_Wedding Gifts--A Wife's Duties--Adopted Son-Husbands--Women in
Business and Professional Life--Actresses--The "New
Woman"--Kissing as a Business Custom--Film Censorship_--"Oi,
Kora!"--_Women of Old Japan--The Change is Coming_
Though the Japanese system of arranged marriages is sometimes likened to
the French system, the two are quite different. In France the great
point is the bride's dowry, but the Japanese bride is not necessarily
expected to bring a dowry of money. Her wedding present from her parents
consists as a rule of furniture and clothing which they give according
to their purse.
The ceremonies connected with a Japanese wedding are extremely
interesting, but are too elaborate to be gone into here. There is no
wedding trip. The bride moves at once to the home of her husband's
parents, unless she has married a younger son sufficiently prosperous
and enterprising to set up a home of his own. The rule is that the
eldest son continues to live under the parental roof after his marriage.
Along with her name and residence the bride transfers her allegiance
absolutely to the husband's family. Particular stress is laid upon her
duty to her husband's mother.
This fact is recognized in a textbook issued by the Imperial Department
of Education for use in the higher girls' schools, which says:
Absence of harmony is often witnessed between a husband's mother
and her daughter-in-law, and this is often traceable to the
latter's disobedience and undutifulness. The mother-in-law may
be too conservative to get on smoothly with the young
daughter-in-law trained in new ideas, but dutifulness, patience,
and sincerity on the latter's part will bring on peace and
harmony.... If, on the contrary, the daughter-in-law, while
tolerant of her own weaknesses, is critical toward her husband's
mother and complains of her heartlessness, she will only betray
her own unworthiness. These points should always be kept in mind
by young girls.
Young Japanese heiresses are doubly fortunate since their affluence
provides, among other comforts, a means of escaping the dreaded
mother-in-law. Instead of moving to her husband's home, an heiress will
often bring her husband to the shelter of her own paternal roof, where
by adoption he becomes a son of her family, taking the family name. One
hears that the bed of roses sought by some of these _muko-yoshi_, or
adopted son-husbands, does not prove always to be free from thorns, and
there is a Japanese proverb which advises: "If you have left so much as
a pound of bad rice, don't become a muko-yoshi." The muko-yoshi is not,
however, always married to an heiress. Poor families having daughters,
but no sons, will often take in a muko-yoshi to perpetuate the family
line under the ancestral roof.
[Illustration: A laundry on the river's brim]
When all is said, there is no question that the condition of Japanese
women is slowly improving, although the woman movement there is still in
the academic stage. Little by little the example of women in America and
England is making itself felt, and the educational opportunities open to
women are gradually increasing. The average college for women is not, to
be sure, comparable with the ordinary college for men, but there is said
to be one university of really high standing which is open to women, and
a number of other co-educational institutions are listed as fairly good.
Waseda College is now opening its doors for the first time to women as
well as men, and though women cannot graduate from Tokyo Imperial
University, I am informed that they are permitted to attend lectures
there.
Women are going more and more into business and professional life. Great
numbers of them are now employed in the government postal and railway
offices, in the offices of prefectures and municipalities, and, of
course, in the telephone service, as well as by private companies of all
kinds. Employers report steady improvement in the standard of
intelligence and capability among their woman employees. Women, they
say, do their work well and are usually content with small salaries. In
seeking positions they generally declare that they wish to occupy
themselves profitably between the time of leaving high school and that
of marrying.
Eliminating, for the time being, the geisha, who because of her curious
occupation will be separately discussed, and who does not in any case
fit into a discussion of woman's progress, since she is in some measure
a barrier to it, we find that the medical profession is probably the
most profitable field for woman workers. There are some seven or eight
hundred woman doctors in Japan, of whom almost half are graduates of the
Tokyo School for Women, founded by a woman physician, Dr. Y. Yoshioka.
Trained nursing is also a popular occupation, and many girls have lately
been leaving office and telephone work to take it up, chiefly for the
reason that trained nurses receive from $1 to $1.25 per day, which is
considered good pay.
