Japanese Girls and Women, Alice Mabel Bacon [ebook reader library TXT] 📗

student of Japanese domestic life as nearest to the customs of our own civilization in regard to the relations of husbands and wives.

Throughout the country districts, where the women have a large share in the labor that is directly productive of wealth, where they not only work in the rice fields, pick the tea crops, gather the harvests, and help draw them to market, but where they have their own productive industries, such as caring for the silkworms, and spinning, and weaving both silk and cotton, we find the conventional distance between the sexes much diminished by the important character of feminine labor; but in the cities, and among the classes who are largely either indirect producers or non-producers, the only labor of the women is that personal service which we account as menial. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the gap widens as we go upward in society, and between the same social levels as we go cityward.

The wife of the countryman, though she may work harder and grow old earlier, is more free and independent than her city sister; and the wife of the peasant, pushing her produce to market, is in some ways happier and more considered than the wife of the noble, who must spend her life among her ladies-in-waiting, in the seclusion of her great house with its beautiful garden, the plaything of her husband in his leisure hours, but never his equal, or the sharer of his cares or of his thoughts.

One of the causes which must be mentioned as contributing to the lowering of the wife's position, among the higher and more wealthy classes, lies in the system of concubinage which custom allows, and the law until quite recently has not discouraged. From the Emperor, who was, by the old Chinese code of morals, allowed twelve supplementary wives, to the samurai, who are permitted two, the men of the higher classes are allowed to introduce into their families these mékaké, who, while beneath the wife in position, are frequently more beloved by the husband than the wife herself. It must be said, however, to the credit of many husbands, that in spite of this privilege, which custom allows, there are many men of the old school who are faithful to one wife, and never introduce this discordant element into the household. Even should he keep mékaké, it is often unknown to the wife, and she is placed in a separate establishment of her own. And in spite of the code of morals requiring submission in any case on the part of the woman, there are many wives of the samurai and lower classes who have enough spirit and wit to prevent their husbands from ever introducing a rival under the same roof. In this way the practice is made better than the theory.

Not so with the more helpless wife of the nobleman, for wealth and leisure make temptation greater for the husband. She submits unquestioningly to the custom requiring that the wife treat these women with all civility. Their children she may even have to adopt as her own. The lot of the mékaké herself is rendered the less endurable, from the American point of view, by the fact that, should the father of her child decide to make it his heir, the mother is thenceforth no more to it than any other of the servants of the household. For instance, suppose a hitherto childless noble is presented with a son by one of his concubines, and he decides by legal adoption to make that son his heir: the child at its birth, or as soon afterwards as is practicable, is taken from its mother and placed in other hands, and the mother never sees her own child until, on the thirtieth day after its birth, she goes with the other servants of the household to pay her respects to her young master. If it were not for the habit of abject obedience to parents which Japanese custom has exalted into the one feminine virtue, few women could be found of respectable families who would take a position so devoid of either honor or satisfaction of any kind as that of mékaké. That these positions are not sought after must be said, to the honor of Japanese womanhood. A nobleman may obtain samurai women for his "O mékaké" (literally, honorable concubines), but they are never respected by their own class for taking such positions. In the same way the mékaké of samurai are usually from the héimin. No woman who has any chance of a better lot will ever take the unenviable position of mékaké.

A law which has recently been promulgated strikes at the root of this evil, and, if enforced, will in course of time go far toward extirpating it. Henceforth in Japan, no child of a concubine, or of adoption from any source, can inherit a noble title. The heir to the throne must hereafter be the son, not only of the Emperor, but of the Empress, or the succession passes to some collateral branch of the family. This law does not apply to Prince Haru, the present heir to the throne, as, although he is not the son of the Empress, he was legally adopted before the promulgation of the law; but should he die, it will apply to all future heirs.

That public opinion is moving in the right direction is shown by the fact that the young men of the higher classes do not care to marry the daughters of mékaké, be they ever so legally adopted by their own fathers. When the girls born of such unions become a drug in the matrimonial market, and the boys are unable to keep up the succession, the mékaké will go out of fashion, and the real wife will once more assume her proper importance.[20]

Upon the 11th day of February, 1889, the day on which the Emperor, by his own act in giving a constitution to the people, limited his own power for the sake of putting his nation upon a level with the most civilized nations of the earth, he at the same time, and for the first time, publicly placed his wife upon his own level. In an imperial progress made through the streets of Tōkyō, the Emperor and Empress, for the first time in the history of Japan, rode together in the imperial coach.[*] Until then, the Emperor, attended by his chief gentlemen-in-waiting and his guards, had always headed the procession, while the Empress must follow at a distance with her own attendants. That this act on the part of the Emperor signifies the beginning of a new and better era for the women of Japan, we cannot but hope; for until the position of the wife and mother in Japan is improved and made secure, little permanence can be expected in the progress of the nation toward what is best and highest in the Western civilization. Better laws, broader education for the women, a change in public opinion on the subject, caused by the study, by the men educated abroad, of the homes of Europe and America,—these are the forces which alone can bring the women of Japan up to that place in the home which their intellectual and moral qualities fit them to fill. That Japan is infinitely ahead of other Oriental countries in her practices in this matter is greatly to her credit; but that she is far behind the civilized nations of Europe and America, not only in practice but in theory, is a fact that is incontestable, and a fact that, unless changed, must sooner or later be a stumbling-block in the path of her progress toward the highest civilization of which she is capable.[21] The European practice cannot be grafted upon the Asiatic theory, but the change in the home must be a radical one, to secure permanent good results. As long as the wife has no rights which the husband is bound to respect, no great advance can be made, for human nature is too mean and selfish to give in all cases to those who are entirely unprotected by law, and entirely unable to protect themselves, those things which the moral nature declares to be their due. In the old slave times in the South, many of the negroes were better fed, better cared for, and happier than they are to-day; but they were nevertheless at the mercy of men who too often thought only of themselves, and not of the human bodies and souls over which they had unlimited power. It was a condition of things that could not be prevented by educating the masters so as to induce them to be kind to their slaves; it was a condition that was wrong in theory, and so could not be righted in practice. In the same way the position of the Japanese wife is wrong in theory, and can never be righted until legislation has given to her rights which it still denies. Education will but aggravate the trouble to a point beyond endurance. The giving to the wife power to obtain a divorce will not help much, but simply tend to weaken still further the marriage tie. Nothing can help surely and permanently but the growth of a sound public opinion, in regard to the position of the wife, that will, sooner or later, have its effect upon the laws of the country. Legislation once effected, all the rest will come, and the wife, secure in her home and her children, will be at the point where her new education can be of use to her in the administration of her domestic affairs and the training of her children; and where she will finally become the friend and companion of her husband, instead of his mere waitress, seamstress, and housekeeper,—the plaything of his leisure moments, too often the victim of his caprices.