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INTRODUCTORY

Japanese women are going out more and more, just as Japanese men are staying at home more and more. This is one of the most notable phenomena of present-day Japan. Thirty or forty years ago, before the Sino-Japanese War was fought or before Japan was recognized as a world Power, ladies walking abroad by themselves were rare. They were exclusively domestic creatures, clinging vines of the home-tree, just as men were out-of-the-home animals. This was one landmark dividing the men and women of the other day. As in the old nursery story, he went out to work on the farm while she stayed at home to do her washing.

Our men once prided themselves on being the lords of creation, but the women took care that their lords stayed out of the home and exercised as little of their sovereignty there as possible. Men left home early in the morning, stayed away till late in the afternoon, and returned under the starry sky, very tired in body and mind. Were there entertainment to be given or received, much of it was arranged outside the home, in restaurants and in tea-houses, with professional caterers to take care of both host and guests. It was the same with most other social functions in which men were chiefly concerned. Thus the home stood self-protected from the outside world, while the so-called autocrat of the home was a sort of revered robot, supposed to have all authority but actually know-

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ing little about how things were being managed at home.

This order of things has somewhat changed. With their general “awakening,” women began slowly and steadily, and, now quite irrevocably, to take part in the active life of the world, hitherto believed to be man’s exclusive sphere, and to mingle with men in work and play to an ever-increasing degree. As women have learned thus to understand and appreciate men’s life outside the home, both in its amenities and its stern realities, so also have men learned to understand and appreciate the home life hitherto exclusively controlled by women. In other words, they have seen each other in a new light at home and abroad, and have begun to reconstruct their home on the basis of this new re-discovery of each other. The

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Japanese home today is, therefore, a new creation, born from the womb of old Japan, and fostered in the genial light of new Japan. It is in the transition stage, awaiting the future to bring a more complete development.

In trying to present a bird’s-eye view of the Japanese home as it stands, the best way will be to examine its component parts, dealing with them separately, and then take a general survey of the whole scene. We shall close this introduction with a word of warning about the words “old and new Japan”—a distinction often made with but hazy understanding. Old Japan has not quite passed, nor is new Japan as yet the universally prevalent aspect of the country. In some respects, old Japan remains as potent as in the mid-Tokugawa régime, and in others new Japan reigns supreme, while in still others the old and new are mixed in a strange, but not inharmonious, blending. For illustration, take the following three homes: Firstly, a home made by man and wife, both with very conservative parents, probably from the same provincial town. Secondly, a home made by man and wife, city-born and city-bred in the modernistic environment of a great metropolis. Thirdly, a home made by the scion of a conservative family married to an ultra-modern girl, brought up among the glittering fashions of urban civilization, or vice versa. In the first you will see nothing but old Japan, in the second new Japan, and in the third the old and new in picturesque compound. Which of them is happiest would be hard to say. Suffice it to state that there are these and other varieties of home, and that the key to happiness is in the persons concerned rather than in the constitution of the home.