Lafcadio Hearn, touching upon this same feature of the family ethics of the Japanese, declares that the Bible text, “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife,” is, to their way of thinking and feeling, “one of the most immoral sentences ever written.”[207] In another important respect does the domestic morality of the Japanese differ essentially from that of the Christian West. The family is not strictly monogamous, as with us. The moral sense of the Japanese discerns nothing wrong in polygamy or concubinage.[208] As respects the whole relation of marriage, the Japanese appear to be in about the same stage of evolution as had been reached by the Hebrews at the time of Abraham. A chief virtue of the Japanese women in all their relations is obedience to the one--whether father, or husband, or son--to whom obedience is due. It is the setting of this duty before all other duties that causes the Japanese women sometimes to do what appears to us immoral, but which seems to them truest piety and noblest self-sacrifice.[209] In loyalty to duty, as they interpret duty, they maintain a standard rarely surpassed by the women of any land.[210] [Sidenote: Suicide regarded as a virtuous act] Suicide is infrequent among savage and barbarian races, but is common among all peoples in an advanced stage of civilization. It is not so much the fact itself of self-destruction that claims the attention of the historian of morals, as the light in which the act is viewed; that is, whether it is considered a virtuous or a reprehensible deed. Now the Japanese regard suicide, if prompted by a good motive, as a justifiable and noble act. The motives with them for the deed are various, as in the case of other peoples, but among these motives is one which discloses the existence among the Japanese of a sentiment unknown or almost unknown among ourselves. The deed is often committed in the way of making a solemn protest against something disapproved of in the conduct or acts of others. Thus when the Japanese government after war with China in 1898 acceded to the demands of Russia, France, and Germany respecting the recession to China of certain territories on the Continent, forty men in the Japanese army, by way of protest, committed suicide “in the ancient way.”[211] Tyrannicide is also looked upon by the Japanese as an heroic and praiseworthy deed, provided the person committing the act makes clear the self-sacrificing and patriotic character of his motives by at once taking his own life. [Sidenote: Low estimation of the virtue of truthfulness] A marked defect of the moral standard of the Japanese is the low place assigned to the virtue of truthfulness. Among the Japanese, to call a person a liar is not to apply to him a term of reproach, but rather to pay him a pleasant compliment as a person of tact and shrewdness.