JAPAN
dhist temples and the celebration of grand religious services, and he made a parade of his belief in Buddhism by forbidding the slaughter of birds, beasts, fish or insects in any part of the Empire, and never allowing either fish or flesh to be served at the Palace feasts. Yet he did not hesitate to sell official posts, thus deliberately perpetuating what he knew to be one of the worst evils of the era, hereditary office-holding. So far was this abuse carried that the post of provincial governor became hereditary in thirty cases during Shirakawa's tenure of power; three or four persons sometimes held the same office simultaneously by purchase, and in one instance a boy of ten was governor of a province. Such incidents were not calculated to consolidate the power of the Throne, and the imperial authority was still further discredited by the spectacle of a sovereign nominally ruling but in reality ruled by an ex-Emperor, who, while professing to have abandoned the world and devoted himself to a life of religion, had a duly organised Court with ministers and an independent military force of his own, and issued edicts above the head of the reigning Emperor. Shirakawa and his immediate successors who followed this system of dual imperialism, if for a moment they enjoyed the sweets of administrative authority, must be said to have invited the vicissitudes that afterwards befell the Throne. In truth, to whatever trait of national character the fact may be ascribable,
4
