ABSTRACT
THERE is the Japanese Home and there are the institutions which it harbours. Paradox being so often syllogism, chaos so often cosmos in the Japan of to-day, it might not be very surprising to find that the institutions had been revolutionised, while the house, their home, remained intact, untainted, aboriginal. In this instance, however, it is the expected-or is it the unexpected ?— that happens. The institutions of the home are secure as the home itself, or more so, for while, for instance, there is or lately was a fashion of furnishing a reception room in well-to-do houses in the ' foreign style,'—that is to say, with all the decorative appurtenances of a Western drawing-room-the Japanese fashion in marriage, for example, is insulted by no temerous innovator. The Japanese lover woos and marries in the fashion of his ancestors, unblessed with revolutionary knowledge or the means of it. Here is food for thought of the sociologist. Does the Japanese lover, by his inalienable devotion to the fashion of his fathers in love, demonstrate this institution the hinge of human character, the foundation of being, the motive of life ? The question seems worth some inquiry. I contribute a fact. Japan has adopted parliamentary institutions ; she follows the light of the most modern science in her education ; she
writes her Navy log-books in English ; but her sons make love through middlemen, and the climax of the marriage ceremony is a mutual drinking from a mutual wine-cup. It is hardest, it seems, to convert a people to a new mode in marriage. It is in the affair of love that their profoundest affections and conservatisms reside. Is this affair, then, the heart of the heart of man ?
