Читать книгу A History of the Japanese People - Kikuchi Dairoku - Страница 207

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.