WOMEN OF JAPAN.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 44, 20 January 1938, Page 12

WOMEN OF JAPAN.

LOYALTY AND PATRIOTISM. Whatever country is the aggressor in war, the women of both combatant nations suffer. Much has been written lately of the Chinese women’s heroic reaction to the invasion that is laying waste their land, but very little is heard of the women of Japan, whose men are being torn from their families to fight on the Asiatic mainland. Mrs R. D. M. Shaw, who, with her husband, Rev. R. D. M. Shaw, arrived in Sydney recently, after 30 years in Japan, gives an interesting account of the women of that country. During the last four years she has lived in Tokio, where her husband was attached to St. Paul’s University.

“The great Japanese virtues are loyalty and patriotism—these, with self-control, aretaught girls and boys from their earliest years,” she says. THE MAN FIRST. “Ancient tradition always puts the man first. , A little girl must give way to her brother to a certain extent in everything.” . Tradition and early training explain the intensely patriotic attitude of Japanese women while their husbands and brothers are being conscripted to fight a war of aggression. The severe censorship, which hides both Japanese defeats and the case for China, does not give the whole reason for the support Japanese.women lend the war aims of their Government.

“Not many of the girls are educated abroad, where often the boys may go to a foreign university,” Mrs Shaw explains. “Usually girls are married by the time they are 20. Even if they have gone to a modern school for girls where advanced ideas are taught, and even if these ideas should be held so strongly that they would embarrass their families before marriage, after marriage the women are so busy with their homes that their ideas qften peter out. “It is hard for an Australian women to understand the Japanese. For instance, a woman will never precede any of the men of her family into a room. "When a man wishes to entertain his friends, he does not take them home, but to an hotel. The wife can never have a women’s party if there are men in the house.” said Mrs Shaw. '

“So the Japanese women are largely kept in ignorance of what goes on at the Chinese front.

“Since the war began the Japanese have organised their guilds into ‘war chests’ and so on to supply things for the men at the front. “Every time a man is called up a representative from each house in his district will go to see him off, waving a little flag. The women wear their white kitchen aprons with long sleeves which, with a ribbon band across the front, are signs of their membership of the Women’s National Organisation.”