Maintaining Public Order

[Tier-Group 3, First-Floor Hall, the Six-Party Meeting]

"A long highway is to be laid out, and great numbers of immigrants will travel it, but what will you do about pirates? Even in our Sumō we haven't managed to root out the bandits entirely. This region in particular has lain in ruin for years; no country governs it properly. It's an area one might call not merely 'no-man's-land of three jurisdictions' but a 'no-man's-land of four.'"

So Nyūdō Daizen-no-suke asked. Incidentally, though they say "pirates," in reality these are mountain bandits. They have no ships or anything of the sort.

"Against an invasion by a great host like Tsukuba Naiyaku-no-jō's the other day, we will make use of the dungeon's functions to drive them off. But when a small number of pirates infiltrate by mingling among merchants and the like, it is difficult, with the dungeon's functions, to repel them without harming ordinary people. For that reason we will station warrior bands along the highways."

"Well, that's the usual way of it."

"At present there is but one warrior band, and we will have them prioritize and guard the highway as far as Iruma. We are also calling in that band's kinfolk, and ultimately we plan to post one or two warrior bands, each granted a fief, along each highway."

"Those fellows are utterly fixated on land, after all. But guarantee them their fiefs and they won't complain much, conversely."

Okamoto Shuyu-no-kami grumbled.

"Ordinary dungeon monsters have no intelligence, so they're useless for this sort of purpose, and Named monsters can't be increased in great numbers, so we'll be taking warrior bands into our service."

"And how is crime being dealt with?"

"Raising the standard of living and moral education are the royal road of crime prevention, we keep that firmly in mind, but for the crimes that occur even so, the dungeon interior is under surveillance, so crimes can be detected swiftly."

"You can keep it under surveillance?"

"That's the dungeon's strength. Unfortunately we can't manage constant, around-the-clock surveillance, but we can confirm the circumstances at the moment a crime occurs."

"'Steal ten ryō and you lose your head,' and yet, threaten as you might, thieves never cease, because it's so hard to catch hold of their tails. That is powerful indeed."

As Okamoto Shuyu-no-kami said, there is no forensic science, so evidence is hard to come by.

"The legal system will be complete before long. Formal decisions will come after the assembly is established, so for the time being it will be provisional operation. As for capital punishment, pirates are hanged, and other murderers are beheaded (geshunin), but beheading requires a skilled hand, so we use a tool for severing the head called a guillotine. I'd be glad if we could do without it, but statistically speaking, I doubt that's how it will go."

Spread the guillotine and you'd earn the Legion of Honour. Nothing of the sort.

"Lastly, what will you do about the gods and Buddhas?"

"Introduce some strange new scheme and an uprising breaks out, so we'll adopt the ordinary temple-registration system. Roughly one temple per village, and for towns a number of temples scaled to population, and entrust them with managing the residents and providing basic education."

"Hm."

"When each village is laid out, we'll also set aside land for a temple and donate the building. But if a Buddhist-style main hall and so forth is wanted, we'll have the village build it. And the funds needed to run a temple school and the like will be provided as alms."

Since the very concept of separation of church and state does not exist, there's no problem with the dungeon providing land and buildings to temples and supplying the monks with rice. Because the support goes directly to the temples, though, the problem of the Fuju-fuse sect is on a scale far beyond the Edo period.

"Monks may come flooding in."

"Eventually thousands of temples will be needed, so that's no problem. As for sects, however, we'll give priority to the residents' wishes while taking care not to lean too heavily toward any particular sect."