The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (17 page)

25. Women in Europe wear fine, scented gloves; Japanese women wear silk gauntlets that cover the forearm, leaving all the fingers exposed
.

Tight-fitting gloves, particularly of kidskin, were popular with European men as well as women (presumably only the women perfumed theirs).
²⁴
Japanese gloves cover the back rather than the front of the hands; protecting the hands from the sun or cold while not adversely affecting dexterity. (One could eat and write with these gloves on.) In any case, the main intent was to keep the inside of the sleeve clean (see
#56a
below).

26. Women in Europe wear very long black cloaks; Japanese noblewomen wear short ones made of white silk
.

Long and black vs. short and white seem as different as can be, but both European and Japanese cloaks fulfilled much the same function of covering and protecting a woman's hair from the elements. Okada notes that the Japanese scarves or cloaks usually were made of satin or silk crepe.

27. Cloaks in Europe have neither sleeves nor any color; in Japan their colorful
katabiras
also serve as cloaks
.

The image of a light robe serving as a head scarf or cloak might seem strange, but imagine getting caught during the summer in a rain shower without a hat or umbrella and removing your arms from your coat and drawing it up over your head. This is what Frois seems to be commenting on. As noted in the previous chapter (
#1a
), the
katabira
is summer wear, and most
katabira
were white, “pale-scallion” (light green) “water-pale-scallion” (light blue-green), and other light shades. The Japanese still feel that such colors are cooling and utilize them even today, particularly for window and door screens.

28. European soldiers wear their [troop's] colors when they dress up; Japanese women regularly wear their group's colors on their kimonos, in a four-color design
.

It is unclear whether the “four-color design” (
quarteados
) mentioned by Frois refers to the colors of a single item, or four different colored robes that were worn one over another. If it is the latter, a clan crest on the garment may have made it seem even more military. Charles Thunberg visited Japan at the end of the eighteenth century and was struck by how at public baths the Japanese would fold their cloaks and put them in little boxes. Thunberg noted that every cloak had a “coat of arms,” perhaps to distinguish one from another.

29. In Europe, men walk in front and women walk behind; in Japan, the men walk behind and the women in front
.

As noted at the outset of this chapter, this is the first of numerous distichs that focus more on behavior than appearance. Japanese editions of the
Tratado
by Okada and Matsuda and Jorißsen interpret the “men and women” as “husband and wife (
otto, tsuma
).” This contrast would appear to make more sense, however, if it
is understood that Frois is referring to the male and female servants who ordinarily accompanied nobles in Japan and Europe. Frois' superior, Valignano, observed that Japanese noblewomen were preceded by their maids (
senoras moças
) and followed by their male servants (
criados
); this is indeed the opposite of European practice.

30. In Europe, property is held in common by husband and wife; in Japan, each owns his or her own, and sometimes the woman lends hers to her husband at exorbitant rates of interest
.

European commonality belied the fact that, practically speaking, the property (i.e., land, house, furniture) was controlled by the husband rather than the wife, excepting perhaps clothing or furniture (e.g., chests, tapestries) that a wife may have brought to the marriage as a dowry.
²⁵
At the time Frois wrote, a Japanese woman's
trousseau
remained hers to dispose of as she wished. If and when she divorced (see
#32
below), she got her things and money back.
²⁶
“Her” children, unless they were from a previous marriage, remained with her husband's family. However, if a Japanese man married into a woman's family, which was not uncommon, the situation reversed and
her
family kept the children.

If men tended to control the purse strings in Europe, it was indeed the opposite in Japan, where women saved, kept the books, and made the budget. Men in Japan, unless they were merchants, were supposed to be above pecuniary matters. A housewife in all her glory is often called the
daikoku-bashira
, literally the “big-black-post,” which is to say the central pillar of the house.

Generations of Japanese men have joked about being cormorants, made to regurgitate their pay for their wives. In modern times, the complaint has gained a new twist. The wedding ring (a Western import) is sometimes jokingly referred to as the neck-choke, worn by the bird to make certain it cannot swallow any fish. In the 1970s and 1980s some Japanese companies reputedly cooperated with their cormorant “salary men” by giving them two paychecks, one of which was kept secret from the wife.

31. In Europe, repudiating a woman is not only a sin but a great dishonor; in Japan, one can repudiate as many women as one pleases without them consequently losing their honor or prospects for marriage
.

Today, as in the past, the Catholic Church does not allow divorce. In Frois' day, husbands and wives who did not get along remained together yet essentially lived separate lives. Among the nobility or wealthy business class, this often meant, in the case of the husband, keeping a mistress. A woman in Europe who was
disowned by her husband was “damaged goods” and certainly could not remarry “in the eyes of the Church,” which was no small matter in communities where the Church wielded enormous power.

The situation for married women in Japan was somewhat “better,” seemingly, in that divorce or repudiation did not have a crippling stigma, except perhaps among the samurai class.
²⁷
A Japanese husband, unless he was a noble and feared scandal and damage to a family alliance, could easily divorce a woman and remarry, while a woman could not remarry without official papers of separation and divorce, which the husband was free to grant or withhold.
²⁸
Presumably, the threat of divorce was used to control women. The seventeenth-century moralist, Kaibara Eiken, in his classic
Onna Daigaku
(“Woman-Great-Study”), gave a handful of reasons for divorce: disobedience to the father or mother-in-law, barrenness (an otherwise good wife might be kept and children adopted), lewdness, jealousy, leprosy or any foul disease, disturbing the household harmony by talking too much and too disrespectfully, or being a kleptomaniac. To promote frugality, the authorities further decreed that “too much sightseeing” or “too much tea-drinking” were just cause for divorce.

