ettlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were from 600,000 to
1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual, away over here in Japan.
Seven years later, however, government persecution began, Christianity
was put under the ban, and so remained until eight years after our
Civil War ended. Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in
this long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly handed
their faith down from father to son through all the long generations
until tolerance came again.

Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old
man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where
Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first time
that a man might be a Christian without being punished, and then
confessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a little
Catholic shrine hidden in {52} his wall, as his father and his father's
father had done before him.

As another illustration of the changed attitude toward Christianity, I
may mention that a Japanese Buddhist once came to Doctor Hail's
services armed with a dagger to kill the preacher, but had his
attention caught by the sermon while waiting his chance and is now a
missionary himself!

Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a greater change
than in the general estimate of woman, although this is an objection
the natives openly urge against Christianity. Just as in any conflict
of interest the family in Japan has been everything and the individual
nothing, so in every disagreement between husband and wife his
opinions count for everything, hers for nothing. The orthodox and
traditional Japanese view as to a woman's place has been very
accurately and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated Japanese
moralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman":

"The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her
husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear
and trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and
forwardness. A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven
itself and never weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband,
and thus escape celestial castigation."

Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is declared:

"The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are
indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five
maladies infest seven or eight out of every t