If the Japanese are a conspicuously emotional race, as is commonly believed, we should naturally expect this characteristic to manifest itself in a marked degree in the relation of the sexes.  Curiously enough, however, such does not seem to be the case.  So slight a place does the emotion of sexual love have in Japanese family life that some have gone to the extreme of denying it altogether.  In his brilliant but fallacious volume, entitled “The Soul of the Far East,” Mr. Percival Lowell states that the Japanese do not “fall in love.”  The correctness of this statement we shall consider in connection with the argument for Japanese impersonality.  That “falling in love” is not a recognized part of the family system, and that marriage is arranged regardless not only of love, but even of mutual acquaintance, are indisputable facts.

Let us confine our attention here to Japanese post-marital emotional characteristics.  Do Japanese husbands love their wives and wives their husbands?  We have already seen that in the text-book for Japanese women, the “Onna Daigaku,” not one word is said about love.  It may be stated at once that love between husband and wife is almost as conspicuously lacking in practice as in precept.  In no regard, perhaps, is the contrast between the East and the West more striking than the respective ideas concerning woman and marriage.  The one counts woman the equal, if not the superior of man; the other looks down upon her as man’s inferior in every respect; the one considers profound love as the only true condition of marriage; the other thinks of love as essentially impure, beneath the dignity of a true man, and not to be taken into consideration when marriage is contemplated; in the one, the two persons most interested have most to say in the matter; in the other, they have the least to say; in the one, a long and intimate previous acquaintance is deemed important; in the other, the need for such an acquaintance does not receive a second thought; in the one, the wife at once takes her place as the queen of the home; in the other, she enters as the domestic for her husband and his parents; in the one, the children are hers as well as his; in the other, they are his rather than hers, and remain with him in case of divorce; in the one, divorce is rare and condemned; in the other, it is common in the extreme; in the one, it is as often the woman as the man who seeks the divorce; in the other, until most recent times, it is the man alone who divorces the wife; in the one, the reasons for divorce are grave; in the other, they are often trivial; in the one, the wife is the “helpmate”; in the other, she is the man’s “plaything”; or, at most, the means for continuing the family lineage; in the one, the man is the “husband”; in the other, he is the “danna san” or “teishu” (the lord or master); in the ideal home of the one, the wife is the object of the husband’s constant affection and solicitous care; in the ideal home of