CHAPTER VI

THE CHILD IN JAPAN

=Women.= Although women have always stood higher in Japan than in any other oriental country, yet they were much more highly considered in the early times than in the later times. There was no seclusion, they had a station in society, they shared in the recreations of their fathers and husbands, they possessed intellectual and physical vigor, they filled offices of state and religion; in fact, they ranked alongside of men as among the best nations of the earth. Among the rulers of Japan there have been nine empresses, the most noted having been Jingu and who led a conquering expedition into Corea about 200 A. D., from whence came letters, religion, and civilization into Japan.

"Of one hundred and twenty-three Japanese sovereigns, nine have been women. The custodian of the divine regalia is a virgin priestess. The chief deity in their mythology is a woman. Japanese women, by their wit and genius, made their native tongue a literary language. In literature, art, poetry, song, the names of women are among the most brilliant of those on the long roll of fame and honor on whose brows the Japanese, at least, have placed the fadeless chaplet of renown. Their memory is still kept green by recitation, quotation, reading, and inscription on screen, roll, memorial-stone, wall, fan, cup, and those exquisite works of art that delight even alien admirers east and west of the Pacific.

"In the records of the Japanese glory, valor, fortitude in affliction, greatness in the hour of death, filial devotion, wifely affection, in all the straits of life when codes of honor, morals, and religion are tested, in the person of their professors, the literature of history and romance, the every-day routine of fact, teem with instances of the Japanese woman's power and willingness to share whatever of pain or sorrow is appointed to man. In the annals of persecution, in the red roll of martyrs, no names are brighter, no faces gleam more peacefully amidst the flames, or on the cross of transfixing spears, or on the pyre of rice-straw, or on the precipice edge, or in the open grave about to be filled up, than the faces of the Christian Japanese women in the seventeenth century. Such is the position of woman in Japan in the past."[106]

In later times woman fell from her high estate and even lost power over herself, as she came under her father in the home, under her husband when married, and under her son when widowed. "The introduction of the Chinese civilization with the Confucian system of moral philosophy, and of Buddism, and later on the establishment of Feudalism, were prejudicial to this high position of women. Chinese philosophers seem not to have had much respect for women; while Buddism regards women as sinful creatures, a temptation and snare, an obstacle to peace and holiness. In our feudal system, in the code of Bushido, there was no reverence for women as in the Western Chivalry."[107] Buddism entered into Japan in the sixth century of the Christian era and Confucianism came in some earlier, while Feudalism existed in Japan earlier than in Europe and continued later, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries being the time during which the feudal system received its most perfect development and the _Bushido_, or "The Way of the Samurai," was fully elaborated.

The Japanese women had a love for beauty, order and neatness; they were patient and long-suffering; their hopes lay in their children and they tended and cared for them as, perhaps, no other nation of women ever