JAPANESE GIRLS AND WOMEN. BY ALICE MABEL BACON – 28 5niti
CHAPTER V. OLD AGE. –3As one rides about the streets, one often sees a little, white-haired old woman trotting about with a yoke over her shoulders from which are suspended two swinging baskets, filled with fresh vegetables. The fact that her hair is still growing to its natural length shows that she is still a wife and not a widow; her worn and patched blue cotton clothes, bleached light from much washing, show that extreme poverty is her lot in life; and as she hobbles along with the gait peculiar to those who carry a yoke, my thoughts are busy with her home, which, though poor and small, is doubtless clean and comfortable, but my eye follows her through the city's crowd, where laborer, soldier, student, and high official jostle each other by the way. Suddenly I[129] see her pause before the gateway of a temple. She sets her burden down, and there in the midst of the bustling throng, with bowed head, folded hands, and moving lips, she invokes her god, snatching this moment from her busy life to seek a blessing for herself and her dear ones. The throng moves busily on, making a little eddy around the burden she has laid down, but paying no heed to the devout little figure standing there; then in a moment the prayer is finished; she stoops, picks up her yoke, balances it on her shoulders, and moves on with the crowd, to do her share while her strength lasts, and to be cared for tenderly, I doubt not, by children and children's children when her work is done.Another picture comes to me, too, a picture of one whose memory is an inspiring thought to the many who have the honor to call her "mother." A stately old lady, left a widow many years ago, before the recent changes had wrought havoc preparatory to further progress, she seemed always to me the model of a mother of the old school. Herself a woman of thorough classical education, her example and teaching were to both sons and daughters a constant [130]inspiration; and in her old age she found herself the honored head of a family well known in the arts of war and peace, a goodly company of sons and daughters, every one of them heirs of her spirit and of her intellect. Though conservative herself, and always clinging to the old customs, she put no block in the path of her children's progress, and her fine character, heroic spirit, and stanch loyalty to what she believed were worth more to her children than anything else could have been. Tried by war, by siege, by banishment, by danger and sufferings of all kinds, to her was given at last an old age of prosperity among children of whom she might well be proud. Keeping her physical vigor to the end, and dying at last, after an illness of only two days, her spirit passed out into the great unknown, ready to meet its dangers as bravely as she had met those of earth, or to enjoy its rest as sweetly and appreciatively as she had enjoyed that of her old age in the house of her oldest son.My acquaintance with her was limited by our lack of common language, but was a most admiring and appreciative one on my side; and I esteem it one of the chief[131] honors of my stay in Japan, that upon my last meeting with her, two weeks before her death, she gave me her wrinkled but still beautiful and delicately shaped hand at parting,—a deference to foreign customs that she only paid upon special occasions.Two weeks later, amid such rain as Japanese skies know all too well how to let fall, I attended her funeral at the cemetery of Aoyama. The cemetery chapel was crowded, but a place was reserved for me, on account of special ties that bound me to the family, just behind the long line of white-robed mourners. In the Buddhist faith she had lived, and by the Buddhist ceremonial she was buried,—the chanted ritual, the gorgeously robed priests, and the heavy smell of incense in the air reminding one of a Roman Catholic ceremony. The white wooden coffin was placed upon a bier at the entrance to the chapel, and when the priests had done their work, and the ecclesiastical ceremony was over, the relatives arose, one by one, walked over to the coffin, bowed low before it, and placed a grain of incense upon the little censer that stood on a table before the[132] bier, then, bowing again, retired to their places. Slowly and solemnly, from the tall soldier son, his hair already streaked with gray, to the two-year-old grandchild, all paid this last token of respect to a noble spirit; and after the relatives the guests, each in the order of rank or nearness to the deceased, stepped forward and performed the same ceremony before leaving the room. What the meaning of the rite was, I did not know, whether a worship of strange gods or no; but to me, as I performed the act, it only signified the honor in which I held the memory of a heroic woman who had done well her part in the world according to the light that God had given her.Japanese art loves to picture the old woman with her kindly, wrinkled face, leaving out no wrinkle of them all, but giving with equal truthfulness the charm of expression that one finds in them. Long life is desired by all as passionately as by ancient Hebrew poet and psalmist, and with good reason, for only by long life can a woman attain the greatest honor and happiness. We often exclaim in impatience at the thought of the weakness and dependence of old[133] age, and pray that we may die in the fullness of our powers, before the decay of advancing years has made us a burden upon our friends. But in Japan, dependence is the lot of woman, and the dependence of old age is that which is most respected and considered. An aged parent is never a burden, is treated by all with the greatest love and tenderness; and if times are hard, and food and other comforts are scarce, the children, as a matter of course, deprive themselves and their children to give ungrudgingly to their old father and mother. Faults there are many in the Japanese social system, but ingratitude to parents, or disrespect to the aged, must not be named among them; and Young America may learn a salutary lesson by the study of the place that old people occupy in the home.