ere required to
serve at a distance from home. Small farmers, upon whom this duty
devolved, had no choice but to take their wives and children with
them, the family subsisting on the pittance given as rations eked out
by money realized from sales of chattels and garments. Thus, on the
expiration of their service they returned to their native place in a
wholly destitute condition, and sometimes perished of hunger on the
way. In consideration of the hardships of such a system, it was
abolished, and thus the distinction between the soldier and the
peasant received further accentuation.

There is no record as to the exact dimensions of Japan's standing
army in the ninth century, but if we observe that troops were raised
in the eight littoral provinces only--six in the south and two in the
north--and in the island of Sado, and that the total number in the
six southern provinces was only nine thousand, it would seem
reasonable to conclude that the aggregate did not exceed thirty
thousand. There were also the kondei (or kenji), but these, since
they served solely as guards or for special purposes, can scarcely be
counted a part of the standing army. The inference is that whatever
the Yamato race may have been when it set out upon its original
career of conquest, or when, in later eras, it sent great armies to
the Asiatic continent, the close of the fifth cycle after the coming
of Buddhism found the country reduced to a condition of comparative
military weakness. As to that, however, clearer judgment may be
formed in the context of the campaign--to be now spoken of--conducted
by the Yamato against the Yemishi tribes throughout a great part of
the eighth century and the early years of the ninth.

REVOLT OF THE YEMISHI

It has been shown that the close of the third decade of the eighth
century saw the capital established at Nara amid conditions of great
refinement, and saw the Court and the aristocracy absorbed in
religious observances, while the provincial governments were, in many
cases, corrupt and inefficient. In the year 724, Nara received news
of an event which illustrated the danger of such a state of affairs.
The Yemishi of the east had risen in arms and killed Koyamaro, warden
of Mutsu. At that time the term "Mutsu" represented a much wider area
than the modern region of the same name: it comprised the five
provinces now distinguished as Iwaki, Iwashiro, Rikuzen, Rikuchu, and
Mutsu--in other words, the whole of the n