an
the paramount idea in marriage, was not that of love or companionship,
or of mutual assistance with children, but was almost wholly that of
offspring, and of maintaining the family line.[20] The individual might
perish but the house must live on.

Very different from the family of Christendom, is the family in Old
Japan, in which we find elements that would not be recognized where
monogamy prevails and children are born in the home and not in the herd.
Instead of father, mother and children, there are father, wife,
concubines, and various sorts of children who are born of the wife or of
the concubine, or have been adopted into the family. With us, adoption
is the exception, but in Japan it is the invariable rule whenever either
convenience or necessity requires it of the house. Indeed it is rare to
find a set of brothers bearing the same family name. Adoption and
concubinage keep the house unbroken.[21] It is the house, the name,
which must continue, although not necessarily by a blood line. The name,
a social trade-mark, lives on for ages. The line of Japanese emperors,
which, in the Constitution of 1889, by adding mythology to history is
said to rule "unbroken from ages eternal," is not one of fathers and
sons, but has been made continuous by concubinage and adoption. In this
view, it is possibly as old as the line of the popes.

It is very evident that our terms and usages do not have in such a home
the place or meaning which one not familiar with the real life of Old
Japan would suppose. The father is an absolute ruler. There is in Old
Japan hardly any such thing as "parents," for practically there is only
one parent, as the woman counts for little. The wife is honored if she
becomes a mother, but if childless she is very probably neglected. Our
idea of fatherhood implies that the child has rights and that he should
love as well as be loved. Our customs excite not only the merriment but
even the contempt of the old-school Japanese. The kiss and the embrace,
the linking of the child's arm around its father's neck, the address on
letters "My dear Wife" or "My beloved Mother" seem to them like
caricatures of propriety. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly true that
in reverence toward parents--or at least toward one of the parents--a
Japanese child is apt to excel the one born even in a Christian home.

This so-called filial "piety" becomes in practice, however, a horrible
outrage upon humanity and especially upon