The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (18 page)

37. In India, foot servants carry umbrellas for the women [to protect them] against the sun and the rain; in Japan, women hold up umbrellas for each other
.

Frois lived for years in India and Malacca before he was assigned to Japan. This is one of a few instances in which he refers to India instead of Europe, presumably because Europeans did not yet make use of umbrellas. Nowadays in Japan, everyone holds up their own “bat-umbrellas,” as Western-style umbrellas are called.

38. In Europe, while they do exist, abortions are infrequent; in Japan this is so common that there are women who have had twenty abortions
.

Frois seems to understate the frequency of abortions in Europe, particularly as most abortions presumably went unreported. Somewhat surprisingly, Church law was rather lenient, allowing abortions for unwed women as late as the fifth month of pregnancy or before “quickening” and “ensoulment.”
³⁷

With respect to Japan,
risqué
poems (
senryu
) written two centuries after Frois actually joked about abortion. Even today, the abortion rate in Japan is relatively high, owing to a belief that the child of an unwed mother will be stigmatized and have a difficult life.
³⁸
Still, abortion was no laughing matter for the Japanese woman who drank poisonous drugs, put pressure on their stomachs, and so forth. Moreover, the complex emotions felt by Japanese women, today as in the past, is evident from the fact that some Buddhist temples secure high fees praying for a “water-baby's” soul. At these temples, one can see thousands of small stone statues, many with bibs and candy or toys placed before them.
³⁹

39. In Europe, an infant is rarely or almost never killed after birth; in Japan, the women step on the neck and kill any children to whom they give birth that they believe they cannot feed
.

Europeans considered infanticide an offense to God, an unspeakable crime in the same general category as witchcraft, incest, and sodomy. Although the Counter-Reformation is sometimes cast as a defensive reaction to criticism of the Church, it was itself reform-minded and encouraged confraternities and new
religious orders dedicated to the poor, orphans, and foundlings.
⁴⁰
That said, Frois understates the extent of infanticide in Europe, where innumerable infants died in foundling homes or at the hands of wet nurses or helpless mothers.
⁴¹

Okada
⁴²
cites a late Ming (1368–1644) Chinese source to the effect that there were more women than men in Japan because the fief administrators cruelly encouraged the strangulation of boys born to poor women at birth because they only desired a supply of women to serve as common-law wives and mistresses. Frois, however, writes in a letter of April 4, 1565, that it was girls who were liable to be killed. Perhaps both are correct and different practices of infanticide obtained in Japan at different times and places.

The Japanese were mostly a farming people and correspondingly referred to infanticide as “thinning” (
mabiki
). You do not thin for reasons of cruelty. When crops failed or did not keep up with taxes, parents had to make hard choices on how to maximize the chances of survival for their offspring. Because bad years could not be predicted, abortion was not always an option. In 1557, Frois' fellow Jesuit, Vilela, wrote with obvious sympathy, “We fear the lean cows of Pharaoh
⁴³
and pray the Lord will not let them come, because it is a heart-breaking thing to see children killed in similar times, ….”
⁴⁴
Although scholars who have studied infanticide in early modern Japan have concluded that peasants lost far more children to natural causes than to induced death,
⁴⁵
the Jesuits as early as 1557 opened a foundling home in Funai, their base of operations in Japan and one of the two largest cities in the province of Bungo.
⁴⁶

40. Pregnant women in Europe loosen and relax their belts so as not to hurt their unborn babies; the Japanese wear a belt up until the time of birth that is kept so tight that it is impossible to slip a hand between the belt and the skin
.

Frois' Jesuit superior noted that the Japanese, “from experience” rather than, say, ignorance, had come to believe that the tight belt brought good luck in birthing. The tight
obi
was put on ceremoniously in the fifth month of conception and was thought to prevent miscarriage and premature birth.

41. After giving birth, women in Europe lie down and rest; Japanese women are required to remain in a seated position day and night for twenty days after birth
.

