Will Adams's letters have been published by the Hakluyt Society in their "Memorials of Japon" (sic), and republished in a cheaper form at Yokohama. They are well-worth reading, both for the lifelike silhouette of the writer which stands out from their quaintly spelt pages, and for the picture given by him of Japan as it then was, when the land swarmed with Catholic friars and Catholic converts, when no embargo had yet been laid on foreign commerce, and when the native energy of the Japanese people had not yet been numbed by two centuries and a half of bureaucracy and timid seclusion.
Adoption. It is strange, but true, that you may often go into a Japanese family and find half-a-dozen persons calling each other parent and child, brother and sister, uncle and nephew, and yet being really either no blood-relations at all, or else relations in quite different degrees from those conventionally assumed. Galton's books could never have been written in Japan; for though genealogies are carefully kept, they mean nothing, at least from a scientific point of view,—so universal is the practice of adoption, from the top of society to the bottom. This it is which explains such apparent anomalies as a distinguished painter, potter, actor, or what not, almost always having a son distinguished in the same line:—he has simply adopted his best pupil. It also explains the fact of Japanese families not dying out.
So completely has adoption become part and parcel of the national life that Mr. Shigeno An-eki, the best Japanese authority on the subject, enumerates no less than ten different categories of adopted persons. Adoption is resorted to, not only to prevent the extinction of families and the consequent neglect of the spirits of the departed, but also in order to regulate the size of families. Thus, a man with too many children hands over one or more of them to some friend who has none. To adopt a person is also the simplest way to leave him money, it not being usual in Japan to nominate strangers as one's heirs. Formerly, too, it was sometimes a means of money-making, not to the adopted, but to the
