The social position of Japanese women has very much changed for the better during the last few years, chiefly owing to foreign influence and the spread of Christianity in the country.
The Empress, too, has done much by promoting charitable work of all kinds in the country, and through her influence the horrible custom of blackening the teeth and shaving the eyebrows of married women has been abolished. Her personal interest in the Red-Cross Society was especially noticeable during the last war, when she and the wives of many of the nobles visited, and some even nursed, the sick in hospital, and employed their days making lint and bandages for the use of the wounded.
A Japanese courtship and wedding are both very curious ceremonies, and still somewhat savour of barbarism.
‘When a young man has fixed his affections upon a maiden of suitable standing, he declares his love by fastening a branch of a certain shrub to the house of the damsel’s parents. If the branch be neglected, the suit is rejected; if it be accepted, so is the suitor’ (Siebold).
At the time of the marriage the bridegroom sends presents to his bride as costly as his means will allow, which she immediately offers to her parents, in acknowledgment of their kindness in infancy and of the pains bestowed upon her education. The wedding takes place in the evening. The bride is dressed in a long white silk kimono and white veil, and she and her future husband sit facing each other on the floor. Two tables are placed close by. On the one is a kettle with two spouts, a bottle of saké, and cups; on the other table a miniature fir-tree, signifying strength of the bridegroom; a plum-tree, signifying the beauty of the bride; and lastly a stork, standing on a tortoise, representing long life and happiness, desired by them both.
At the marriage feast each guest in turn drinks three cups of the saké, and the two-spouted kettle, also containing saké, is put to the mouths of the bride and bridegroom alternately by two attendants, signifying that they are to share together joys and sorrows. The bride keeps her veil all her life, and at her death it is buried with her as her shroud. The chief duty of a Japanese woman is obedience--whilst unmarried, to her parents; when married, to her husband and his parents; when widowed, to her son.
In the ‘Greater Learning of Women’ we read: ‘A woman should look upon her husband as if he were heaven itself, and thus escape celestial punishment.... The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy, and silliness. Without any doubt these five maladies afflict seven or eight out of every ten women, and from them arises the inferiority of women to men. A woman should cure them by self-inspection and self-reproach. The worst of them all and the parent of the other four is silliness.’
The above extract shows us very clearly the position which women have until quite recently taken in Japan. As a German writer says, ‘Her condition is the intermediate link between the European and the Asiatic.’ On the one hand, Japanese women are subjected to no seclusion, and are as carefully educated as the men, and take their own place in society; but, on the other hand, they have absolutely no independence, and are in complete subjection to their husbands, sons, and other relations. They are without legal rights, and under no circumstances can a wife obtain a divorce or separation from her husband, however great his offence. Notwithstanding this, in no country does one find a higher standard of morality than amongst the married women of Japan. Faithlessness is practically unknown, although the poor little wives must often have much to put up with from their autocratic lords and masters. They bear all, however, silently and uncomplainingly, their characteristic pride and reserve forbidding them show to the outer world what they suffer. I read the other day that a Japanese poet has called a Japanese wife ‘social glue,’ meaning, I suppose, that she had to cement the happiness of everyone in the house together.
We Europeans might well in many respects imitate, and have still much to learn from, our little cousins in the Far East.