, and Kamakura interfered there only when instructed to do so by Imperial decree."* *Murdoch's History of Japan. It is not to be supposed that the Joei Shikimoku represents the whole outcome of Kamakura legislation.
This same doctrine permeated by construction the commentaries that accompanied the articles of the Kemmu Shikimoku as quoted above, and in that fact Chikafusa saw an opportunity of winning adherents for the Southern Court by proclaiming its heaven-conferred rights. "Great Yamato," Kitabatake wrote, "is a divine country. It is only our land whose foundations were first laid by the divine ancestor.
But in the thirteenth, the aim of Yasutoki and his fellow legislators was to render the laws intelligible to all, and with that object they were indited mostly in the kana syllabary. *Called also the Kwanto Goseibai Shikimoku. There was no intention of suppressing the Daiho code. The latter was to remain operative in all regions to which the sway of the Kyoto Court extended direct.
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