Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II JAPANESE WOMEN Japan is the Antipodes as much as Australia. If Australia has its Christmas at mid-summer and its cherries with stones outside the fruit, Japan has its oranges without pips and its screws which work the reverse way, and does most other things upside down from our point of view. Take the women, for instance : they carry their babies on their backs instead of in their arms, and black their teeth instead of trying to keep them Avhite, and the lower they are in class the more consideration they receive from their husbands. There is generally, it must be confessed, method in Japanese madness, but it does look very mad to the unreasoning globe-trotter. Take, for instance, the matter of the woman carrying her baby behind instead of in front: that is because girls begin carrying babies so very young in Japan that it becomes a second nature not to remember the baby at all, but to go on doing whatever one is doing without regardingit; in other words, by this new patent way of carrying a baby a woman can work as well as mind the child—which she does not mind. In fact, unless it is her first, the mother does not generally carry the baby; the last baby, if it is a girl and weaned, carries it. Little Japanese girls are weaned unconscionably late, and begin their duties as women unconsciously early. The first duty of woman, says the Japanese proverb, is obedience; the first duty of a Japanese woman in home life is, when she looks about four years old, to carry the next baby in a haori (shawl) on her back. The baby is fastened so securely that its little mothering sister can play ball or shuttlecock in spite of the pick-a-back. The baby does not cry or laugh—Japanese babies are very solemn— but nods its head and runs at the nose. If all the succeeding babies are bo...