The cemetery to which we went was also bright and gay. It was built upon a gently-sloping hillside, and was literally a paradise of sweet-smelling flowers. The graves were at some distance from each other, and, without exception, most carefully tended. Over many of them were built carved marble roofing, peaked in shape. From some of these roofs hung one of the tiny chimes of bells of which the Japanese are so fond, and which they invariably have in their temples or prayer-houses. The coffin was placed in a grave that was half-full of honeysuckle and roses. More flowers were thrown above the coffin, or rather coffins, for the inner box had been put in several others. Again incense was burned, until the air grew very peculiar with the mingling of the fresh perfumes of the growing flowers and the heavy odour of the preserved spices. Then we left the dead in the least depressing cemetery I have ever seen. A tuneful brook ran through that burial ground, and in it were several squat pagodas or prayer-houses—miniature temples. Everything was clean, quiet, and in order, except the flowering vines—they ran mad riot everywhere.
Cremation used to be practised in Japan, but never, I believe, very generally. Certainly it has long been confined to the lower and poorer classes, and even they employ it less and less every year.
The custom of burying the dead in a sitting position is general but not universal, and is decreasing. In many Japanese families, children are still trained explicitly in the offices of respect they may at any time be called upon to perform at the obsequies of a relative. One quaint old custom still holds in Japan. Upon slips of paper are written the names of all persons present at a funeral. The slips are bound together, sometimes very elegantly, and handed down from generation to generation as heirlooms. Curiously, the writing of these lists is the only one exception I know to the Japanese rule of writing from the right to the left. The lists of funeral guests are written as we write from left to right.
The Japanese deal with death and the attendant ceremonies with more dignity and simplicity than any of the other Oriental peoples. They are not naturally gloomy, and they never exaggerate gloom. Their burial grounds are pretty, peaceful places, in every way fitting resting places for the dead of a superlatively graceful, artistic, pleasant people.
CHAPTER XXVII
ORIENTAL NUPTIALS
Japanese Wedlock
Confucius wrote: “The man stands in importance before the woman; it is the right of the strong over the weak. Heaven ranks before earth; the prince ranks before his minister. This law of honour is one.” The Occidental reformers who would fain place the women of China and Japan on an equality with the men of those countries, must first disabuse the Chinese and the Japanese minds of their deeply-rooted reverence for Confucius. That will be very difficult. Confucius said so much that has held true for thousands of years, so very much that has stood the test of ages—he so satisfies the good and the intellectual—that it will be a very able “foreign devil” who convinces Chung-Fan and Uzeyama that Confucius was not infallible. And the chief difficulty will again be with the women. A heathen man sometimes deserts the heathen gods,—a heathen woman does so, almost never. Upon these especial words, then, of Confucius, and upon many similar words of his, and upon words in literature held almost as sacred, are based the relative positions of the sexes in China and Japan. It is no mistake to suppose that the men of China and Japan regard women as their own inferiors. But the great mistake,—and a common and stupid mistake it is,—the great mistake is made by those who suppose that in China and Japan man is necessarily unkind, or even ungentle to woman. A great many of us hold that our children are our inferiors intellectually and physically, and that we have a right to their obedience. But we do not, as a matter of consequence, beat or bully the little creatures who cluster about our knees. If (with the one exception of the Burmans) the men of Asia regard themselves as superior to their women, they nevertheless, as a rule, treat those women with extreme tenderness. There is usually something prettily paternal in the bearing of an Oriental husband to his wife.
Another point is unnoted by the women who sip four o’clock tea in Europe and America, and mourn over their sisters in benighted Cathay. They forget the power of love, and how it “raises the lowly and humbles the great.” If the fin-de-siècle women of Europe have discarded love as a silly luxury and a useless ally, the women of Asia have not. It is their mainstay. And when we wring our emancipated hands over the deplorable condition of the women of Asia we forget that the woman who is loved is all-powerful.
The women of Japan are, I think, supreme in their own homes. They exercise, as a rule, little or no influence on public affairs, but I fancy that their own indifference is the chief cause of this. The Japanese women are not generally industrious nor keenly intellectual. They are as dainty, as beautiful, as fine, as the ivory carvings of Kioto; they are as exquisite, as lovely in tint, as the embroideries of Tokio. Yet they have few or none of the qualities of statesmen, but they are to the men of Japan what Japan is to the world,—they are models of beauty, exemplifications of grace, flowers of courtesy, acmes of hospitality; they are sweet refuges of rest, something to be looked upon with delight and to be loved.