to the office within whose jurisdiction her husband, or the head of her husband's family, if the husband himself be not a house holder, has his domicile. An official intimation of the transfer follows this request, and all is then in order.
The above is the usual form of marriage. In some cases, however, the bridegroom is adopted into the bride's family, instead of the bride into the bridegroom's. This takes place mostly when a parent has only a daughter or daughters, but no son. In order to preserve the family intact—due regard being had to the circumstance that no female can be its legal head—it is then necessary to adopt a son-in-law, who, literally becoming a son in the eyes of the law, drops his own surname and takes that of his wife. None but poor men are generally willing to place themselves in such a false position.
Amongst the lower classes, ceremonies and considerations of all kinds are often honoured only in the breach, many of the so-called marriages of plebeians being mere cohabitation founded on mutual convenience. This accounts for the "boy" and the cook—to their foreign master's increasing astonishment being found to bring home a new wife almost as often as they bring home a new saucepan. Such laxity would never be tolerated in well-bred circles.
When it is added that a Japanese bride has no bridesmaids, that the young couple go off on no honeymoon, that a Japanese wife is not only supposed to obey her husband, but actually does so, that the husband, if well enough off, probably has a concubine besides and makes no secret of it, and that the mother-in-law, with us a terror to the man, is not only a terror but a daily and hourly cross to the girl for in nine cases out of ten, the girl has to live with her husband's family and be at the beck and call of his relations when due consideration is given to all these circumstances, it will be seen that marriage in Japan is a vastly different thing, socially as well as legally, from marriage in Anglo-Saxon countries. The reader will be still more firmly persuaded of this truth, if he will take the trouble to glance at the Article on
