Some of the above diversions are shared in by the ladies; but take it altogether, their mode of life is much duller than that of their European sisters. Confucian ideas concerning the subjection of women still obtain to a great extent. Women are not, it is true, actually shut up, as in India; but it is considered that their true vocation is to sit at home. Hence visiting is much less practised in Japan than with us. It is further to be observed, to the credit of the Japanese, that amusement, though permitted, is never exalted by them to the rank of the great and serious business of life. In England at least among the upper classes a man's shooting, fishing, and golf, a girl's dances, garden-parties, and country-house visitings appear to be the centre round which all the family plans revolve. In Japan, on the contrary, amusements are merely picked up by the way, and are all the more appreciated.[1]
Some sixteen or seventeen years ago, it looked as if the state of things here sketched were about to undergo considerable modification. Poker, horse-racing, even shooting and lawn-tennis, had begun to find devotees among Japanese men, while the fair sex, abandoning their own charming costume for the corsets and furbelows of Europe, were seen boldly to join in the ball-room fray. True, as Netto wittily remarks in his Papierschmetterlinge aus Japan, "most of them showed by the expression of their faces that they were making a sacrifice on the altar of civilisation." Happily a reaction supervened, older customs and costumes were resumed, and on the now very rare occasions when Japanese ladies enter a ball-room, it is as spectators only, and in their infinitely more attractive native garb.
The sports of Japanese children include kite-flying, top-spinning, battledoor and shuttlecock, making snow men, playing with dolls, etc., etc.,—in fact, most of our old nursery friends, but modified by the genius loci. The large, grotesquely coloured papier-mâché dogs given to babies, often by the kennelful, owe their origin to
- ↑ A critic of the first edition humorously suggested that, had the author been a merchant, he would have reversed this dictum, and have said that that which the Japanese merely picked up by the way was business!
