The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1902-04-26
WOMAN'S FUTURE IN JAPAN
NOW HER POSITION HAS IN
PROVED

within the Last Twenty-Five Years
Her Part in the Educational system
Movement for Higher Education
Among Japanese Women.
The place occupied by woman in all
Far Eastern lands is, in general, well
known. In Japan, however, for the
largest part of its history, woman has
not been quite the social zero or slave
she has been in India, Siam, China or
Korea. Indeed, in ancient times and
until about six hundred years ago the
Japanese woman stood comparatively
high, not only as wife and mother and
companion in the home, but as scholar
writer, artist, and adviser in business
and even in affairs of state. 1t is re-
markable that in the early classics of
Japanese literature the names of women
are among those of the leaders in both
prose and poetry. Until the thirteenth
century their social relations We're in
great degree unconstrained, and they
were graced, along with domestic
knowledge, by many of the highest at
tainments in refined learning-in his
tory, poetry, fiction and religious lore,
and in artistic skill. The change, to be
deplored that at length befell Woman's
position, took place chiefly in conse-
quence of the universal civil wars that
devastated the empire from the thir-
teenth to the seventeenth centuries, and
the dominance during the latter part of
Japan's middle ages of the social regu-
lations of the Chinese sage, Confucius
With the acceptance of Confucianism
by the upper and ruling classes about
three centuries ago, the Japanese wo-
man sunk almost out of sight as a So
cial factor everywhere outside the
home; and so she remained until the
present period of the general political,
religious, scientific, and social revivifi-
cation of the people under the influence
of the civilization of Christendom,
can best illustrate woman's position
during the two hundred and fifty years
of the Takugawa Shogunate, the age
just preceding the recent restoration OF
the Emperor to active sovereignty, by
a few quotations from the Greater
Learning for Women the code most
widely accepted as regulative of wo-
mans place and conduct. Seeing that
1T Is a girls destiny on reaching wo-
manhood" says the Onna Daigaku, ito
go to a new home and live in submits
sion to her father-in-law and mother
in-law, it is even more incumbent on
her than it is on a boy to receive with
all reverence her parents's instruc-
tons" THE only qualities that befit a
woman are gentle obedience, chastity, |
mercy and quietness" "After her mar
riage her chief duty is to honor her !
father law and her mother-in- law
to honor them beyond her own father |
and mother-to love and reverence them
with all ardor, and to tend them with !,
every practice of flial piety." A wo-
man must look to her husband as her
lord'-or, as another code expresses it, :
las her only heaven to look up to-
land must serve him with all worship
and reverence. Her lifelong duty is
Much else is enjoined in this code, but
only in like tone, concerning woman's
relations, which are exclusively those of
daughter, wife and mother. The closing
INDUCTION reads: parents, teach the
foregoing maxilns to your daughters
from their tenderest years. Copy them
out from time to time, that they may
read and never forget them.
But during the past fifty years. under
The beneficent increase Of the influences
Of Western civilization, important
changes, just now becoming strongly