EXAGGERATED DUTY

New Zealand Tablet, 3 December 1908, Page 37

EXAGGERATED DUTY

The Japanese make much of the duty of children to parents. In some of their popular stories they exaggerate" the wholesome virtue until it becomes absurd. There is a grotyp of such tales called ' The Four-and-Twenty Paragons of Filial Piety,' some of which Mr. Basil Hall Camberlain collects in ' Things Japanese.

One is the story of the paragon whose cruel stepmother was very fond of fish. In spite of her harsh treatment, he lay naked on a frozen lake until his body melted a hole in the ice. He caught two fish that came up to breathe, and set them before his stepmother. Another paragon lay uncovered at night in order that the mosquitoes should fasten on him. alone and allow his parents to slumber undisturbed.

Still another, who was extremely poor, determined to sacrifice his own child in order to save food to support his aged mother. He was rewarded by heaven wilh the discovery of a vessel filled with gold, on which the whole family lived happily ever after. A fourth gave her father a chance to escape while she clung to the jaws of the uger which was about to devour him.

The drollest story of all is of Rovaishi. This paragon, although seventy years old, used to dress in baby's clothes and sprawl about the floor. His object was piously to delude his parents, who were more than ninety years of age, into the idea that they could not be very old, after all, seeing that they had an infant son.