JAPANESE WIVES

Evening Star, Issue 25619, 20 October 1945, Page 11

JAPANESE WIVES

"UNHAPPIEST IN WORLD" During the past two or three weeks much has been read about the cheerful Japanese who smile even in the hour of defeat. Those who have studied them state that the people of Japan are never more subtle than when they smile. Mrs Helen Moscicki, who lived in Japan for three years, while her husband was Polish Minister there. Bays in an article in a London paper that in those three years she tried to understand Japanese women and to discover why they spoke of everything with the same smile, whether it was flowers or disaster. " The women seemed to live behind the smile as though it were an impenetrable wall," she wrote. "To the Japanese woman, who, I soon discovered, is among the unhappiest in the world, the highest achievement, and often an expression of great heroism, is to bear every sorrow and misfortune with a smile."

The writer described the Japanese woman as obedient, artificial, and because of her training and environment, completely devoid of enterprise or individuality. In law she is not regarded as a person. When she marries she has no legal status whatever. She cannot divorce her husband, but he can divorce her simply by sending her back to her family. Whatever her family's position, the wife is alwas a slave. Site is the first to rise in.the morning and the last to retire. Even her pleasure in her children is restricted because, »e--cording to the law, thev belong on!v to her husband.

" Once in a long while, when a Japanese wife can endure her life no longer, she tries to break away, but her attempt usually ends in the most abysmal tragedy," Mrs Moscicki wrote. " The only sure release is suicido and after living in Japan for several vent's one understands why self-destruction is surrounded with a halo of poetry. The fashionable spots for suicides are always picturesque."