Peeps at Many Lands: Japan | Page 7

colour, or greys or
fawns, quiet shades, but often of great charm. She has now to rise first
in the morning, to open the shutters which have closed the house for the
night, for this is a duty she may not leave to the servants. If her
husband's father and mother dwell in the same house, she must consider
it an honour to supply all their wants, and she is expected to become a
perfect slave to her mother-in-law. It is not uncommon for a meek little
wife, who has obeyed every one, to become a perfect tyrant as a
mother-in-law, ordering her son's wife right and left, and making the
younger woman's life a sheer misery. The mother-in-law has escaped
from the land of bondage. It is no longer her duty to rise at dawn and
open the house; she can lie in bed, and be waited upon by the young
wife; she is free to go here and there, and she does not let her chances
slip; she begins once more to thoroughly enjoy life.
It may be doubted, however, whether these conditions will hold their
own against the flood of Western customs and Western views which
has begun to flow into Japan. At present the deeply-seated ideas which
rule home-life are but little shaken in the main, but it is very likely that
the modern Japanese girl will revolt against this spending of the best
years of her life as an upper and unpaid servant to her husband's friends
and relations. But at the present moment, for great sections of Japanese
society, the old ways still stand, and stand firmly.

It was formerly the custom for a woman to make herself as ugly as
possible when she was married. This was to show that she wished to
draw no attention from anyone outside her own home. As a rule she
blackened her teeth, which gave her a hideous appearance when she
smiled. This custom is now dying out, though plenty of women with
blackened teeth are still to be seen.
Should a Japanese wife become a widow, she is expected to show her
grief by her desolate appearance. She shaves her head, and wears
garments of the most mournful look. It has been said that a Japanese
girl has the look of a bird of Paradise, the Japanese wife of a dove, and
the Japanese widow of a crow.

CHAPTER VI
IN THE HOUSE
A Japanese house is one of the simplest buildings in the world. Its main
features are the roof of tiles or thatch, and the posts which support the
latter. By day the walls are of oiled paper; by night they are formed of
wooden shutters, neither very thick nor very strong. As a rule, the
house is of but one story, and its flimsiness comes from two reasons,
both very good ones.
The first is that Japan is a home of earthquakes, and when an
earthquake starts to rock the land and topple the houses about the
peoples' ears, then a tall, strong house of stone or brick would be both
dangerous in its fall and very expensive to put up again. The second is
that Japan is a land of fires. The people are very careless. They use
cheap lamps and still cheaper petroleum. A lamp explodes or gets
knocked over; the oiled paper walls burst into a blaze; the blaze spreads
right and left, and sweeps away a few streets, or a suburb of a city, or a
whole village. The Jap takes this very calmly. He gets a few posts, puts
the same tiles up again for a roof, or makes a new thatch, and, with a
few paper screens and shutters, there stands his house again.

A house among the poorer sort of Japanese consists of one large room
in the daytime. At night it is formed into as many bedrooms as its
owner requires. Along the floor, which is raised about a foot from the
ground, and along the roof run a number of grooves, lengthways and
crossways. Frames covered with paper, called shoji, slide along these
grooves and form the wall between chamber and chamber. The front of
the house is, as a rule, open to the street, but if the owners wish for
privacy they slide a paper screen into position. At night wooden
shutters, called amado, cover the screens. Each shutter is held in place
by the next, and the last shutter is fastened by a wooden bolt.
The Japanese are very fond of fresh air and sunshine. Unless the day is
too wet or stormy, the front of the house always stands open. If the sun
is too strong a curtain is hung across for shade, and very often this
curtain bears a huge white