Until ten or a dozen years ago there were no actresses in Japan, female
rôles invariably having been played by men, but the octogenarian Baron
Shibusawa (lately created Viscount), who has done so much toward
liberalizing the thought of Japan in many lines, founded a school for
actresses, with the result that there is now a place for them, and that
a few have come to be well known, although none is as yet so popular as
are the best-known actors. Actors hold in Japan a social position
similar to that held by Occidental players a century or more ago. They
are distinctly a lower caste, and while they are admired for their art,
and are adored by young girls as matinée idols are with us, they are
considered as belonging to a social stratum in which geisha and
wrestlers figure.
There are now perhaps a dozen or more women working as reporters and
special writers on the various Tokyo newspapers. Miss Osawa, who started
work on the _Jiji Shimpo_ twenty-one years ago, is, I believe, the dean
of Japanese woman journalists.
There are more than twenty well-known monthly magazines for women, many
of them edited by women and largely contributed to by woman writers.
Authorship is a traditional occupation for women in Japan, women's names
being among the greatest in the nation's ancient literature--in which
connection it is interesting to note the fact that some of the old-time
authoresses were courtesans.
One hears a good deal of talk of the "new woman" in Japan, and perhaps
the surest indication that she is coming into being is the fact that
supposedly humorous postcards are sold on the Tokyo streets, in which
the new woman is shown in various dictatorial attitudes before a
cringing husband. Once, at a dinner I attended in Osaka, a woman who
runs a business training school for girls, arose and made a short
speech. I noticed that while she spoke not a few of the men smiled
pityingly. From this item American women old enough to recall the early
days of the woman movement in this country will have no difficulty in
estimating the distance that the Japanese woman has yet to go.
Japanese ladies who have the time and the inclination for charitable
activity accomplish a great deal. The W. C. T. U. is active in Japan,
Mrs. Yajima, its president, a lady who, in 1920, at the age of
eighty-eight, went to England for the International W. C. T. U.
Convention, being perhaps the leader among progressive women of the
land. The Red Cross has a large membership, and the Y. W. C. A., like
the Y. M. C. A., has a firmly fixed and useful place, carrying on a wide
variety of activities. Among these are classes to teach young girls the
ways of the business world which is so rapidly opening to them. As an
indication of the need for such instruction, a lady who works in the Y.
W. C. A. in Tokyo told me of a case in which a Japanese girl who came
for instruction reported that she was in the habit of kissing her
foreign employer good morning and good night, in the belief--a belief we
must suppose to have been inculcated by him--that such was the general
business custom.
It is often said that the Japanese never kiss. Bowing is the national
form of salutation, though those accustomed to meet foreigners shake
hands with them. The fact as to kissing is that one never sees it, even
between mother and child, and that this is interpreted as signifying
that kissing is unknown. That is not the case. I own an old print by
Utamaro which shows a man and a woman kissing with the greatest zeal.
The Japanese simply do not kiss indiscriminately or in public places.
The feeling against demonstrations of affection in public is so strong
that when American motion pictures were first taken to Japan, audiences
would hoot at those tender passages so much enjoyed by some persons in
this country. For several years past, however, all such representations
have been cut from American films intended for exhibition over there.
This work is done by an American who lives in Japan, and who has made up
what is probably one of the strangest films in the world by assembling
all the cuts into one awful reel of lust and osculation, in which figure
most of the widely known American movie stars. This film he sometimes
runs off privately for his friends, and it is said to leave those who
witness it in a frame of mind to vote kissing a capital offence.
In a rather pitiful list of ten requests made by a Japanese wife to her
husband, and exhibited as a poster at the Girls' Industrial School of
Tokyo, was the appeal: "Please stop saying '_Oi, kora_,' when you call
me."
