CHAPTER XVII.

CHILDREN.

Child-life—Love of children—Desire for them—Child-birth—After-birth—Early days—The baby’s food—The “first-eating”—Superstitions connected with infancy—Carrying of babies—Teething—Visits to the local shrine—Toddling—Weaning—The kindergarten and primary school—The girls’ high school—The middle school—The popularity of middle schools—Hitting—Exercises and diversions—Collections.

Japan has been called the Paradise of Babies; and certain it is that childhood passes very happily in this country. In every family its children have a free run of the whole house; there is neither a nursery to which they can be confined nor any room which is exempt from their invasion. They are the real masters of the house; and father, mother, elder brother and sister are their willing slaves. They will romp unchidden into the parlour and interrupt the visitor whom the father or mother is there receiving; and the visitor too, be he friend, relative, or comparative stranger, never takes such intrusion amiss, but on the contrary, pays court to them as he knows well that through them the softest spot in the father’s heart is reached and the mother’s goodwill won. The parent, following the common custom of the country, deprecates any words uttered in their praise, for it is considered as great a breach of good manners to extol one’s children, or for that matter, husband, wife, or any other member of the family, as to belaud oneself. The mother, burning as she may be to expatiate upon her children’s marvellous sharpness or sagacity, will to the last speak disparagingly of them, but in a tone which clearly expects from the hearer an emphatic protest against her depreciation of her own offspring. Indeed, to take her at her word would be to incur her undying displeasure.

Children too, on their part, brighten every household; and were it not for their enlivening presence, the Japanese home with its staid manners and cold civilities would be intolerably dull. The wife, debarred as she usually is by household duties from social distractions, would if childless lead a monotonous life; and the absence of little ones she would take to heart as if she were personally to blame for it and feel that she has missed the primary object for which she entered into wedlock. She would also have to put up sometimes with the reproaches of her husband or his parents for this failure of issue and consent to the adoption of a child to whom she must concede the love which she had hoped to reserve for her own flesh and blood. But happily for the wife, we are on the whole a prolific nation untroubled by the phantom of race suicide, and every woman is prepared to bring up a family, which is in her eyes as much the wife’s destiny as in girlhood she looked upon marriage as her inevitable fate. Her absolute concentration upon her own home, though it is a serious obstacle to her social development, brings its compensation when her wedded life is crowned with maternity, and in the smiles of infancy she finds ample consolation for the monotony of her home. This intense love of children is one of the brightest traits of Japanese home life, and with the reverence for old age, gives it a tone of quiet, undemonstrative happiness.

It will therefore be readily imagined with what eagerness the arrival of the little stranger, is awaited and how the childless wife will move heaven and earth for the blessings of motherhood. She will try nostrums of every kind, submit to any regimen however irksome, that may be prescribed for her, and visit watering-places and other resorts for the improvement of her physical condition; she will offer prayers at one temple after another, or sometimes make long pilgrimages for the purpose, in defiance of the popular belief that a child born in answer to prayer is either itself doomed to early death or destined to cut short its parents’ lives.

When the unpleasant symptoms of morning-sickness warn the wife that she is about to become a mother, a midwife is called in from time to time to examine her and relieve her pain. In the fifth month an auspicious day is selected on which her relatives are invited to dinner to hear the formal announcement of her interesting state. On this day the midwife girds her under her clothes with a wide strip of bleached cotton, with the object of keeping the child as small as possible so as to ensure a light delivery. This girdle is worn up to the moment of birth. With the same object the wife does considerable amount of active housework, such as cleaning and sweeping the rooms, until the beginning of the last month when she ceases from all work and calmly awaits the delivery. Meanwhile, the midwife pays periodical visits, and in a well-to-do family she is often made to live in the house during the last month. She usually assists alone at the birth, for a doctor is seldom called in unless complications have set in or surgical operations are necessary. The accouchement, if indeed it can be so called which in Japan takes place in a sitting posture, is effected, if in the daytime, in a room darkened with half-closed doors and a screen round the bed. The delivery is left as far as possible to nature. The midwife, who is deeply versed in the intricacies of the lunar calendar, can always tell the exact hour at which the tide begins to flow, when the delivery oftenest occurs; and until that time she merely soothes and alleviates. On the whole, the curse of Eve sits lightly on her daughters in Japan, for which we have probably to thank the simplicity of our diet and mode of life. The woman who dies in child-birth is an object of infinite pity; her fate is supposed to be the consequence of her sins in a former state of existence. In lonely country-sides, in memory of such a woman, a piece of white cloth supported on four sticks is set over a stream, together with a ladle, with which passers-by are entreated to pour water into the cloth, because only when the cloth rots away completely will she be purged of her sins and enabled to enter Paradise.

