Page:A handbook of modern Japan (IA handbookofmodern01clem).pdf/238

doo and Chinese conceptions of woman's position moulded public opinion and thus eventually changed the manners, customs, and laws of Japan so as to relegate woman to an abnormally inferior position. As only one striking example out of many possible illustrations of the relative positions of man and woman, we note that, in the case of the death of the husband, the law prescribed mourning garments for thirteen months and abstinence from impurity for fifty days; but, in the case of the death of the wife, mourning garments for three months and abstinence for twenty days were sufficient.

Mr. Gubbins in the introduction to Part II. of his translation of the Civil Code, writes as follows:—

"The legal position of women in Japan before the commencement of modern legislative reform is well illustrated by the fact that offences came under different categories according to their commission by the wife against the husband, or by the husband against the wife, and by the curious anomaly that, while the husband stood in the first degree of relationship to his wife, the latter stood to him only in the second.^[1] The disabilities under which a woman formerly labored shut her out from the exercise of almost all rights. She could not inherit or own property in her own name, she could not become the head of a family, she could not adopt, and she could not be the guardian of her child. The maxim, mulier est finis familiae, was as true in Japan as in Rome, though its observance may have been less strict, owing to the greater frequency of adoption.