Local government has now to choose if it is to be to use the distinction coined by Walter Bagehot a dignified or an efficient part of the constitution.
Once novels began to be published in blocks, rather than in slivers, they became art, perhaps in part because the author and the reader were held at a more dignified distance.
But Koetsu ended his days in dignified security, as the quasi-religious head of a community at Takagamine, near Kyoto, part artists' colony and part monkish village.