Immediately the child is born, the midwife cuts off the umbilical cord, washes the child in warm water, and dresses it in swaddling clothes, after which it is shown to the mother and the rest of the family. The after-birth is put in an earthen dish and covered with another of the same material; the whole case is buried at the front entrance, inside the door if a boy and outside if a girl, the reason for the discrimination being that the latter is destined to leave her home and, therefore, is not a permanent member of the family. It is the custom now to have the case buried in a special ground by a company formed for the purpose.

For the first day or two the child is given an infusion of a seaweed which acts as a purgative; and if the mother is yet too weak, she gets another woman to give it her milk until she is strong enough. She lies with her head propped up high, and the child sleeps with her. On the second day after the birth, the baby is washed again; and on the sixth, friends and relatives are invited to a dinner to celebrate the birth when the child’s name is given to it. The birth is also reported on that day to the local office. The mother does not leave her bed until the twenty-first day; and she is kept at low diet until the seventy-fifth day when she can take the usual food and is considered to be herself again. Until then she is supposed not to be purified and cannot enter a temple or a shrine. On the same day she resumes her household duties. In the meantime, the child is taken on the thirty-first day if a boy and on the thirty-third if a girl, to the shrine of the tutelary deity of the district, where prayers are offered for its welfare. Then calls are made on those friends and relatives who gave presents upon the child’s birth; and it receives from them various toys, the principal of which is a papier-maché dog. Such a dog is always placed at the head of the child’s bed at night as a charm against evil influences.

The child is at first fed entirely with its mother’s milk; if she is weak or sickly, a wet nurse is engaged in a family which can afford one, but in poor homes the child is nourished with a very thin rice-gruel. Cow’s milk is now largely used in Tokyo, and in many families given together with human milk. Very often the former is drunk in the daytime, and at night the mother who sleeps with the baby, suckles it with her own milk. In Japan the mother, unless her place is taken by the wet nurse, invariably sleeps with the youngest child, and never leaves it by itself in a cot or bed. This has the advantage that any ailment that the child may happen to suffer in the course of the night is not left to be discovered in the morning when it may be too late, but is detected at once and attended to before it becomes serious. Thus, for instance, any rise in temperature is immediately felt when the child gets its milk, and measures are taken accordingly.

On the hundred and ninth day after the birth, occurs the “first-eating,” at which a tray of food is set before the baby. Friends are invited to take part in the ceremony. A lady friend who has a large family of her own is asked to feed the child. She puts into its mouth a little paste of boiled rice and wets its lips with a drop of soup. Though the child generally spits out the paste, the fiction of its eating is maintained, and the ceremony closes with feasting among the invited guests. This “first-eating” is usually deferred for five or ten days as a postponement is supposed to bring luck to the child.

