412. The Japanese woman. The Japanese woman has been formed in an isolated state, of a militant character, with strong and invariable folkways. "Before this ethical creature, criticism should hold its breath; for there is here no single fault, save the fault of a moral charm unsuited to any world of selfishness and struggle.... How frequently has it been asserted that, as a moral being, the Japanese woman does not seem to belong to the same race as the Japanese man!... Perhaps no such type of woman will appear again in this world for a hundred thousand years: the conditions of industrial civilization will not admit of her existence.... The Japanese woman can be known only in her own country,—the Japanese woman as prepared and perfected by the old-time education for that strange society in which the charm of her moral being,—her delicacy, her supreme unselfishness, her childlike piety and trust, her exquisite tactful perception of all ways and means to make happiness about her,—can be comprehended and valued.... Even if she cannot be called handsome according to western standards, the Japanese woman must be confessed pretty,—pretty like a comely child; and if she be seldom graceful in the occidental sense, she is at least in all her ways incomparably graceful: her every motion, gesture, or expression being, in its own oriental manner, a perfect thing,—an act performed, or a look conferred, in the most easy, the most graceful, the most modest way possible.... The old-fashioned education of her sex was directed to the development of every quality essentially feminine, and to the suppression of the opposite quality. Kindliness, docility, sympathy, tenderness, daintiness,—these and other attributes were cultivated into incomparable blossoming. 'Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever; do noble things, not dream them, all day long,'—those words of Kingsley really embody the central idea in her training. Of course the being, formed by such training only, must be protected by society; and by the old Japanese society she was protected.... A being working only for others, thinking only for others, happy only in making pleasure for others,—a being incapable of unkindness, incapable of selfishness, incapable of acting contrary to her own inherited sense of right,—and in spite of this softness and gentleness ready, at any moment, to lay down her life, to sacrifice everything at the call of duty: such was the character of the Japanese woman."[1323]
[1129] Campbell, Differences in the Nervous Organization of Men and Women, 29.
[1130] Ibid., 43.
[1131] Ibid., 34.
[1132] Campbell, Differences in the Nervous Organization of Men and Women, 46.
[1133] Ibid., 45.
[1134] Ibid., 68.
[1135] Ibid., 66.
[1136] Ibid., 53 f.
[1137] Ibid., 223.