_Oi_, the expression used by most Japanese husbands when they call their
wives, is about equivalent to our "Hallo!" or "Hey!" Sometimes a husband
will call his wife by name, but one more often hears "_Oi_," or "_Oi,
oi_," even among persons of position. _Oi_ is more familiar than rude. A
man would say it to his close friend. But a woman would never say it to
her husband. _Kora_ is really objectionable, being an exclamation
addressed only to inferiors. Naturally, then, wives do not like it,
whether they make bold to declare the fact or not. For a wife may not
even call her husband by his first name, but must address him as
_anata_, which is a respectful form for "you."
It has been declared that the peasant woman who works beside her husband
in the fields or fishing villages, or who helps him push a cart, or
navigate a boat on the rivers and canals, is the happiest woman in
Japan, being a real companion to him. However, that may be, there is
much room for improvement in the attitude of the average middle-class
Japanese toward his wife. He gets into automobiles and railroad trains
ahead of her and has the air of ignoring her in public.
It should be said, though, that the attitude of such husbands does not
necessarily mean that they do not care for their wives. Rather it means
that they are old-fashioned--that the ancient notion of woman's
position, based on the teachings of Buddhism and Confucianism, has clung
to them. But most of all, I think, it reveals their fear of being
thought ridiculous. For if a man showed his wife what we should call
ordinary civility, the old-school Japanese thought him henpecked.
Strangely enough the position occupied by women in the days of Japan's
early antiquity was much higher than it has since become. In olden times
women took part in war, had a voice in politics, and in other ways held
their own with men. In the eighth century successive Empresses occupied
the Imperial throne, and the influence of certain able women was
strongly felt at court; two centuries later we find a great era of
literary women many of whose names are famous to this day.
But soon after the introduction of Buddhism and Confucianism all this
was changed. The Buddhist doctrine called women creatures of sin,
treacherous and cruel; and says Confucius: "When a boy is born let him
play with jewels; when a girl is born let her play with tiles." So it
came about that woman's position declined until it was possible for a
famous moralist to write a treatise on the Duty of Woman, containing
such maxims as these:
A woman should look upon her husband as if he were Heaven
itself, and never weary of thinking how she may yield to him,
and thus escape celestial castigation. Let her never dream of
jealousy. If her husband be dissolute she must expostulate with
him but never either nurse or vent her anger. Should her husband
become angry she should obey him with fear and trembling and not
set herself up against him in anger and frowardness.
An endless quantity of such quotations may be taken from the writings of
moral teachers, and in them is indicated the debt of the women of Japan
to Chinese doctrines. In view of which it seems strange indeed to visit
a Buddhist temple and there be shown coils of thick black rope which was
used in the erection of the building, and which was made entirely from
the hair of devout women who sacrificed their prized tresses for this
purpose, being too poor to give aught else.
Thus, while the Occident was teaching men to be chivalrous toward women,
the Orient was teaching women to be, as one might put it, chivalrous
toward men. But in both cases the modern tendency is toward change. The
growth of woman's economic independence in this country, making her
man's competitor, tends to make man less polite in his general casual
contacts with her. Having elected to be his equal she must take her
chances with him in the subway rush and in the scramble for street-car
seats.
Fifty years hence, Japan will perhaps have reached this pass, but the
present rudeness of men to women is not that of equals to equals, but of
superiors to inferiors; that is the thing that must be changed.
And it will be changed. Slowly, very slowly, the attitude of the
Japanese man toward the Japanese woman is improving. I found that
evening classes were being held at the Y. W. C. A. in Tokyo for the
purpose of teaching young husbands and wives how to enjoy social life
together, and there is no doubt that in fashionable society the better
type of modern young husband treats his wife with much more
consideration and courtesy, and makes much more a companion of her, than
was customary or even possible under the old régime. Twenty-five years
ago it was well enough for a man to walk on the street with a geisha,
but the man who walked in public with his wife was jeered at, and might
even find himself a target for missiles. Though that is no longer the
case, the tradition that man should assume a superior air still to some
extent survives among the masses, so that for a husband to treat his
wife with perfect courtesy before strangers requires, singular though it
may seem, real moral courage.