permissible for, and even obligatory on, a girl to allow herself to be sold into prostitution in order to support her destitute parents. Incidents of this kind are very common indeed in their pages.
The harlot figures very prominently in the literature of the Yedo period, and in Japan, as elsewhere, writers have not been wanting who have done their best to surround this calling with a halo of romance. But, as Mitford has shown, Japanese opinion on this subject is on the whole sound. There may be some difference of degree, but of the substantial identity of the feeling with which prostitution is regarded by them and by ourselves there can be no doubt. The proverb, "When you find an honest harlot and a three-cornered egg, the moon will appear on the last day of the [lunar] month," very clearly indicates the general opinion of this class.
Piety, by which must be understood a devotion to Buddhist religious practices, was not in high estimation under the Tokugawas. It is not a distinctive virtue of the Japanese character at any period of their history.
On the extreme punctiliousness and ceremony which characterised all the doings of a well-bred Japanese, of his sensitiveness on the point of honour, and of his cult of the sword as a sort of incarnation of the spirit of the Samurai, this is not the place to dilate. Nor need anything be said of the virtues of frugality, sobriety, honesty, and liberality, as they hold practically the same position in Japan as with ourselves. The duties of superiors to their inferiors, of a lord to his retainer, of a father to his son, and of a husband towards his wife, may also be taken for granted. Though less frequently insisted upon, they are by no means passed over by the Japanese moralist.
As time went on, the code of morals derived from the
