ON THE VERGE OF HISTORY
the Confucian precepts of refraining from excess, abhorring evil and curbing the passions. They also claim that she quickly began to practise these ethical canons, and they point to the career of the Emperor Nintoku (313–399) as an example of the new morality. But Nintoku, though he displayed some of the most picturesque virtues of a ruler, was an extreme type of libertine. He crowned a long list of excesses by marrying his step-mother's daughter. Fifty years later, the Nero of Japanese history appeared in the person of Yuraku (457–459), who exiled an official in order to obtain possession of his wife, and perpetrated a wholesale slaughter of his own brothers, their children, and other members of the Imperial family. His successor (Seinei) carried out a similar massacre, and the Imperial line would have become extinct had not a child been secreted and reduced to the position of a serf in order to escape the quest of the official assassins. Buretsu, who reigned a few decades later (499–507), ranks even below Yuraku as a fierce and merciless despot, and at the same time the great families who had become depositories of administrative power behaved with the utmost arrogance, despising the laws, defying the sovereign's authority, and perpetrating all kinds of excesses. In brief, if Confucianism, and its comparatively high code of moral precepts, obtained recognition in Japan during the fourth century, its civilising influence is not to be detected in the fifth, which may
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