The infant is expected not to be able to walk in less than a twelvemonth; but if it toddles within a year, a bag holding about three pints of uncooked rice is laid on its back, and the child is made to stumble and fall, because to walk before the first birthday augurs, according to one authority, early death and according to another, residence in a distant land. There are many other superstitions connected with infancy. Thus, a child that begins to suck its fingers before the thumb which represents the parents in Japanese palmistry, will not be an encumbrance upon its father when it grows up; if it pushes itself out in sleep beyond the head of its bed, it will rise in the world, while a downward course is in store for the one that slips in under its bed-clothes. The baby which eats fish before it can say _toto_, the child’s name for fish, will stammer when it talks. In a family in which children have one after another died in infancy, the birth of a healthy infant is ensured by such charms as making a dress for it with thirty-three pieces of cloth collected from as many families, shaving the child’s head till its seventh year, and giving a boy a girl’s name and _vice-versa_. A sovereign remedy for prickly heat is to hang over the front door by a piece of red thread a small egg-plant before any member of the family eats one that season. Crying at night is stopped by suspending over the child’s bed a picture of a devil beating a prayer-gong. Immunity from measles is secured by putting over the child’s head for a moment the rice-pot still hot after the removal of the rice, while a similar treatment with the bucket for feeding the sacred horse at a shrine is said to be equally efficacious against small-pox. The child’s face is wiped with a wet scrubbing-cloth to cure it of shyness before strangers. For whooping-cough there are several remedies: for instance, a wooden spatula with the child’s name and an invocation against the disease is nailed over the front door; the inked string used by carpenters for marking lines is tied loosely round the neck; a slender piece of nandina wood, just long enough for the child to grasp, is hung by a red thread to its neck; or a pair of small square wooden blocks are obtained from a temple dedicated to Jizo, the protector of children, when the child is suffering from whooping-cough and clapped whenever it coughs, and when it has recovered, the blocks are returned to the temple with another pair bearing the child’s name. If the infant stands up and bending down its head, peeps from between its legs, another child will soon be born in the family; and if it has a single streak on its thigh as a birth-mark, the next to be born will be a boy, but if the streaks are double, the next will be a girl. Mothers are especially warned against leaving their children’s clothes out to dry at night, for the souls of women dying at child-birth fly in the form of birds at dead of night and if they see children’s apparel, they will, from envy, drop their blood upon it and the wearer of the clothing so soiled will surely sicken and die. Infants in arms must, when out at night, be covered with their own loin-cloth to avert the malign influences of the night-demon.

Japanese babies are at first carried in arms. When they fall asleep in the daytime, they are laid on a bed in a room where they can be watched. They get early used to noise, and slumber on though the watchers may talk aloud to each other. When they are a month or more old, they are carried not only in arms, but on the back as well. In the latter case, the child is tied by a long piece of bleached cotton which is first passed under its arms and over the nurse’s shoulders and after crossing in front, one end is passed under the girl’s arm and over the child’s thighs and tied at the side to the other end. Thus, the piece is carried over the child’s back in parallel lines and crosses on the nurse’s breast. In cold weather, the nurse and her charge are covered with a kind of _haori_, thickly wadded, before being tied with the cotton. It keeps them both warm, while the child’s breast and stomach are even better protected by the contact of the nurse’s back. Very young babies are tied down straight with their legs close together; but when they are older, they ride astride and their feet dangle on either side. The nurse who is specially engaged for the purpose is twelve or thirteen years old; but in poor families the elder brother or sister takes her place. Little girls are often to be seen in the streets, carrying on their backs sisters and brothers only a year or two younger than themselves, whose feet, as they dangle, almost trail on the ground. At first the girls can hardly walk with such burdens; but they soon get used to them, and they run, romp, and dance with their companions without much concern for their charges, who are often put in very uncomfortable positions. These, however, fare worse when they are on their brothers’ backs; for these urchins, being rougher and more careless than their sisters, fly kites, climb up trees, flourish bamboo poles to catch cicadas, run after dragon-flies, and even snowball one another, utterly regardless of the discomfort they occasion their charges, who, if they cry, are knocked with the back of the head, and seem soon to become habituated to the dangers they run through the recklessness of their carriers. This manner of carrying on the back is only possible with Japanese clothes, for the knot of the _obi_ behind prevents the child from slipping down; and it would be difficult to try this method with European clothes, with men’s because the tying down of the coat would hamper the movement of the arms, and with women’s because of the multiplicity of pins at the neck and the waist. Nurses tie a towel round their heads so as not to let their back-hair fall on the babies’ faces. When the children are older and able to walk, they are carried without being tied down, for they can catch hold by the shoulders or by putting their arms loosely round the nurse’s neck, while they are kept from slipping by the nurse’s passing her hands under them.

