Japanese Girls and Women by Alice Mabel Bacon (best e reader for epub .txt) 📕

On the third day after the wedding, the newly married couple are expected to make a visit to the bride's family, and for this great preparations are made. A large party is usually given by the bride's parents, either in the afternoon or evening, in honor of this occasion, to which the friends of the bride's family are invited. The young couple bring with them presents from the groom's family to the bride's, in return for the presents sent on the wedding day.[*]

The festivities often begin early in the afternoon and keep up until late at night. A fine dinner is served, and music and dancing, by professional performers, or some other entertainment, serve to make the time pass pleasantly. The bride appears as hostess with her mother, entertaining the company, and receiving their congratulations, and must remain to speed the last departing guest, before leaving the paternal roof.

Within the course of two or three months, the newly married couple are expected to give an entertainment, or series of entertainments, to their friends, as an announcement of the marriage. As the wedding ceremony is private, and no notice is given, nor are cards sent out, this is sometimes the first intimation that is received of the marriage by many of the acquaintances, though the news of a wedding usually travels quickly. The entertainment may be a dinner party, given at home, or at some tea-house, similar in many ways to the one given at the bride's home by her parents. Sometimes it is a garden party, and very lately it has become the fashion for officials and people of high rank to give a ball in foreign style.

Besides the entertainment, presents of red rice, or mochi, are sent as a token of thanks to all who have remembered the young couple. These are arranged even more elaborately than the ones sent after the birth of an heir.

The young people are not, as in this country, expected to set up housekeeping by themselves, and establish a new home. Marriages often take place early in life, even before the husband has any means of supporting a family; and as a matter of course, a son with his wife makes his abode with his parents, and forms simply a new branch of the household.

The only act required to make the marriage legal is the withdrawal of the bride's name from the list of her father's family as registered by the government, and its entry upon the register of her husband's family. From that time forward she severs all ties with her father's house, save those of affection, and is more closely related by law and custom to her husband's relatives than to her own. Even this legal recognition of her marriage is a comparatively new thing in Japan, as is any limitation of the right of divorce on the part of the husband, or extension of that right to the wife.[14]

At present in Japan the marriage relation is by no means a permanent one, as it is virtually dissoluble at the will of either party, and the condition of public opinion is such among the lower classes that it is not an unknown occurrence for a man to marry and divorce several wives in succession; and for a woman, who has been divorced once or twice, to be willing and able to marry well a second or even a third time. Among the higher classes, the dread of the scandal and gossip, that must attach themselves to troubles between man and wife, serves as a restraint upon too free use of the power of divorce; but still, divorces among the higher classes are so common now that one meets numerous respectable and respected persons who have at some time in their lives gone through such an experience.

One provision of the law, which serves to make most mothers endure any evil of married life rather than sue for a divorce, is the fact that the children belong to the father; and no matter how unfit a person he may be to have the care of them, the disposal of them in case of a divorce rests absolutely with him. A divorced woman returns childless to her father's house; and many women, in consequence of this law or custom, will do their best to keep the family together, working the more strenuously in this direction, the more brutal and worthless the husband proves himself to be.

The ancestor worship, as found in Japan, the tracing of relationship in the male line only, and the generally accepted belief that children inherit their qualities from their father rather than from the mother, make them his children and not hers. Thus we often see children of noble rank on the father's side, but ignoble on the mother's, inherit the rank of their father, and not permitted even to recognize their mother as in any way their equal. If she is plebeian, the children are not regarded as tainted by it.

In the case of divorce, even if the law allowed the mother to keep her children, it would be almost an impossibility for her to do so. She has no means of earning her bread and theirs, for few occupations are open to women, and she is forced to become a dependent on her father, or some male relative. Whatever they may be willing to do for her, it is quite likely that they would begrudge aid to the children of another family, with whom custom hardly recognizes any tie. The children are the children of the man whose name they bear. If the woman is a favorite daughter, it may happen that her father will take her and her children under his roof, and support them all; but this is a rare exception, and only possible when the husband first gives up all claim to the children.

