Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/717

 THE NEW WOMAN IN JAPAN 697

dition of Japanese society may favor a rule being honored more in the breach than in the observance." But it will probably not be long before here and there certain women will claim the rights accorded by law and will find a corresponding improve- ment in their social condition ; and thus the general position of the Japanese woman will gradually be advanced.

Since writing the above, we have had the pleasure of reading the revised and illustrated edition of Miss Alice M. Bacon's Japanese Girls and Women, and cannot refrain from making some references to it along the line of this article. In that excellent book, which is a sure and safe authority on matters pertaining to the female half of Japan, the author traces very clearly the progress that has been made in the condition of woman, and shows how "better laws, broader education for the women, [and] a change in public opinion" are still necessary. And she affirms that "we can feel pretty sure that, when the people have become used to these [recent] changes [of the new Civil Code], other and more binding laws will be enacted, for the drift of enlight- ened public opinion seems to be in favor of securing better and more firmly established homes."

It is, moreover, worth our while to make even a lengthy quo- tation, as follows :

The woman question in Japan is at the present moment a matter of much consideration: There seems to be an uneasy feeling in the minds of even the more conservative men that some change in the status of women is inevitable, if the nation wishes to keep the pace it has set for itself. The Japanese women of the past and of the present are exactly suited to the position accorded them in society, and any attempt to alter them without changing their status only results in making square pegs for round holes. If the pegs hereafter are to be cut square, the holes must be enlarged and squared to fit them. The Japanese woman stands in no need of alteration unless her place in life is somehow enlarged, nor, on the other hand, can she fill a larger place without additional training. The men of new Japan, to whom the opinions and customs of the western world are becoming daily more familiar, while they shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become like the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West, show a growing tendency to dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters a growing belief that better-