ch one party or the other
utterly refuses to carry out the arrangements of the parents. Many a
girl declines from the beginning the proposals of the parents. These
cases are by no means few. Only a few days before writing the present
lines a waiting girl in a hotel requested me to find her a place of
service in some foreign family. On inquiry she told me how her parents
wished her to marry into a certain family; but that she could not
endure the thought and had run away from home. One of the facts which
strike a missionary, as he becomes acquainted with the people, is the
frequency of the cases of running away from home. Girls run away,
probably not as frequently as boys, yet very often. Are we to believe
that these are individuals who have an excessive amount of
"personality"? If so, then the development of "personality" in Japan
is far more than the advocates of its "impersonality" recognize or
would allow us to believe. Mr. Lowell devotes three pages to a
beautiful and truthful description of the experience known in the West
as "falling in love." Turning his attention to the Orient, because of
the fact that marriages are arranged for by the families concerned, he
argues that: "No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far
Oriental. He never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim
of his self-delusion. He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by
thus revealing, realize.... For she is not his love; she is only his
wife; and what is left of a romance when the romance is left out?"
Although there is an element of truth in this, yet it is useless as a
support for the theory of Japanese "impersonality." For it is not a
fact that the Japanese do not fall in love; it is a well-known
experience to them. It is inconceivable how anyone at all acquainted
with either Japanese life or literature could make such an assertion.
The passionate love of a man and a woman for each other, so strong
that in multitudes of cases the two prefer a common death to a life
apart, is a not uncommon event in Japan. Frequently we read in the
daily papers of a case of mutual suicide for love. This is
sufficiently common to have received a specific name "joshi."[CN]

So far as the argument for "impersonality" is concerned this
illustration from the asserted lack of love is useless, for it is one
of those manufactured for the occasion by imaginative and resourceful
advocates of "impersonality."

But I do not mean to say that