[197] Nitobé, Bushido, p. 32.
[198] Ibid. p. 30.
[199] For the subject of the downfall of feudalism and the Restoration, see Count Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. i, chap. ii.
[200] Nitobé, Bushido, p. 189.
[201] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (1908), vol. ii, p. 323.
[202] Scherer, What is Japanese Morality? (1906), p. 10.
[203] Nitobé, Bushido, p. vi.
[204] The works of Molière, it is said, have been put under the ban of the censor in Japan and their circulation forbidden, for the reason that Molière ridicules old age, and constantly, like the comic supplement of the newspapers, “makes some father the butt of jokes and gross wit by his child or children.”
[205] “Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the author of one’s being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of parents, by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves; any social system in which the mother-in-law is not entitled to the obedient service of the daughter-in-law, appears to him [the Japanese] of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.”—Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East (1895), p. 89.
[206] Okakura-Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan (1904), p. 179. Romantic love is almost unknown in Japan. B. H. Chamberlain affirms that in a residence of twenty-eight years he heard of only one love match, and then the young people had been brought up in America.