In Art. 790 it is stipulated that “a husband and wife are mutually bound to support one another.” A husband manages the property of his wife, unless he is unable to do so, when she manages it herself. “With regard to daily household matters, a wife is regarded as her husband’s agent.” There are two ways of effecting divorce: either by arrangement, which is effected in a similar way to marriage—that is, by simply having the registration of marriage cancelled—or by judicial divorce, which may be granted on several grounds specified in the Code. But divorce by arrangement cannot be effected by persons under 25 years of age, without consent of the person or persons by whose consent marriage was effected. And if the persons who effect this kind of divorce fail to determine who is to have the custody of the children, they belong to the father; but “in cases where the father leaves the family owing to divorce, the custody of the children belongs to the mother,” evidently because she remains in the family. In other words, _children are chattels of the family_. The grounds on which judicial divorce is granted include bigamy, adultery on the part of the wife, the husband’s receiving a criminal sentence for an offence against morality, cruel treatment or grave insult such as to render living together unbearable, desertion with evil intent, cruel treatment or gross insult of or by lineal ascendants. The new Civil Code indirectly sanctions concubinage by stipulating (in Art. 827) that “an illegitimate child may be recognized by the father or mother” by giving notice to a registrar. Such a child is called _shoshi_, but is not legitimized. It is, however, stipulated (in Art. 728) that between a wife and a _shoshi_ “the same relationship as that between parent and child is established.” That seems clearly enough to mean that a wife must accept a concubine’s child as if it were her own, in case the father “recognizes” it. This would appear to be little, if any, advance over the old _régime_, where “the wife of the father,” as she was technically called, frequently had to accept as her own child that of a concubine. Mr. Gubbins makes the following explanation of _shoshi_:— “This term illustrates the transitionary phase through which Japanese law is passing. Japanese dictionaries define _shoshi_ as the child of a concubine, and this, so long as concubinage was sanctioned by law, and the question of legitimacy never arose, was the accepted meaning of the term. The law of Japan, which, in the course of its development on western lines, has come to accept the principle of legitimacy, and to admit of the legitimization of children by the subsequent marriage of their parents, now recognizes an intermediate stage between legitimacy and illegitimacy.”