Japanese women are charming, either because or in spite of the disadvantages of their position, is a fact which the admiration of foreign lady travellers proves more conclusively than aught else; for in their case such admiration cannot be suspected of any arrière-pensée. How many times have we not heard European ladies go into ecstasies over them, and marvel how they could be of the same race as the men! And closer acquaintance does but confirm such views. Moreover, it reveals the existence of solid—we had almost said stern—qualities unsuspected by the casual observer. These delicate-looking women have Spartan hearts. Countless anecdotes attest their courage, physical as well as moral.
The following treatise by the celebrated moralist Kaibara so faithfully sums up the ideas hitherto prevalent in Japan concerning the relations between the sexes, that we shall give it in full, notwithstanding its length. The title, which is literally "The Greater Learning for Women" (Onna Daigaku), might be more freely rendered by "The Whole Duty of Woman."[1]
The Greater Learning for Women.
"Seeing that it is a girl's destiny, on reaching womanhood, to go to a new home, and live in submission to her father-in-law and mother-in-law, it is even more incumbent upon her than it is on a boy to receive with all reverence her parents instructions. Should her parents, through excess of tenderness, allow her to grow up self-willed, she will infallibly show herself capricious in her husband's house, and thus alienate his affection, while, if her father-in-law be a man of correct principles, the girl will find the yoke of these principles intolerable. She will hate and decry her father-in-law, and the end of these domestic dissensions will be her dismissal from her husband's house, and the covering of herself with ignominy. Her parents, forgetting the faulty education they gave her, may indeed lay all
- ↑ This translation is reprinted from a paper by the present writer entitled Educational Literature for Japanese Women, contributed in July, 1878, to Vol. X. Part III. of the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain." An imitation of the original work, intended at the same time to serve, as its refutation by preaching modern ideas to the Japanese "new woman," appeared in 1809 from the pen of the celebrated educationalist, Fukuzawa, but was not calculated to add to his reputation.
