Page:A handbook of modern Japan (IA handbookofmodern01clem).pdf/236

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
176
A HANDBOOK OF MODERN JAPAN

out with objectionable salience because her environment is so colorless."

It is desired, in the first instance, to consider, not the new woman in the concrete, in the flesh, but the abstract, legal new woman that has been created by the new Civil Code of Japan. In looking through the translation of that document by Mr. Gubbins, we have been deeply impressed with the possibilities which lie before the women of New Japan through the rights and privileges vouchsafed to them under that code.

In Old Japan, as stated in a preceding chapter,[1] the constitution of the family was practically that of an empire, in which all other members thereof were subject to the despotic authority of the master. A Japanese woman was subject to the "three obediences": as a maiden, to her father; as a wife, to her husband and his parents;[2] as a widow, to her oldest son, whether real or only adopted. A daughter might even be called upon, for the sake of her parents, to sacrifice her honor and enter a brothel; and she was still considered virtuous, because personal chastity was a lower virtue than filial piety.

A Japanese, like a Grecian, wife was to her husband a faithful slave, "something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse"; she was both a drudge and a plaything, to be cast aside as capriciously

  1. ↑ Chap. iv. on "People, Houses, Food, Dress."
  2. ↑ The Japanese mother-in-law is an awful tyrant; but it is always the wife's mother-in-law.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.