It may be denied by some of our Japanese or Japanophile readers that our only allies respect woman any less than we ourselves, but all the customs of this country are against them. The wife cats not until her lord and master has had his fill. She bows to the mats, not. once but several times, whenever he returns home, even if the return takes place at 4 a.m. after a geisha revel. The old-fashioned chivalrous respect for woman which Roman Catholics trace to the influence of the medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary, but which Germans find existing among the Gernan forests in the time of Tacitus, and which was certainly—whatever was its origin—encouraged' by the extraordinary respect paid to womanhood by the knights of the Middle Ages—this respect is, I contend, absent in Japan at present; and in all Japanese history we do not find it.
A modern instance of the feeling that exists in Japan on this point is the case of a young lacy in the provinces, whose name after birth had been inadvertently entered in the register of her native village as that of a boy, and who had consequently to attend a call for conscripts that was made lately in her district. The army doctor and the board of examining officers stared at her when she entered the temple where the physical inspection of the conscripts was being carried on, They asked her if she were a girl and she said she was. "Anyhow," said the doctor, "your name is down on this list—pointing to the list of conscripts to be examined, that lay on the table before him—" and T'll examine you." So he forthwith ordered the girl to strip, which she did without a protest. being raised by any of the "officers and gentlemen" who were present.
It view of an occurrence like this, the outery that was made by official and semiofficial Japan on the occasion of an American quarantine doctor requiring Japanese Indy to unnecessarily expose her person seems a little insincere. So does the following passage from a letter about Australia which has been contributed ton Japanese paper, evidently by a Japanese who has been in the Southern Continent.
"Thad not the least idea," he says, " that I should behold with my own eyes a side ly side with' the most civilised ked, utterly naked, man or woman livin,
Englishmen, Coming right up to the outskirts of the scrub' whence stretched many thousands of acres unier crop, I was ashamed when I happened to loot at the black human figures in their bold natural state, a man with a spear and 8 bow ang
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.