days. The maximum dimensions were similarly
prescribed in every case, down to a minor official, whose grave must
not give employment to more than fifty men for one day. When ordinary
people died, it was directed that they should be buried in the ground
without a day's delay, and, except in the case of an Emperor or an
Empress, the custom of temporary interment was strictly vetoed.
Cemeteries were ordered to be constructed for the first time, and
peremptory injunctions were issued against self-destruction to
accompany the dead; against strangling men or women by way of
sacrifice; against killing the deceased's horse, and against cutting
the hair or stabbing the thighs by way of showing grief. It must be
assumed that all these customs existed.

ABUSES

Other evil practices are incidentally referred to in the context of
the Daika reforms. Thus it appears that slaves occasionally left
their lawful owners owing to the latter's poverty and entered the
service of rich men, who thereafter refused to give them up; that
when a divorced wife or concubine married into another family, her
former husband, after the lapse of years, often preferred claims
against her new husband's property; that men, relying on their power,
demanded people's daughters in marriage, and in the event of the girl
entering another house, levied heavy toll on both families; that when
a widow, of ten or twenty years' standing, married again, or when a
girl entered into wedlock, the people of the vicinity insisted on the
newly wedded couple performing the Shinto rite of harai (purgation),
which was perverted into a device for compelling offerings of goods
and wine; that the compulsory performance of this ceremony had become
so onerous as to make poor men shrink from giving burial to even
their own brothers who had died at a distance from home, or hesitate
to extend aid to them in mortal peril, and that when a forced
labourer cooked his food by the roadside or borrowed a pot to boil
his rice, he was often obliged to perform expensive purgation.

OFFICIAL ORGANIZATION

At the head of all officials were the sa-daijin (minister of the
Left), the u-daijin (minister of the Right) and the nai-daijin
(minister of the Interior), and after them came the heads of
departments, of which eight were established, after the model
of the Tang Court in China. They were the Central Department
(Nakatsukasa-sho); the Department of Ceremonies (Shikibu-sho); the
Department o