Carefully in my august garments green
As the kingfisher—
It is with the intention of finding another mate.
To this the Chief Empress, Her Augustness the Forward Princess, to whom the frank statement is made, plaintively replies:
“Thou ... indeed, being a man, probably hast on the various island-headlands that thou seest and on every beach-headland that thou lookest on, a wife like the young herbs. But I, alas! being a woman have no man except thee; I have no spouse except thee!”[103]
What became of the children in the cases of conjugal separation does not appear, a statement that is made by no less a Japanese authority than Chamberlain.[104] In only one instance is there any reference made to the fate of a child that had been deserted, but this is an unusual case, where the father had violated the rules of the parturition house, with the result that the mother disappears, leaving the father to take care of the child. He pledged himself to look after it until the day of his death but the sister of the child’s mother was first invoked to act as nurse.
The result of this system of family life was that where the children of different mothers but of the same father discovered one another’s presence there were feuds and much fighting, especially as it was the children of the latest affection who were generally the recipients of his favour to the chagrin and anger of the less favoured children and families. Marriages between half-brothers and halfsisters were another result of the system, the only restriction on marriages of any kind being that children of the same mother should not marry. Sons of the same father were thus incited to be enemies rather than brothers, in the accepted sense, and the annals of the civil wars are replete with tales of treachery and ambition and show almost an entire absence of natural affection. The fact that the children had no claim on the love and the protection of the father and that their mother was condemned under the ancient system to the function of a mere animal, is cited by Brinkley as the reason for this cruelty and treachery.[105]
This was the position of the child in the society that is depicted in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, although the latter, written about forty years after the Kojiki (A. D. 720), and under the influence of the Chinese, is more apt to depict the conditions that sprang up with the spreading Chinese culture.
The fourth century brought to Japan a knowledge of Chinese classics, and Chinese morals, and in 552 A. D., there came a still greater change when the Buddhistic religion was introduced through a copy of the scripture and an image of Buddha being sent to the Yamato Court by the government of one of the Korean kingdoms. Unsuccessful preachments there had been by unofficial missionaries before this, but the arrival of the Korean ambassador served to bring to the attention of the government the new religion in a manner calculated to arouse interest in its doctrines.