Women do not learn the code of giri-to-one’s-name and they do not have the modern experiences of boys’ middle schools and Army training. Nor do they go through analogous experiences. Their life cycle is much more consistent than their brothers.’ From their earliest memories they have been trained to accept the fact that boys get the precedence and the attention and the presents which are denied to them. The rule of life which they must honor denies them the privilege of overt self-assertion.
Nevertheless, as babies and as little children, they have shared with their brothers the privileged life of little children in Japan. They have been specially dressed in bright reds as little girls, a color they will give up as adults until they are allowed it again when they reach their second privileged period at the age of sixty. In the home they may be courted like their brothers in the contest between mother and grandmother. Their brothers and sisters, too, demand that a sister, like any other member of the family, like them ‘best.’ The children ask her to show her preference by letting them clap with her, and she can often distribute her favors from the grandmothers to the two-year-old baby. Japanese do not like to sleep alone, and a child’s pallet can be laid at night close up beside that of a chosen elder’s. The proof that ‘you like me best’ that day is very often that the beds of the two are pulled up close together. Girls are allowed compensations even at the period when they are excluded from boys’ play groups at nine or ten. They are flattered by new kinds of hair-do, and at the age of fourteen to eighteen their coiffure is the most elaborate in Japan. They reach the age when they may wear silk instead of cotton and when every effort is made to provide them with clothes that enhance their charms. In these ways girls are given certain gratifications.
The responsibility for the restraints that are required of them, too, is placed squarely upon them, and not vested in an arbitrarily authoritarian parent. Parents exercise their prerogatives not by corporal punishments but by their calm, unswerving expectation that the girl will live up to what is required of her. It is worthwhile quoting an extreme example of such training because it gives so well the kind of non-authoritarian pressure which is also characteristic of less strict and privileged upbringing. From the age of six little Etsu Inagaki was taught to memorize the Chinese classics by a learned Confucian scholar.
Throughout my two-hour lesson he never moved the slightest fraction of an inch except for his hands and his lips. And I sat before him on the matting in an equally correct and unchanging position. Once I moved. It was in the midst of a lesson. For some reason I was restless and swayed my body slightly, allowing my folded knee to slip a trifle from the proper angle. The faintest shade of surprise crossed my instructor’s face; then very quietly he closed his book, saying gently but with a stern air: ‘Little Miss, it is evident that your mental attitude today is not suited for study. You should retire to your room and meditate.’ My little heart was almost killed with shame. There was nothing I could do. I humbly bowed to the picture of Confucius and then to my teacher, and, backing respectfully from the room, I slowly went to my father to report as I always did, at the close of my lesson. Father was surprised, as the time was not yet up, and his unconscious remark, ‘How quickly you have done your work!’ was like a death knell. The memory of that moment hurts like a bruise to this very day.
And Mrs. Sugimoto summarizes one of the most characteristic parental attitudes in Japan when she describes a grandmother in another context:
Serenely she expected everyone to do as she approved; there was no scolding nor arguing, but her expectation, soft as silk floss and quite as strong, held her little family to the paths that seemed right to her.
One of the reasons why this ‘expectation, soft as silk floss and quite as strong,’ can be so effective is that training is so explicit for every art and skill. It is the habit that is taught, not just the rules. Whether it is proper use of chopsticks in childhood or proper ways of entering a room, or is the tea ceremony or massage later in life, the movements are performed over and over literally under the hands of grownups till they are automatic. Adults do not consider that children will ‘pick up’ the proper habits when the time to employ them comes around. Mrs. Sugimoto describes how she set her husband’s table after she was betrothed at fourteen. She had never seen her future husband. He was in America and she was in Echigo, but over and over, under her mother’s and her grandmother’s eyes, ‘I myself cooked the food which Brother told us Matsuo especially liked. His table was placed next to mine and I arranged for it to be always served before my own. Thus I learned to be watchful for the comfort of my prospective husband. Grandmother and Mother always spoke as if Matsuo were present, and I was as careful of my dress and conduct as if he had really been in the room. Thus I grew to respect him and to respect my own position as his wife.’
A boy too receives careful habit training by example and imitation, though it is less intensive than the girl’s. When he has ‘learned,’ no alibi is accepted. After adolescence, however, he is left, in one important field of his life, largely to his own initiative. His elders do not teach him habits of courting. The home is a circle from which all overt amorous behavior is excluded, and the segregation of unrelated boys and girls has been extreme since he was nine or ten. The Japanese ideal is that his parents will arrange a marriage for him before he has really been interested in sex, and it is therefore desirable that a boy should be ‘shy’ in his behavior with girls. In the villages there is a vast amount of teasing on the subject which often does keep boys ‘shy.’ But boys try to learn. In the old days, and even recently in more isolated villages of Japan, many girls, sometimes the great majority, were pregnant before marriage. Such pre-marital experience was a ‘free area’ not involved in the serious business of life. The parents were expected to arrange the marriages without reference to these affairs. But nowadays, as a Japanese said to Doctor Embree in Suye Mura, ‘Even a servant girl has enough education to know that she must keep her virginity.’ Discipline for those boys who go to middle school, too, is sternly directed against any kind of association with the opposite sex. Japanese education and public opinion tries to prevent pre-marital familiarity between the sexes. In their movies, they reckon as ‘bad’ those young men who show some signs of being at ease with a young woman; the ‘good’ ones are those who, to American eyes, are brusque and even uncivil to an attractive girl. Being at ease with a girl means that these boys have ‘played around,’ or have sought out geishas or prostitutes or café girls. The geisha house is the ‘best’ way to learn because ‘she teaches you. A man can relax and just watch.’ He need not be afraid of exhibiting clumsiness, and sex relations with the geisha girl are not expected of him. But not many Japanese boys can afford the geisha house. They can go to cafés and watch how men treat the girls familiarly, but such observation is not the kind of training they have learned to expect in other fields. Boys keep their fear of gaucherie for a long time. Sex is one of the few areas of their lives where they have to learn some new kind of behavior without the personal tutelage of accredited elders. Families of standing provide ‘bride books’ and screens with many detailed pictures for the young couple when they marry, and, as one Japanese said, ‘You can learn from books, the way you learn the rules for making a garden. Your father doesn’t teach you how to make a Japanese garden; it’s a hobby you learn when you’re older.’ The juxtaposition of sex and gardening as two things you learn from books is interesting, even though most Japanese young men learn sex behavior in other ways. In any case, they do not learn through meticulous adult tutelage. This difference, in training underscores for the young man the Japanese tenet that sex is an area removed from that serious business of life over which his elders preside and in which they painstakingly train his habits. It is an area of self-gratification which he masters with much fear of embarrassment. The two areas have their different rules. After his marriage he may have sexual pleasures elsewhere without being in the least surreptitious about it, and in so doing he does not infringe upon his wife’s rights nor threaten the stability of his marriage.