ldren.

I have noticed a rather superficial notion prevailing among
half-informed foreigners, that because the common Japanese expression
for one's wife is "my rustic wife" and the like, she is despised and
held in little esteem. When it is told that such phrases as "my foolish
father," "my swinish son," "my awkward self," etc., are in current use,
is not the answer clear enough?

To me it seems that our idea of marital union goes in some ways further
than the so-called Christian. "Man and woman shall be one flesh." The
individualism of the Anglo-Saxon cannot let go of the idea that husband
and wife are two persons;--hence when they disagree, their separate
_rights_ are recognized, and when they agree, they exhaust their
vocabulary in all sorts of silly pet-names and--nonsensical
blandishments. It sounds highly irrational to our ears, when a husband
or wife speaks to a third party of his other half--better or worse--as
being lovely, bright, kind, and what not. Is it good taste to speak of
one's self as "my bright self," "my lovely disposition," and so forth?
We think praising one's own wife or one's own husband is praising a part
of one's own self, and self-praise is regarded, to say the least, as bad
taste among us,--and I hope, among Christian nations too! I have
diverged at some length because the polite debasement of one's consort
was a usage most in vogue among the samurai.

The Teutonic races beginning their tribal life with a superstitious awe
of the fair sex (though this is really wearing off in Germany!), and the
Americans beginning their social life under the painful consciousness of
the numerical insufficiency of women[26] (who, now increasing, are, I am
afraid, fast losing the prestige their colonial mothers enjoyed), the
respect man pays to woman has in Western civilization become the chief
standard of morality. But in the martial ethics of Bushido, the main
water-shed dividing the good and the bad was sought elsewhere. It was
located along the line of duty which bound man to his own divine soul
and then to other souls, in the five relations I have mentioned in the
early part of this paper. Of these we have brought to our reader's
notice, Loyalty, the relation between one man as vassal and another as
lord. Upon the rest, I have only dwelt incidentally as occasion
presented itself; because they were not peculiar to Bushido. Being
founded on natural affections, they could but be common to all mankind,
thou