every house where a son has been born during
the year. On this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into
eighty square miles of aquarium.

For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular
anniversaries. Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon
everything in general, and incidentally upon being alive. Such
substitution of an abstract for a concrete birthday, although
exceedingly convenient for others, must at least conduce to
self-forgetfulness on the part of its proper possessor, and tend
inevitably to merge the identity of the individual in that of the
community.

It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the
result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact, it
is not his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply made a
cat's-paw of. The matter is entirely a business transaction, entered
into by the parent and conducted through regular marriage brokers. In
it he plays only the part of a marionette. His revenge for being thus
bartered out of what might be the better half of his life, he takes
eventually on the next succeeding generation.

His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life.
For then only can his personal existence be properly considered to
begin. By it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to these
people of almost more consequence than living folk, and of much more
individual distinction. Particularly is this the case in China and
Korea, but the same respect, though in a somewhat less rigid form,
is paid the dead in Japan. Then at last the individual receives that
recognition which was denied him in the flesh. In Japan a mortuary
tablet is set up to him in the house and duly worshipped; on the
continent the ancestors are given a dwelling of their own, and even
more devotedly reverenced. But in both places the cult is anything but
funereal. For the ancestral tombs are temples and pleasure pavilions at
the same time, consecrated not simply to rites and ceremonies, but to
family gatherings and general jollification. And the fortunate defunct
must feel, if he is still half as sentient as his dutiful descendants
suppose, that his earthly life, like other approved comedies, has ended
well.

Important, however, as these critical points in his career may be
reckoned by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove equal