JAPAN
spectacular effect is important. But the folding principle invented in the fifteenth century was never bettered.
With regard to diet, dwellers in the Imperial capital continued to be influenced by Buddhist vetoes against the taking of life, but did not carry their piety beyond refraining from the flesh of four-footed animals and certain birds. As for the military men at Kamakura and in the provinces, no prejudice of that kind disturbed them. They ate everything eatable, except the flesh of oxen and horses. Deer, wild boar, bear, badger, hare, wild fowl, larks, pheasant, snipe, quails, thrushes, and other field birds furnished their table, and they laughed at the citizens of Kyōtō who believed that the misfortunes of the Emperor Go-Murakami (1319–1368) had been due to his neglect of the Buddhist commandment. All kinds of fish, many varieties of sea-weed, twenty-five vegetables, twenty-one fruits, and some eight or nine flavourings constituted their staples of diet, apart from rice, barley, and millet. That universally serviceable and most profitable condiment of the Japanese kitchen, soy (shōyu), a mixture of calcined barley-meal and a special kind of beans, yeast, water, and salt, had not yet been invented. Its place was taken by the greatly inferior but much cheaper miso, a sauce made of wheat, beans, and salt.
But although his list of edibles was large, the military man nominally contented himself with
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