I have been told that, since the coming in of the new civilization and the rise of the new ideas about woman, marriage, and home, there is clearly observable to the Japanese themselves a change in the way in which children are being treated.  But, even still, the elder son takes the more prominent place in the affection of the family, and sons precede daughters.

A fair statement of the case, therefore, is somewhat as follows:  The lower and laboring classes of Japan seem to have more visible affection for their children than the same classes in the Occident.  Among the middle and upper classes, however, the balance is in favor of the West.  In the East, while, without doubt, there always has been and is now a pure and natural affection, it is also true that this natural affection has been more mixed with utilitarian considerations than in the West.  Christian Japanese, however, differ little from Christian Americans in this respect.  The differences between the East and the West are largely due to the differing industrial and family conditions induced by the social order.

The correctness of this general statement will perhaps be better appreciated if we consider in detail some of the facts of Japanese family life.  Let us notice first the very loose ties, as they seem to us, holding the Japanese family together.  It is one of the constant wonders to us Westerners how families can break up into fragments, as they constantly do.  One third of the marriages end in divorce; and in case of divorce, the children all stay with the father’s family.  It would seem as if the love of the mother for her children could not be very strong where divorce under such a condition is so common.  Or, perhaps, it would be truer to say that divorce would be far more frequent than it is but for the mother’s love for her children.  For I am assured that many a mother endures most distressing conditions rather than leave her children.  Furthermore, the way in which parents allow their children to leave the home and then fail to write or communicate with them, for months or even years at a time, is incomprehensible if the parental love were really strong.  And still further, the way in which concubines are brought into the home, causing confusion and discord, is a very striking evidence of the lack of a deep love on the part of the father for the mother of his children and even for his own legitimate children.  One would expect a father who really loved his children to desire and plan for their legitimacy; but the children by his concubines are not “ipso facto” recognized as legal.  One more evidence in this direction is the frequency of adoption and of separation.  Adoption in Japan is largely, though by no means exclusively, the adoption of an adult; the cases where a child is adopted by a childless couple from love of children are rare, as compared with similar cases in the United States, so far, at least, as my observation goes.  I recently heard of a conversation on personal financial