After World War II, divorce was strongly discouraged in Japan, both for the sake of the children (the nuclear family now being the norm), and purportedly out of concern that men would use and then throw away their wives for someone younger.
²⁹

32. In accordance with corrupt nature, it is men in Europe who repudiate women; in Japan it is often the woman who repudiates the man
.

The Judeo-Christian origin myth, Genesis, says Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit, which got both of them thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Genesis also says that, as a consequence, “Your [Eve's] yearning will be for your husband, and he will dominate you.” Domination and repudiation go hand-in-hand.

While only men in Japan had a general right to divorce, the wife's family could sue when the husband sold off or pawned her possessions without her permission; she could flee to her family and gain a divorce if the husband did not sue for her to return to his family (in this case, the influence of the wife's family was important), or she could become a nun for life.
³⁰
Still, it was not until 1873 that women obtained a formal right to sue their husbands for divorce.

Jesuit and other early visitors to Japan did not note any class difference here, but late nineteenth-century writers made it clear that peasant women often repudiated
their husbands, mostly for being hopelessly dissolute drinkers or gamblers, but sometimes for lesser reasons. Writing in the early twentieth century, Douglas Sladen
lauded
the high divorce rate in Japan, noting that it was far more reasonable to allow a working woman to divorce her no-good husband than to chain her to an utterly irresponsible and violent man, as English Law did at the time.
³¹

Today, Europeans and Americans have a higher divorce rate than the Japanese. Considering the historically recent reversal, it is ironic that this difference is usually attributed to some inherently Western individualism versus Japanese collectivism. It may well be that both sexes in Japan had more control of their lives in Frois' time, considering that today they face an uphill battle securing a divorce, even in clear-cut cases of abuse or where a married couple has lived separately for a long time.

33. In Europe, the abduction of a female relative results in the entire family placing their lives on the line; in Japan the fathers and mothers and siblings dissimulate and pass over this lightly
.

Okada believes Frois was referring to
yukai
, meaning “abduction” or “enticement.” Japan was not a place where women worried about being overpowered and carried off, either physically or symbolically, but lovers could and did elope, something that was usually hushed up for a while and later forgiven.

Both abduction (lovers running off together) and rape, meaning the physical violation of a woman, was much more common in Europe as compared with Japan. We in the West forget that the family was very much a “private enterprise” during the sixteenth-century; it wasn't necessarily or solely a loving support group. Women were of great value to fathers, uncles, brothers, and other male relatives; the latter understood that their female kin were valuable assets that could realize great economic and social gains if properly “invested,” that is, married into the right family. So, forced or not, a woman's rapture was serious business.
³²
A rape in the modern sense of the word would have undermined a woman's chances for marriage in the West, but not in Japan, where virginity
per se
was not an issue. While women of the warrior class were expected to defend their own honor to the death (see
#35
below), not all commoners would have been so proud.

34. In Europe, the confinement of daughters and maidens is very intense and rigorous; in Japan, daughters go unaccompanied wherever they please for an entire day, and many do so without informing their parents
.

Women in Japan were not in fact as secluded as in most Asiatic countries or in sixteenth century Spain or Portugal, where a quarter or more of the female population lived in convents. Walthall recounts how in eighteenth century Japan it was not uncommon for the daughters of wealthy peasants to make lengthy pilgrimages
to Shinto shrines for religious purposes as well as for sightseeing and simply experiencing the world beyond one's home town or village.
³³

35. Women in Europe never leave the house without their husband's permission; in Japan the women are free to go where they please without their husbands' knowledge
.

Beyond the different gender constructions already noted, the differential freedom of women may also reflect different levels of public safety. While war made Japan unsafe for male combatants, the greater emotional self-control of the Japanese meant that there was less random violence as compared with Europe (see
Chapter 14
). Japanese women (at least in the warrior classes and among the towns-folk, who strove to emulate the samurai) were not only more likely to read and write than their European counterparts (see
#45
below), but also were more likely to have studied martial arts. Japanese literature or drama do not feature Japanese women who “faint away” like their European counterparts. Perhaps more importantly, if overpowered, Japanese women of the samurai class were prepared to kill themselves.
³⁴
On television “Easterns” at least, the instant the “bad guy” touches a woman she stabs herself, or if the dagger is taken away from her, she bites off her tongue and bleeds to death. (This inevitably brings on the avenging hero or her vengeful ghost.) Television exaggerates, but the threat of suicide may have been a significant deterrent of violence against women. Japanese women were, then, “free” to move about as they pleased.

Still, lest these women appear braver than they probably were, it should be noted that if a woman was anything more than a servant, she probably did
not
go out alone. A letter of Gaspar Vilela from 1565 put it this way: “They [noble-women] are not used to being accompanied by men when they go out, but with many other women with whom they have been raised.”

36. In Europe the love felt between male and female family members is very strong; in Japan it is weak and they treat each other like strangers
.

Frois seems to imply that marriage in sixteenth-century Europe was a lot like marriage today, where couples ideally are best friends as well as lovers. It is not clear that this was indeed the case in 1585, as many Europeans seemed to view marriage as a practical necessity. Men, in particular, often had another man as their “best friend.”
³⁵

Today, as in the past, the Japanese, particularly of the upper classes, do not center their lives around the biological family and blood relatives (as compared with Europeans and Americans). The Japanese have traditionally favored those nearby over blood kin. “Out of sight, out of mind” makes more sense to the Japanese than “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Thus, Japanese families were more liable to adopt children (or husbands) to carry on the family line, despite their pride in lineage. In Japan, the idea of lineage or heredity had less to
do with blood and more to do with actual relationships, including those where a craftsmen would pass on his skills to a loyal apprentice or adopted son-in-law.
³⁶
Some have argued that this Japanese attitude was conducive to modernization in general and the building of effective corporations in particular.