Among little toys given to infants is a wooden whistle with either end rounded into a ball. It is given to the child to suck and bite and like the coral, hardens the gums, thereby facilitating the teething. The time for teething varies of course with the individual child and is the source of as much anxiety to the Japanese mother as to that of any other country.

On the fifteenth of November in the second year after the birth, the child is again taken to the shrine of the tutelary deity of the locality. A small offering of money is made; and in return the consecrated _sake_ in a flat unglazed earthenware is given to the child to sip, while the priest purifies its body by waving over it a sacred wand adorned with strips of paper. The ostensible object of the visit is to invoke the God’s blessing upon the child; but it is really made the occasion for dressing up the child in finery, when parents vie with one another in the richness of their children’s apparel. Calls are then made on the friends who made congratulatory presents to the child. The shrine is visited again on the same day of the same month two years later in the case of a boy and four years later if the child is a girl.

As soon as the child is able to toddle along, sandals or plain clogs are tied to its feet when it walks on the ground. It learns first to walk indoors. As there are no go-carts in Japan, it tries to stand up by clinging to pillars and sliding-doors, for it may stumble and flop down on the soft mats without hurting itself; it is when it runs, as children will do, without being able to stop, that the greatest care has to be taken that it does not tumble over the edge of the verandah. In Tokyo perambulators are now pretty common; but in the old days there was no special means of conveyance for children, and they had to be carried in arms or on the back.

There is no fixed time for weaning. After its first birthday, ordinary food is given to the child little by little until in a year’s time it is able to do without its milk. Generally speaking, however, the time for weaning is governed by the arrival of a younger brother or sister; but the youngest is often allowed to take its mother’s milk up to its fifth or sixth year, though of course, as it can’t be common food, it goes to its mother only for diversion.

At three or four years children are sent to kindergarten, that is, if they can gain admission, for these useful institutions are still few even in Tokyo. There they are kept in good humour, everything being done for their amusement. They sing together simple songs, have object lessons, are set to make little things out of paper, and are also allowed to romp about as they please. At six years, the minimum school-age, they enter the primary school, the course at which extends over six years. Here they are taught Japanese, arithmetic, elements of history, geography, and natural history, elementary drawing, singing, and gymnastics, and hand work for boys and needlework for girls. This six years’ course is compulsory for all children; and there is a higher primary school with two years’ course for those boys who cannot afford to receive any higher education. The pupils who have completed the course at the ordinary primary school are qualified to present themselves for the entrance examinations of the higher schools, the middle school for boys and the high school for girls.

Although a women’s university was established not long ago in Tokyo, a girl’s education generally stops with the high school, if it goes so far. As she has been six years in the primary and four in the high school, she has had ten years of schooling if she has passed every class satisfactorily from the first to the last, and she is sixteen years old when she leaves the high school. And as a Japanese girl usually marries at eighteen or nineteen, she has not much time to spare before she has to think seriously of matrimony. Two or three years of home life are all that is left her before she will have to take charge of a household of her own. And further, as she is supposed to pass the flower of her youth at four and twenty, a college course would bring her dangerously close to the lower limit of spinsterhood, and so, as things stand in Japan, female universities would, even were they plentiful, not be so popular as they should deserve. In the high school the same subjects, more advanced, are taught as in the lower school, the only new subject of importance being domestic economy.

The middle school has a course of five years, in which the pupils are taught, besides the advanced course of the subjects studied in the lower school, Chinese classics, algebra, geometry, physiology and hygiene, physics and chemistry, law and political economy. English becomes a subject of importance, being taught seven hours a week. When the course is completed satisfactorily by regular promotion every year, the pupil is seventeen years old. He is now ready to commence his secondary education, for which he will enter the special higher schools for the professions or the preparatory high school for the university.

