Thus will Japan become worthy of all the honors, which the
highest humanity on this planet can bestow.
The Ideal of Yamato Damashii Enlarged.
In this our time it is not only the alien from Christendom, with his
hostile eye and mordant criticism, who is helping to undermine that
system of ethics which permitted the sale of the daughter to shame, the
introduction of the concubine into the family and the reduction of
woman, even though wife and mother, to nearly a cipher. It is not only
the foreigner who assaults that philosophy which glorified the vendetta,
kept alive private war, made revenge in murder the sweetest joy of the
Samurai and suicide the gate to honor and fame, subordinated the family
to the house, and suppressed individuality and personality. It is the
native Japanese, no longer a hermit, a "frog in the well, that knows not
the great ocean" but a student, an inquirer, and a critic, who assaults
the old ethical and philosophical system, and calls for a new way
between heaven and earth, and a new kind of Heaven in which shall be a
Creator, a Father and a Saviour. The brain and pen of New Japan, as well
as its heart, demand that the family shall be more than the house and
that the living members shall have greater rights as well as duties,
than the dead ancestors.
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