I had already told Jack of my anxiety for Sada San and of the fate that was hanging over her, but now that the blow has suddenly fallen I dare not tell him.  In a situation like this I know what Jack would want to do; and in his present weakened condition it might be fatal.

It is useless for me to appeal to anybody out here.  Those in Japan who would help are powerless.  Those who could help would smile serenely and tell me it was the law.  And law and custom supersede any lesser question of right or wrong.  By it the smallest act of every inhabitant is regulated, from the quantity of air he breathes to the proper official place for him to die.  But, imagine the majesty of any law which makes it a ghastly immorality to mildly sass your mother-in-law, and a right, lawful and moral act for a man, with any trumped-up excuse, to throw his legal wife out of the house, that room may be made for another woman who has appealed to his fancy.

Japan may not need missionaries, but, by all the Mikados that ever were or will be, her divorce laws need a few revisions more than the nation needs battleships.  You might run a country without gunboats, but never without women.

This case of Hara is neither extreme nor unusual.  I have been face to face in this flowery kingdom with tragedies of this kind when a woman was the blameless victim of a man’s caprice, and he was upheld by a law that would shame any country the sun shines on.  By a single stroke of a pen through her name, on the records at the courthouse, the woman is divorced—­sometimes before she knows it.  Then she goes away to hide her disgrace and her broken heart—­not broken because of her love for the man who has cast her off, but because, from the time she is invited to go home on a visit and her clothes are sent after her, on through life, she is marked.  If she has children, the chances are that the husband retains possession of them, and she is seldom, if ever, permitted to see them.

I know your words of caution would be, Mate, not to be rash in my condemnations, to remember the defects of my own land.  I am neither forgetful nor rash.  I do not expect to reform the country, neither am I arguing.  I am simply telling you facts.

I know, too, that some Fountain Head of knowledge will rise from the back seat and beg to state that the new civil code contains many revisions and regulates divorce.  The only trouble with the new civil code is that it keeps on containing the revisions and only in theory do they get beyond the books in which they are written.

Next to my own, in my affections, stands this sunlit, flower-covered land which has given the world men and women unselfishly brave and noble.  But there are a few deformities in the country’s law system that need the knife of a skilled surgeon, amputating right up to the last joint; among these the divorce laws made in ancient times by the gone-to-dust but still sacred and revered ancestors.  Who would give a hang for any old ancestor so cut on the bias?