Japan and Sex.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 661, 14 January 1933, Page 8

Japan and Sex.

A Man’s Country

Baroness Admires Western Equality.

By WALTER TRUMBELL. NEW YORK, November 30. rpHE UNITED STATES is a better country for women in most things than Japan, in the opinion of Baroness Ishimoto, leading Japanese birth control advocate and feminist. Japan, she asserts, is a man’s country. “ Here I notice," she says, “ that a young married couple, especially when both work, co-operate in household duties. The man may possibly do the marketing, or even help the wife in the preparation of meals. That is not so in Japan. There the young husband never helps around the house. He sits still while his wife does the work. He feels that he could not aid in any household task without loss of dignity. ‘ I was married at seventeen, and my husband, Baron Kekichi Ishimoto, who had taken his degree as a mining engineer at the Imperial University of Tokio, was much interested in labour problems. So for three years we stayed in the coal mining country of Western Japan and lived among the labourers. The baron studied both the mines and the workers. As you say here, he was learning the business. “ But,” continued the pretty, slender Japanese, who was dressed in her native costume of sandals and kimono—and don’t call it kemona, which means animal—“ the first thing I noticed was that, while the men and women worked all day together iti the mines, when they came home at night the man rested while the woman did the cooking and the housework. And, of course, the women took care of the children and had the babies. I have known of babies being born in the mine." The baroness called attention to the fact that the whole family system here is different from Japan’s. In Japan, the oldest man is not only actually, but legally the head of the family, responsible for all its members. The family is a unit, controlled by its head. Marriages are not made without his consent. He is consulted on any important matter. Baron Ishimoto is now head of his family and the baroness had to get his permission in writing before securing a passport to come to the United States. The baron is now in Manchukuo, where he has mining interests. Japanese Girls Study Harder. Baron and Baroness Ishimoto first came to the United States in 1919, for purposes of study. While the baron went to the International Labour Conference in Washington, the baroness stayed in New York and took a business course at the Ballard School in the Y.W.C.A. She studied English, . stenography, typewriting and bookkeeping, and, before returning to Japan, met Margaret Sanger and from her got her first ideas concerning the subject of birth control. All Japanese are studious. Japan is more than 99 per cent literate. “ I think our Japanese girls have to study harder than the girls over here,” said the baroness. “ One reason is that we are at the point where we must know both eastern and western customs. After attending kindergarten, a child goes for six years to what corresponds to your grammar school. “ A girl then attends for five years what you probably would call a finishing school. In addition to reading, writing and arithmetic she must study Japanese, Chinese and Western history, either French or English, Japanese and Western art and music and natural sciences. Study Western History. “Japan not only studies Western history, languages and arts,” continued the baroness, “ but has been greatly affected by Western customs. Women have no political rights and there is decidedly a double standard of morals, but we, too, have our younger generation. “No girl of the older social set would go anywhere with a young man without a chaperone and, in fact, the friends of their brothers are about the only men outside the family these girls see. But we have our modern and newly rich sets. The women in these are not so careful of old social customs. They smoke, rouge their nails and wear what they believe to be the latest Western fashions. “ Many 'of these fashions,” said the baroness, “ they get from magazines, sometimes with humorous results. Recent fashion drawings, for example, portray women wearing long dresses and these became a vogue in Japan. When I arrived here, I was glad to see that American women had stuck to more sensible clothes.” The baroness said that Western customs were especially noticeable in their effect on the tea houses which were supposed to be typically Japanese. These tea houses now have phonographs and the geishas, who would correspond to our dance hall hostesses, have learned Western dances although they still wear their Eastern costumes and elaborate hairdress. They also try to learn English. A few of them have adopted Western clothes. Not only foreigners dance with these girls, but the fashionable youth of Japan leave their female relatives at home and go out to dance the one-step and the waltz. (N.A.N.A.)