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The abdicating proclivities of the nation in pre-Meiji times are well shown by the official list of daimyos published by the Shogunate in 1862. To a list of 268 ruling daimyos is added a list of 104 "inkyo." In addition to what we may call political and family abdication, described above, is personal abdication, referred to on a previous page.
The latter two were also inkyo and shared the tastes and foibles of Harunari. One of their greatest pleasures was to startle society.
Across the garden and beyond the bamboo grove is the little house of Mr. Fujinami's stepbrother and his wife; and in the opposite corner, below the cherry-orchard, is the inkyo, the dower house, where old Mr. Fujinami Gennosuké, the retired Lord who is the present Mr.
Inkyo had the grace to be "greatly shocked" and to "soothe the mind of the Empress with explanations," but he did not mend his infidelity.
The mother warns her little ones at play about the effect of wrong-doing upon their future births, as the children of other parents. The pilgrim or the street-beggar accepts your alms with the prayer that your next birth may be fortunate. The aged inkyo, whose sight and hearing begin to fail, talks cheerily of the impending change that is to provide him with a fresh young body.
It fell out as Inkyo wished, but there then ensued a chapter of incidents in which the dignity of the Crown fared ill. Again and again the beautiful Oto refused to obey her sovereign's summons, and when at length, by an unworthy ruse, she was induced to repair to the palace, it was found impossible to make her an inmate of it in defiance of the Empress' jealousy.
He was, in short, what is known as an inkyo, or one "dwelling in retirement," a singular state, composed of equal parts of this world and the next; like dying in theory, and then undertaking to live on in practice. For an inkyo is a man who has formally handed in his resignation to the community, and yet continues to exist most enjoyably in the midst of it.
Moreover, Richu, as has been stated already, was a son of Iwa, a lady of the same great family, and his two successors, Hansho and Inkyo, were his brothers by the same mother.
She wore the dress of a peasant, and a blue towel tied round her head. She was ugly; and her natural ugliness had been increased by a cruel attack of smallpox. The child carried a bundle of printed ballads. Neighbors then began to crowd into my front yard, mostly young mothers and nurse girls with babies on their backs, but old women and men likewise the inkyo of the vicinity.
But with its extension beyond the circle of official dignitaries, and its consequent severance from tradition and religious associations, whether real or nominal abdication changed its name. It was no longer termed 'niu do, but 'in kio, the old word being retained only in its strict religious meaning, and 'inkyo' is the term in use to-day.
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