The common Japanese novels read like records of slaughter-houses.  No Moloch or Shiva has won more victims to his shrine than has this idea of Japanese loyalty which is so beautiful in theory and so hideous in practice.  Despite the military clamps and frightful despotism of Yedo, which for two hundred and fifty years gave to the world a delusive idea of profound quiet in the Country of Peaceful Shores, there was in fact a chronic unrest which amounted at many times and in many places to anarchy.  The calm of despotism was, indeed, rudely broken by the aliens in the “black ships” with the “flowery flag”; but, without regarding influences from the West, the indications of history as now read, pointed in 1850 toward the bloodiest of Japan’s many civil wars.  Could the statistics of the suicides during this long period be collected, their publication would excite in Christendom the utmost incredulity.

Nevertheless, this qualifying statement should be made.  A study of the origin and development of the national method of self-destruction shows that suicide by seppuku, or opening of the abdomen, was first a custom, and then a privilege.  It took, among men of honor, the place of the public executions, the massacres in battle and siege, decimation of rebels and similar means of killing at the hands of others, which so often mar the historical records of western nations.  Undoubtedly, therefore, in the minds of most Japanese, there are many instances of hara-kiri which should not be classed as suicide, but technically as execution of judicial sentence.  And yet no sentence or process of death known in western lands had such influence in glorifying the victim, as had seppuku in Japan.

The Family Idea.

The Second Relation is that of father and son, thus preceding what we should suppose to be the first of human relations—­husband and wife—­but the arrangement entirely accords with the Oriental conception that the family, the house, is more important than the individual.  In Old Japan the paramount idea in marriage, was not that of love or companionship, or of mutual assistance with children, but was almost wholly that of offspring, and of maintaining the family line.[20] The individual might perish but the house must live on.

Very different from the family of Christendom, is the family in Old Japan, in which we find elements that would not be recognized where monogamy prevails and children are born in the home and not in the herd.  Instead of father, mother and children, there are father, wife, concubines, and various sorts of children who are born of the wife or of the concubine, or have been adopted into the family.  With us, adoption is the exception, but in Japan it is the invariable rule whenever either convenience or necessity requires it of the house.  Indeed it is rare to find a set of brothers bearing the same family name.  Adoption and concubinage keep the house unbroken.[21] It is the house, the name, which must continue, although not necessarily by a blood line.  The name, a social trade-mark, lives on for ages.  The line of Japanese emperors, which, in the Constitution of 1889, by adding mythology to history is said to rule “unbroken from ages eternal,” is not one of fathers and sons, but has been made continuous by concubinage and adoption.  In this view, it is possibly as old as the line of the popes.