that all who wish well to Japan may look upon its
future with hope. It will no doubt play an important part as the years
roll by in the development of the country and in the holding up before
the people of worthy ideals in reference to economic conditions,
material progress, and the conservation of the prestige and security
of the Japanese Empire.

CHAPTER XVIII

JAPANESE MORALITY

In the Preface I remarked that Japanese morality was a thorny subject.
I use the word morality in its now generally accepted rather than in
its absolutely correct meaning. Morality, strictly speaking, is the
practice of moral duties apart from religion or doctrine; it treats of
actions as being right or wrong--is, in brief, ethics. The old
"morality" play, for example, was not, as some people seem to suppose,
especially concerned with the relations of the sexes; it was a drama
in which allegorical representations of all the virtues and vices were
introduced as _dramatis personae_. However, words, like everything else
in this world, change their meaning, and, though the dictionary
interpretation of morality is, as I have stated it, colloquially at
any rate, the word has now come for the most part to signify sexual
conduct, and it is in that sense, as I have said, I use it.

The subject of the morality of the Japanese is one that has been much
discussed for many years past, and accordingly is one in regard to
which it may be urged that there is little or nothing more to be said.
I am not of that opinion. In the first place, much of the discussion
has been simply the mere assertions of men, or sometimes of women,
who either did not have the opportunity, or else had not the
inclination, to investigate matters for themselves, and were therefore
largely dependent on the hearsay evidence of not always unprejudiced
persons. Or they sometimes jumped to very pronounced and erroneous
conclusions from extremely imperfect observation or information. Let
me take as an example in point, a lady, now dead, who wrote many
charming books of travel--the late Mrs. Bishop, better known as Miss
Bird. In her journeyings through the country Miss Bird relates in
"Unbeaten Tracks in Japan," that she passed through a wide street in
which the houses were large and handsome and open in front. Their
highly polished floors and passages, she remarks, looked like still
water, the kakemonos, or wall pictures, on their side-walls were
extremely beautiful, and thei