Having all her life under
her father's roof reverenced her superiors, she is expected to bring
reverence to her new domicile, but not love. She must always obey but
never be jealous. She must not be angry, no matter whom her husband may
introduce into his household. She must wait upon him at his meals and
must walk behind him, but not with him. When she dies her children go to
her funeral, but not her husband.
A foreigner, hearing the Japanese translate our word chastity by the
term _teiso_ or _misao_, may imagine that the latter represents mutual
obligation and personal purity for man and wife alike, but on looking
into the dictionary he will find that _teiso_ means "Womanly duties." A
circumlocution is needed to express the idea of a chaste man.
Jealousy is a horrible sin, but is always supposed to be a womanish
fault, and so an exhibition of folly and weakness. Therefore, to apply
such a term to God--to say "a jealous God"--outrages the good sense of a
Confucianist,[24] almost as much as the statement that God "cannot lie"
did that of the Pundit, who wondered how God could be Omnipotent if He
could not lie.
How great the need in Japanese social life of some purifying principle
higher than Confucianism can afford, is shown in the little book
entitled "The Japanese Bride,"[25] written by a native, and scarcely
less in the storm of native criticism it called forth.
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