Child-birthing in both Europe and Japan often was done sitting, as it is in most cultures. European women made use of horseshoe-shaped or elongated chairs or stools. In Japan, the wealthy sat on special legless chairs covered with cushions. (If we can call something legless a sofa, then they invented the sofa or soft armchair.) Poor farmers improvised with straw.
⁴⁷

42. In Europe we are very careful after childbirth to guard against the air and wind; as soon as they have given birth, the Japanese wash themselves and open doors and windows
.

In Europe, immediately following a birth, both mother and child were quickly washed and dressed to protect them from chills as well as outside air.
⁴⁸
The Japanese opened doors and windows to “vent the pollution of birth.” For most of Japanese history, delivery took place in a separate birth hut so the main house would not be “polluted.” However, the Japanese also were wary of the wind, for the very word for the common cold in Japanese is “wind.” Rodrigues' Japanese-Portuguese Dictionary includes
ubukaze
, or “birth-wind,” meaning a cold caught by a newborn. The bath after birth is almost always called
ubuyu
, “birth-warm water.” Only rarely was it called
ubumizu
, “birth-coldwater,” and that was in Shikajima prefecture, which happens to be where the Jesuits began their missionary work. But even then, it was only a little cold water and it was used after a bath in warm water.

43. In Europe, the cloister and confinement of nuns is strict and rigorous; in Japan the monasteries of the bikuni [Buddhist nuns] function almost like a red-light district
.
⁴⁹

Again, Frois overstates the case for Europe, for not all nuns were bound to convents, nor did they all lead lives of strict religious observance. Recently we have learned that many women who entered convents had male guests and servants and some wrote love stories and poetry.
⁵⁰
Indeed, the fact that many convents lacked “rigor” explains the reform movements led by Frois' contemporaries, such as Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–1582).

Some of the most charming female letters in Japan are the work of devout nuns, who, like poet bonzes, tended to be very witty (again, not unlike nuns in Spain and the New World who penned fabulous poetry, plays, commentaries, and autobiographical pieces). But nun-prostitutes were also a very visible part of Japan for hundreds of years. There were even “boating nuns” (
funa-bikuni
) who plied the canals. It is clear that some religious authorities actually sponsored these “roadside angels” who were sometimes identified with Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. Frois is only wrong for what he seemingly chose
not
to mention: the vast majority of
bikuni
were chaste and devoted to Buddha.

44. Our nuns ordinarily do not venture outside the convent; the bikuni in Japan are always out entertaining, and sometimes go into military camps
.

Frois again focuses on
bikuni
prostitution, which Okada
⁵¹
suggests flourished at this time of frequent wars between Japanese nobles (the logic presumably is that during times of war men require or benefit from gratuitous sex).

45. Among us it is not very common for a woman to know how to write; among the elite women in Japan it is considered demeaning not to know how to write
.

At the time Frois wrote, high schools and universities were springing up throughout much of Europe and more and more people were learning to read; rag paper, the printing press, and vernacular bibles all inspired and made possible greater consumption of ideas. As Frois suggests, European women rarely were afforded an opportunity to participate in this revolution. Girls might be taught to read, but less frequently learned to write, as learning to write required costly supplies and girls/women were deemed an unlikely source of “great” ideas.
⁵²
If a girl did manage to make it into a lower school, she often was not permitted to study more than the basics or beyond the age of nine. Although women of the lower and middle classes often desired or were required by circumstance to do “men's work”
⁵³
this reality was conveniently ignored in favor of a cult of domesticity, which, while no less demanding, required little education.

In a letter from 1565, Frois noted that “in the more cultured parts” of Japan or wherever there were nobility, both men and women knew how to read and write. We would add that not only would both be able to read and write, but they were also expected to write beautifully, in terms of both content and calligraphy. In Murasaki Shikibu's
Tale of Genji
, generally acknowledged as the world's first full-length novel, writing was the key to a lover's heart. In Japan, poetic letters were passed back and forth in the night, and love and literacy went hand and hand.

