Jukichi Inouye

“ In the West it is through romance that people enter into matrimony, and that is apt to melt before the hard facts of life; whereas in Japan we regard it in a more prosaic light, and the Japanese bride takes up the burden of married life at the threshold to lay it down only at the grave. Again, in the West a man may in a vague way think it time for him to marry and then look for a suitable partner; but more often it is the sight of the woman with whom he would willingly share the pleasures and pains of this world that awakens in him the desire to marry and prompts him to propose to her. ”

“ Labouring as she is under many disadvantages, the Japanese wife does not get credit for her good qualities, because she always keeps in the background. Neither she nor her husband ever sings the other’s praises in public; on the contrary, mutual depreciation is the custom. And yet all her efforts are directed to her husband’s cutting a creditable figure among his acquaintances. A good, sensible, tactful wife is a jewel with us no less than with the wise man of yore; and her adroitness covers a multitude of defects in her husband. ”

“ She would also have to put up sometimes with the reproaches of her husband or his parents for this failure of issue and consent to the adoption of a child to whom she must concede the love which she had hoped to reserve for her own flesh and blood. But happily for the wife, we are on the whole a prolific nation untroubled by the phantom of race suicide, and every woman is prepared to bring up a family, which is in her eyes as much the wife’s destiny as in girlhood she looked upon marriage as her inevitable fate. ”

“ Her absolute concentration upon her own home, though it is a serious obstacle to her social development, brings its compensation when her wedded life is crowned with maternity, and in the smiles of infancy she finds ample consolation for the monotony of her home. This intense love of children is one of the brightest traits of Japanese home life, and with the reverence for old age, gives it a tone of quiet, undemonstrative happiness. ”

“ And it must be admitted that the samisen can never charm and enthrall us like the deep-sounding cathedral organ; and its want of volume deprives it of any power to make a cumulative impression upon us. In short, our samisen-music is mainly a matter of dexterity, with a modicum of taste and judgment. We do not look to it to sway our passions—to move us to tears or laughter, to stir up in us anger, awe, pity, or wonder, or to fire us into bursts of patriotic enthusiasm. ”

“ Thus, a child that begins to suck its fingers before the thumb which represents the parents in Japanese palmistry, will not be an encumbrance upon its father when it grows up; if it pushes itself out in sleep beyond the head of its bed, it will rise in the world, while a downward course is in store for the one that slips in under its bed-clothes. ”

“ The highest, which is twenty points, is assigned to the pine-tree with a crane in the middle and a red sun above, the cherry-tree in bloom with a curtain underneath for a picnic party, the eularia under the full harvest moon, the willow under which a great scholar is learning perseverance from a frog which succeeds after many hours’ vain attempts in reaching a branch, and the paulownia with the phœnix flying over it. ”

“ A French writer has charged Japanese lovers with a lack of tenderness as they neither kiss nor shake hands. But what can the poor lovers do to kiss each other? They cannot fall into each other’s arms while they remain squatting, for squatting is not like sitting together on a sofa. When we sit up straight with our feet under us, the equilibrium of such a posture is as unstable as if we were perched on a high stool. It is very rude to remain standing and even to speak before squatting, so that kissing while we are on our legs is not to be thought of. ”

“ Neither of these amusements can serve to while away a few hours of idleness or relaxation; to those who wish to spend an evening pleasantly and at little expense, the story-tellers’ hall is always open. It stands conspicuously in a street; for over a wide entrance, the walls of which are studded with numerous pegs for suspending the clogs and sandals of its patrons, hangs a large square lantern announcing on its face the names of the principal performers, while the name of the hall is inscribed at a side-end. The hall itself is a great matted room with a platform at the furthest end. ”

“ Even the flowers for which Tokyo is noted they go to look at in the country; and the festivals of the tutelary deities have lost their former splendour, and their most prominent feature, the procession-cars, cannot now be built on the grand scale of the old days, for unless they can be bent low, they cannot parade the streets without snapping the innumerable electric wires which disfigure the thoroughfares of the metropolis. ”

“ Japanese women are as a class gentle, pliant, and docile; and these qualities stand them in good stead at home. Whether it be that they manage with all their demureness to twist their lords round their little fingers or that the latter are afraid that any change in home life would develop a new revolting woman who would refuse to be as submissive as they are at present, the fact remains that with the mass of the nation there has been little change in the conditions of domestic life. ”

“ Tokyo is therefore a great city; but the stranger who visits its streets for the first time usually gets an impression of an even greater populousness. For the streets are always in the evening teeming with young children; they are not gutter-snipes, but children of respectable parents, small tradesmen or private persons of slender means, who let them run about on the public road rather than romp in their narrow dwellings. ”

“ But in winter we feel the inadequacy of wooden houses; it is next to impossible to keep out the cold effectually; a room never gets thoroughly warmed. The wind blows in through the crevices of the sliding-doors, for the edges on which these doors meet are flat and never dovetailed. The paper of the doors is porous, and through its pores the air gets in; there is certainly this to be said for it that in a Japanese room one need never fear asphyxiation, however much charcoal may be burning in the braziers. ”

“ But these inæsthetic innovations he must put up with, for they are typical of the present stage of Japanese civilisation, and nowhere else are they more marked than in Tokyo. The herculean task Japan has set herself leaves her little leisure to consider its artistic effects; she is too much in earnest to waste a thought on the awkward cut of the habiliments she is donning; and only when she has so adapted herself as to fit them exactly, will she turn her attention to their frills and trimmings. ”

