Note 205 — Chapter VI · JAPANESE MORALS: AN IDEAL OF LOYALTY

“Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the author of one’s being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of parents, by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves; any social system in which the mother-in-law is not entitled to the obedient service of the daughter-in-law, appears to him [the Japanese] of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.”—Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East (1895), p. 89.