Educated Japanese are thoroughly aware that English and Americans see immorality and obscenity when they do not, but they are not as conscious of the chasm between our conventional attitudes and their tenet that ‘human feelings’ should not intrude upon serious affairs of life. It is, however, a major source of our difficulty in understanding Japanese attitudes about love and erotic pleasure. They fence off one province which belongs to the wife from another which belongs to erotic pleasure. Both provinces are equally open and aboveboard. The two are not divided from each other as in American life by the fact that one is what a man admits to the public and the other is surreptitious. They are separate because one is in the circle of a man’s major obligations and the other in the circle of minor relaxation. This way of mapping out ‘proper place’ to each area makes the two as separate for the ideal father of a family as it does for the man about town. The Japanese set up no ideal, as we do in the United States, which pictures love and marriage as one and the same thing. We approve of love just in proportion as it is the basis of one’s choice of a spouse. ‘Being in love’ is our most approved reason for marriage. After marriage a husband’s physical attraction to another woman is humiliating to his wife because he bestows elsewhere something that rightly belongs to her. The Japanese judge differently. In the choice of a spouse the young man should bow to his parent’s choice and marry blind. He must observe great formality in his relations with his wife. Even in the give and take of family life their children do not see an erotically affectionate gesture pass between them. ‘The real aim of marriage is regarded in this country,’ as a contemporary Japanese says in one of their magazines, ‘as the procreation of children and thereby to assure the continuity of the family life. Any purpose other than this must simply serve to pervert the true meaning of it.’
But this does not mean that a man remains virtuous by limiting himself to such a life. If he can afford it he keeps a mistress. In strong contrast to China he does not add to his family this woman who has caught his fancy. If he did that, it would confuse the two areas of life which should be kept separate. The girl may be a geisha, highly trained in music and dance and message and the arts of entertainment, or she may be a prostitute. In any case he signs a contract with the house where she is employed and this contract protects the girl from abandonment and ensures her a financial return. He sets her up in an establishment of her own. Only in highly exceptional cases when the girl has a child whom the man wishes to bring up with his own children does he bring her into his home, and then she is designated as one of the servants, not as a concubine. The child calls the legal wife ‘mother,’ and ties between the real mother and her child are not acknowledged. The whole Oriental arrangement of polygamy, which is so pronounced a traditional pattern in China, is thus quite un-Japanese. The Japanese keep family obligations and ‘human feelings’ even spatially apart.
Only the upper class can afford to keep mistresses, but most men have at some time visited geishas or prostitutes. Such visits are not in the least surreptitious. A man’s wife may dress and prepare him for his evening of relaxation. The house he visits may send the bill to his wife and she pays it as a matter of course. She may be unhappy about it but that is her own affair. A visit to the geisha house is more expensive than a visit to a prostitute but the payment a man makes for the privilege of such an evening does not include the right to make her a sexual partner. What he gets is the pleasure of being entertained by beautifully dressed and punctiliously mannered girls who have been meticulously trained for their r?le. To gain access to a particular geisha, the man would have to become her patron and sign a contract according to which she would become his mistress, or he would have to captivate her by his charms so that she gave herself to him of her own free will. All evening with geisha girls, however, is no asexual affair. Their dances, their repartee, their songs, their gestures are traditionally suggestive and carefully calculated to express all that an upper-class wife’s maynot. They are ‘in the circle of human feelings’ and give relief from ‘the circle of ko.’ There is no reason not to indulge oneself but the two spheres belong apart.