iate
attendants, and, among these, Tanuma Okitsugu succeeded in
monopolizing the evil opportunity thus offered. During nearly ten
years the reforms effected by Yoshimune steadily ceased to be
operative, and when Ieshige resigned in 1760, the country had fallen
into many of the bad customs of the Genroku era.

THE TENTH SHOGUN, IEHARU

After his abdication in 1760, Ieshige survived only fourteen months,
dying, in 1761, at the age of fifty-one. He was succeeded, in 1760,
by his son, Ieharu, who, having been born in 1737, was twenty-three
years old when he began to administer the country's affairs. One of
his first acts was to appoint Tanuma Okitsugu to be prime minister,
bestowing on him a fief of fifty-seven thousand koku in the province
of Totomi, and ordering him to construct a fortress there. At the
same time Okitsugu's son, Okitomo, received the rank of Yamato no
Kami and the office of junior minister. These two men became
thenceforth the central figures in an era of maladministration and
corruption. So powerful and all-reaching was their influence that
people were wont to say, "Even a bird on the wing could not escape
the Tanuma." The shogun was not morally incapable, but his
intelligence was completely overshadowed by the devices of Okitsugu,
who took care that Ieharu should remain entirely ignorant of popular
sentiment. Anyone attempting to let light into this state of darkness
was immediately dismissed. It is related of a vassal of Okitsugu that
he was found one day with three high officials of the shogun's court
busily engaged in applying a moxa to his foot. The three officials
knew that their places depended on currying favour with this vassal;
how much more, then, with his master, Okitsugu! Everything went by
bribery. Justice and injustice were openly bought and sold. Tanuma
Okitsugu was wont to say that human life was not so precious as gold
and silver; that by the liberality of a man's gifts his sincerity
might truly be gauged, and that the best solace for the trouble of
conducting State affairs was for their administrator to find his
house always full of presents.

Ieharu, however, knew nothing of all this, or anything of the natural
calamities that befell the country under his sway--the eruption of
the Mihara volcano, in 1779, when twenty feet of ashes were piled
over the adjacent country through an area of several miles; the
volcanic disturbance at Sakura-jima, in Osumi, which took place about
the sa