“ Making use only of the knowledge acquired during his term of apprenticeship or service as journeyman, the master carpenter has little occasion to display his inventiveness or originality, for he need only follow the time-honoured conventions which hold sway in his craft as in all other arts and crafts of the country. Hence, monotony is a distinctive mark of Japanese domestic architecture; there is a sameness of style in all our dwelling-houses. The chief and perhaps the only point upon which the carpenter has to bring his ingenuity to bear is the arrangement of the rooms. ”

“ When the patient is in the last article of death, his wife and children put their mouths close to his ear and call him by name; recalled by the dear voices, life flickers for a moment and then goes out. ”

“ And as a Japanese girl usually marries at eighteen or nineteen, she has not much time to spare before she has to think seriously of matrimony. Two or three years of home life are all that is left her before she will have to take charge of a household of her own. And further, as she is supposed to pass the flower of her youth at four and twenty, a college course would bring her dangerously close to the lower limit of spinsterhood, and so, as things stand in Japan, female universities would, even were they plentiful, not be so popular as they should deserve. ”

“ She is too old to attract, and yet not old enough to realise that fact and abandon hope; and jealous of a younger woman in the house, she rebukes her in a dog-in-the-manger spirit for any demonstration of love when she is with her husband. ”

“ As the oldest servant with the authority she exercises over her younger fellow-domestics, she is held in hardly less reverence than her mistress, and every opportunity is seized to please her; for to cross her would be worse than to offend their mistress, and she is certainly more touchy than the other. She knows her power, too, and enjoys it to the full. She lets them serve her even more assiduously than her lady; and they help her to dress, and when she is tired, offer to shampoo her. She plays, in short, the retired lady more completely than her mistress’s honoured mother-in-law. ”

“ Where there is a great deal of needlework to do, a needlewoman is employed. She is usually a woman of mature years, a widow, probably, and ‘a lone ’lorn creetur,’ who acts as a damper upon the exuberant spirits of the younger servants. In a large and well-to-do family there is sometimes a head-servant, a sort of housekeeper, who came in all probability into the family as the bride’s waiting-woman at the marriage of the present mistress or her mother-in-law. ”

“ We mature early and decline at the same rate. Indeed, man, says a Japanese proverb, lives but for fifty years and rarely does his span extend to seventy years. Our expectation of life is, then, two decades less than the Psalmist’s. Impressed by its brevity, the Japanese woman knows that she ceases to please after two score and unmurmuringly gives up hope. She does not allow herself to be deceived when silver locks begin to appear among the raven; and by her dress and coiffure she frankly confesses the stage she has reached in the journey of life. ”

“ Our women, in particular, have very little leisure, and if they wander with childish delight in avenues of cherry-blossoms or sit with quiet content on the verandah under the harvest-moon, it is because they are glad to snatch a few hours of innocent enjoyment from their round of almost ceaseless household work. ”

“ The position to which she is relegated by the Japanese guide to wifely conduct is merely that of an upper servant; for no matter how many domestics there may be in the house, she must do menial work. She must share with her husband all the hardships of grinding poverty; and when fortune smiles, he may live in luxury and entertain many friends, but she must not frequent public resorts or go sight-seeing. Wealth may bring her more conveniences, but not more pleasure ”

“ We can therefore keep fairly warm if we merely sit on the mats; but directly we move or stand up, the cold attacks us. Most Japanese are, however, used from childhood to these cold rooms and do not feel the chill. Many of them think nothing of sitting for hours in a cold draught.
A Japanese wooden house looks pretty when new; but after some years when the outside is weather-beaten, the pillars begin to warp and the walls to crumble, its charms, too, are on the wane. ”

“ The stranger, then, who visits the streets of Tokyo will find much to arouse his curiosity in the open, windowless shops, the jinrikisha, the native dresses of men and women, the throngs of hawkers, and the ceaseless din of traffic ”

“ Finally, the new couple do not go on a honeymoon, but proceed at once to enter upon their household duties. The honeymoon is undoubtedly an excellent institution for giving the couple an opportunity of enjoying themselves unreservedly in each other’s company before taking up the serious business of life; but at the same time it not unfrequently happens that they return from it sadly disillusioned and with an outlook far from rosy upon wedded life. The Japanese bride has an advantage over her western sister in that respect, for she has no illusions to be dispelled. ”

“ Thus, marriage is looked upon as an inevitable fate by both sexes.
In a country like Japan where ceremony envelops every phase of life, such an important event as a wedding is, as may be expected, governed at every step by strict etiquette, and to celebrate it in proper style one needs to call in a regular professor of etiquette. But though weddings in high society are still perplexing tangles of formalities, the tendency to-day among the middle classes is to strip them as much as possible of unnecessary ceremony. ”

“ It may appear somewhat unjust that a man whose conduct has led to the divorce of a married woman should be disqualified from making to her the only reparation in his power for her loss of home and honour; but the idea is, as in the Scots law, that the ability to marry each other would rather encourage such illicit connections and make the offenders brave the ignominy of judicial divorce for the prospective pleasure of a lawful union. ”

“ But the most effectual way in which a man may make money by marriage is to get adopted as a husband by a wealthy family; it is indeed the only means a poor man has of acquiring wealth without any exertion on his part; the difficulty is to find a well-to-do family willing to adopt him. If he has nothing to expect from his father, he need not hope for a legacy from an uncle, aunt, or any other relative, as an estate is seldom allowed to go out of the family. A bachelor or a childless person adopts some one to succeed to his name and property. ”