There comes to my mind now a case illustrating this point, which I think I may cite without betraying confidence. It is that of a most attractive young woman who was married to a worthless husband, but lived faithfully with him for several years, and became the mother of three children. The husband, who seemed at first merely good-for-nothing, became worse as the years went by, drank himself out of situation after situation procured for him by powerful relatives, and at last became so violent that he even beat his wife and threatened his children, a proceeding most unusual on the part of a Japanese husband and father. The poor wife was at last obliged to flee from her husband's house to her mother's, taking her children with her. She sued for a divorce and obtained it, and is now married again; her youth, good looks, and high connections procuring her a very good catch for her second venture in matrimony; but her children are lost to her, and belong wholly to their worthless, drunken father.

Of the lack of permanence in the marriage relation among the lower classes, the domestic changes of one of my servants in Tōkyō afford an amusing illustration. The man, whom I had hired in the double capacity of jinrikisha man and bettō or groom, was a strong, faithful, pleasant-faced fellow, recently come to Tōkyō from the country. I inquired, when I engaged him, whether he had a wife, as I wanted some one who could remain in his room in the stable in care of the horse when he was pulling me about in the jinrikisha. He replied that he had a wife, but she was now at Utsunomiya, the country town from which he had come, but he would send for her at once, and she would be in Tōkyō in the course of a week or two. Two or three weeks passed and no wife appeared, so I inquired of my cook and head servant what had become of Yasaku's wife. He replied, with a twinkle in his eye, that she had found work in Utsunomiya and did not wish to come. A week more passed, and still no wife, and further inquiries elicited from the cook the information that Yasaku had divorced her for disobedience, and was on the lookout for a new and more docile helpmate. His first thought was of the maidservant of the Japanese family who lived in the same house with me, a broad-faced, red-cheeked country girl, of a very low grade of intelligence. He gave this up, however, because he thought it would not be polite to put my friends to inconvenience by taking away their servant. His next effort was by negotiation through a Tōkyō friend; but apparently Yasaku's country manners were not to the taste of the Tōkyō damsels, for he met with no success, and was at last driven to write to his father in Utsunomiya asking him to select him a wife and bring her down to Tōkyō.

The selection took a week or two, and at last my maid told me that Yasaku's wife was coming by the next morning's train. A look into the bettō's quarters in the stable showed great preparations for the bride. The mats, new-covered with nice straw matting, were white and clean; the shoji were mended with new paper; the walls covered with bright-colored pictures; and various new domestic conveniences had nearly bankrupted Yasaku, in spite of his large salary of ten dollars a month. He had ordered a fine feast at a neighboring tea house, had had cards printed with his own name in English and Japanese, and had altogether been to such great expense that he had had to put his winter clothes in pawn to secure the necessary money.

The day chosen for the marriage was rainy, and, though Yasaku spent all his time in going to trains, no bridal party appeared; and he came home at night disconsolate, to smoke his good-night pipe over his solitary hibachi. He was, no doubt, angry as well as disconsolate, for he sat down and penned a severe letter to his father, in which he said that, if the bride did not appear on the next day counted lucky for a wedding (no Japanese would be married on an unlucky day), they could send her back to her father's house, for he would none of her. This letter did its work, for on the next lucky day, about ten days later, the bride appeared, and Yasaku was given two days of holiday on the agreement that he should not be married again while he remained in my service. On the evening of the second day, the bride came in to pay me her respects, and, crouching on her hands and knees before me, literally trembled under the excitement of her first introduction to a foreigner. She was a girl of rather unattractive exterior, fat and heavy, and rather older than Yasaku had bargained for, I imagine; at any rate, from the first, he seemed dissatisfied with his "pig in a poke," and after a couple of months sent her home to her parents, and was all ready to start out again in the hope