A very large percentage of children of the school-age pass through the primary school; but of these a comparatively small proportion enter the middle school, partly because many of them are too poor or cannot be spared at home where they must help their fathers, and partly because there are not middle schools enough to take in all the applicants, though of late years these schools have greatly multiplied. Formerly, parents were content to let their children stop their education when they had passed the primary school unless they intended to fit them for the professions; but now a general recognition of the importance of education on modern lines has done much to increase the demand for middle schools. There is still another motive for entering the middle school. To the Japanese mother the greatest source of anxiety on her boy’s account is his liability, when he comes of age, to compulsory military service. Of course, he may upon medical examination be pronounced unfit for service, or he may, though strong enough, be exempted when lots are drawn among those who have been passed by the medical examiners. But the former contingency is naturally distasteful while the latter is too uncertain to be hoped for with any degree of confidence. However, a comparatively easy way of escaping some at least of the rigours of military service was opened when the authorities permitted those who had completed the middle-school course to offer themselves for a year’s voluntary service. As such volunteers leave service with the rank of sergeant at least, and even of commissioned officer if they pass certain examinations, they are, needless to state, better treated than the common soldiers. Moreover, though the prescribed age for conscription is twenty, the students who enter colleges and other institutions for secondary education are permitted to postpone their enlistment until they graduate or reach the age of twenty-eight.

Children, as we have said, are very much petted. They are never whipped or kicked, but occasionally slapped. Even at school they are hardly ever subjected to corporal punishment; caning and birching are unknown. Formerly they used to be made to stand on a school desk or in a corner with a cup of water for half an hour or more; but now the severest punishment is detention after school or suspension from attendance for a certain period. Of course, at home or at school, among their mates they may be knocked about; the hitting is done with a swinging blow on the head or on the back, and very rarely with a forward blow, for the art of boxing being unknown, the hits peculiar to it are seldom resorted to. Kicking is not practised because, with the clogs on, the kicker is as likely to hurt himself as the kicked, while with the sandals or bare socks it is naturally out of the question. People stamp with their clogs, but that can only be done on a fallen foe.

Girls, when they congregate in the open air, play at blindman’s buff, Puss-in-the-corner, and hide and seek, sing in a ring, and romp about much in the same way as do their western cousins. Their amusements are social, but quieter than those of boys, who though they play with their sisters at first, develop, as in all other countries, sovereign contempt for girlish sports when they approach their teens and engage in rougher games of their own. Japanese boys do not box or use single sticks, but they wrestle and fence. In wrestling, their object is to make their adversary touch the ground with any part of his body or to push him out of the ring, just as is done by professional wrestlers, while the great point in fencing is to hit one’s opponent in a way that would be fatal if a real sword were used. The fencing-sword is made of four pieces of spliced bamboo bound together with a stout string and capped at the tip with leather; it has a sword-guard between the handle and the hilt. The combatants put on barred visors with sides of thickly-wadded cloth, which is tightly tied at the neck. They have also on thick gauntlets and body pieces of stout leather around the waist. The legs are unprotected. Blows are given on the crown, arms, waist, and legs, and a thrust is made at the throat. Sometimes the fencers throw down their weapons and wrestle, when the victor must bring down his opponent on the ground and getting astride of him, untie the band and pull off his visor. It is an exercise more exciting and fatiguing than fencing with foils.

Birds’ nesting is unknown; but if birds are exempted from the Japanese boy’s cruelty, their place is taken by the cicada and the dragon-fly, and in late summer and early autumn, boys are to be seen running after these insects with long lime-tipped bamboo poles and catching the cicada as it emits its stridulous cry on the trunk of a tree and the dragon-fly as it flits and flutters in the air. As these boys flourish their poles in the open street, they not unfrequently catch the unwary passers-by in the face, or their hats and clothes. But butterflies and moths, in which Japan is especially rich, are free from their pursuit. Indeed, Japanese boys do not as a rule go in for collection of natural objects.