About the year 552 of the Christian era, Buddhism entered the Mikado’s empire, and after a thousand years of struggle with Shintoism, gained supremacy.
While Japanese women are not so pitiably degraded as in India or China, we read in their book of “Instruction for Woman,” “Woman is the creature of man.” “A woman’s husband is her God.” Concubinage, “divorce if the wife is not obedient to her husband’s parents” or is unkind to a concubine, and the selling of young daughters for prostitution, tell the story.
The Japanese Buddhist Bible teaches that “the sins of three thousand of the worst men all together do not equal the sins of one woman.” Even in “Buddhism’s best Gospel” among the articles given by Buddha himself we find only this negative hope. “Although a woman may not be born into My Country, yet the woman who hears the name of Amida Buddha, and is excited thereby to the hatred of the condition of woman, and an earnest longing for the salvation of others, shall not be re-born as a woman.”[10]
[10] Muripapiu Byo. Luhhavati Sutrasl
For this crumb of comfort Japanese women are devoted to the worship of Buddha. The timbers of the great Buddhist temple building in Kyoto said to cost three million dollars, are all hauled to the ground and raised into the structure by ropes made of hair which devoted women have cut off and sent for this purpose.
Among the Ainu, the aboriginal inhabitants of the island of Yesso, the women do not worship the gods, even separately. “The reason commonly given among them is, that the men fear the prayers of the women in general, and of their wives in particular.”[11]
[11] Rev. John Bachelor, Church Missionary Society.
Mohammedanism.
There are few more pathetic scenes in history than the casting out of Hagar and Ishmael from the polygamous home of Abraham. “Abraham rose up early in the morning and took bread and a bottle of water” and gave it unto Hagar and her child “and sent them away.” The picture is realistic; that erect, well poised figure, with the bottle on her shoulder, that dark Egyptian face with chiseled lines of sorrow, illuminated now with righteous anger, as she gives one last haughty look toward Sarah’s tent and turns toward the wilderness of Beersheba. Very soon the curtain lifts upon the desert scene. The water is spent. Hagar places the child under the scant shade of a shrub and lifting up her voice, weeping cries out, “Let me not see the death of the child.” At this crisis a voice is heard from heaven: “Lift up the lad, I will make of him a great nation.” And they dwelt in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took him a wife out of the land of the Egyptians.