arry.[1322]

+412. The Japanese woman.+ The Japanese woman has been formed in an
isolated state, of a militant character, with strong and invariable
folkways. "Before this ethical creature, criticism should hold its
breath; for there is here no single fault, save the fault of a moral
charm unsuited to any world of selfishness and struggle.... How
frequently has it been asserted that, as a moral being, the Japanese
woman does not seem to belong to the same race as the Japanese man!...
Perhaps no such type of woman will appear again in this world for a
hundred thousand years: the conditions of industrial civilization will
not admit of her existence.... The Japanese woman can be known only in
her own country,--the Japanese woman as prepared and perfected by the
old-time education for that strange society in which the charm of her
moral being,--her delicacy, her supreme unselfishness, her childlike
piety and trust, her exquisite tactful perception of all ways and means
to make happiness about her,--can be comprehended and valued.... Even if
she cannot be called handsome according to western standards, the
Japanese woman must be confessed pretty,--pretty like a comely child;
and if she be seldom graceful in the occidental sense, she is at least
in all her ways incomparably graceful: her every motion, gesture, or
expression being, in its own oriental manner, a perfect thing,--an act
performed, or a look conferred, in the most easy, the most graceful, the
most modest way possible.... The old-fashioned education of her sex was
directed to the development of every quality essentially feminine, and
to the suppression of the opposite quality. Kindliness, docility,
sympathy, tenderness, daintiness,--these and other attributes were
cultivated into incomparable blossoming. 'Be good, sweet maid, and let
who will be clever; do noble things, not dream them, all day
long,'--those words of Kingsley really embody the central idea in her
training. Of course the being, formed by such training only, must be
protected by society; and by the old Japanese society she was
protected.... A being working only for others, thinking only for others,
happy only in making pleasure for others,--a being incapable of
unkindness, incapable of selfishness, incapable of acting contrary to
her own inherited sense of right,--and in spite of this softness and
gentleness ready, at any moment, to lay down her life, to sacrifice
everything at the call of duty: such