Women did not use as many Chinese characters as men and mostly wrote with the visually lighter and more flowing phonetic syllabary.
⁵⁴
Women also developed argot of their own different enough from that of men that some European visitors in Frois' time mistakenly thought they spoke a different language than men. Even today, there are far greater gender differences in the use of the Japanese language than can be found in English.

46. Among us, letters addressed to a woman are signed by the man who writes the letter; letters to women in Japan do not need to have a signature, nor do women sign their letters, nor do they
⁵⁵
indicate the month and year
.

Letters between Japanese friends, regardless of the sex of the writer or the recipient, need not be signed. The beauty and diversity of Japanese handwriting, which enables instant recognition of the author, may have something to do with this. Note that Frois' knowledgeable contemporary, Rodrigues, wrote in his “Treatise on Epistolary Style” that Japanese men did, in fact, conclude their letters with their name and cipher.
⁵⁶
Perhaps both Frois and Rodrigues are correct: Japanese men
sometimes
“signed” their correspondence with women.

47. Among us, women's names are taken from the saints; the names of Japanese women are: kettle, crane, turtle, sandal, tea, bamboo
.

As Michael Cooper
⁵⁷
has pointed out, Frois seems to have gone out of his way to mention the least flattering Japanese names; he could just as easily have cited names that remain popular to this day, such as Spring (
Yuki
), Snow (
Hana
), Blossom (
Kiku
), or Chrysanthemum (
Gin
), to name but a few.
⁵⁸
The Japanese have a far greater variety of personal names (over a million) than Europeans and Americans, whose first names until recently were derived largely from a select group of biblical figures and saints. On the other hand, the ethno-diversity of America, in particular, is reflected in the fact that it has far more family names than in Japan.

48. Women in Europe wear slippers of leather or Valencian gilt; Japanese women wear footwear made of lacquered wood, with the big toe separated from the others
.

The
chapim
or slippers mentioned by Frois presumably were of goatskin or “Cordovan leather,” which could be dyed and decorated with gold and silver.
⁵⁹
The beautifully lacquered (shiny black) female footwear in Japan usually had a triangular front stilt tapering out to the tip and is called
bokuri
(rather than
geta
).
All varieties of Japanese footwear came to have the toe separation mentioned by Frois. The thong, which is
not
mentioned by Frois, generally is the most decorated part of the
geta
or
bokuri
, as that is what is seen above the
tabi
-encased foot.

49. Women in Europe ride sidesaddle or on a seat; Japanese women ride in the same manner as men
.

In Japan, where horses were relatively few in number, it was primarily the nobility who rode them (see
Chapter 8
). As Frois notes, noblewomen or the female kin of high-ranking samurai rode in the same manner as their male relatives. The Japanese did not consider the separation of a woman's legs to be obscene. Note that it was illegal for “lesser” Japanese (i.e., middle-class townsmen, wealthy farmers, brides, and so forth) to ride in the manner of the nobility. Common women did not really ride at all.

50. In the case of [our] women, cushions are placed on the seat on the back of the mule; in Japan, a white cloth is placed over the saddle of the horse of a noblewoman
.

A 1560 Japanese text cited by Okada
⁶⁰
refers to the sheet as an “oil-cloth” and “dust-remover” (
aka-tori
) and cites another source to the effect that these hung way down like skirts. Frois' contrast would seem to refer to something soft and practical pampering European behinds versus a show of purity and cleanliness on the part of the Japanese.

51. In Europe, women ordinarily prepare meals; in Japan, men do the cooking, and noblemen consider it something excellent to go into the kitchen to prepare food
.

Although European nobility made a great deal of feasting and appreciated a good chef, cooking was not perceived as a “liberal art.” European elites may have learned to paint, recite poetry, or play the viola, but cooking remained for the most part “beneath them.”
⁶¹