His wife has not the same privilege. Her duty is faithfulness to her husband. She would have to be surreptitious. Even when she might be tempted, comparatively few women in Japan live their lives in sufficient privacy to carry off a love affair. Women who are regarded as nervous or unstable are said to have hysteri. ‘The most frequent difficulty of women involves not their social but their sexual lives. Many cases of insanity and most of hysteri (nervousness, instability) are clearly due to sexual maladjustments. A girl must take whatever her husband may give her of sexual satisfaction.’ Most women’s diseases, the farmers say in Suye Mura, ‘begin in the womb’ and then go to the head. When her husband looks elsewhere, she may have recourse to the accepted Japanese customs of masturbation, and, from the peasant villages to the homes of the great, women treasure traditional implements for this purpose. She is granted in the villages, moreover, certain exuberances in erotic behavior when she has borne a child. Before she is a mother, she would not make a sex joke, but afterward, and as she grows older, her conversation at a mixed party is full of them. She entertains the party, too, with very free sexual dances, jerking her hips back and forth to the accompaniment of ribald songs. ‘These performances invariably bring roars of laughter.’ In Suye Mura, too, when recruits were welcomed back at the outskirts of the village after their Army training, women dressed as men and made obscene jokes and pretended to rape young girls.
Japanese women are therefore allowed certain kinds of freedom about sexual matters, the more, too, the lower-born they are. They must observe many taboos during most of their lives but there is no taboo which requires them to deny that they know the facts of life. When it gratifies the men, they are obscene. Likewise, when it gratifies the men, they are asexual. When they are of ripe age, they may throw off taboos, and if they are low-born, be as ribald as any man. The Japanese aim at proper behavior for various ages and occasions rather than at consistent characters like the Occidental ‘pure woman’ and the ‘hussy.’
The man also has his exuberances, as well as his areas where great restraint is required. Drinking in male company, especially with geisha attendants, is a gratification which he makes the most of. Japanese men enjoy being tipsy and there is no rule which bids a man carry his liquor well. They relax their formal postures when they have had a few thimblefuls of sake, and they like to lean against each other and be very familiar. They are seldom violent or aggressive when they are drunk, though a few ‘hard-to-get-along-with men’ may get quarrelsome. Apart from such ‘free areas’ as drinking, men should never be, as they say, unexpected. To speak of anyone, in the serious conduct of his life, as unexpected, is the nearest the Japanese come to a curse word except for the word ‘fool.’