Japan has been called the Paradise of Babies; and certain it is that childhood passes very happily in this country. In every family its children have a free run of the whole house; there is neither a nursery to which they can be confined nor any room which is exempt from their invasion. They are the real masters of the house; and father, mother, elder brother and sister are their willing slaves. They will romp unchidden into the parlour and interrupt the visitor whom the father or mother is there receiving; and the visitor too, be he friend, relative, or comparative stranger, never takes such intrusion amiss, but on the contrary, pays court to them as he knows well that through them the softest spot in the father’s heart is reached and the mother’s goodwill won. The parent, following the common custom of the country, deprecates any words uttered in their praise, for it is considered as great a breach of good manners to extol one’s children, or for that matter, husband, wife, or any other member of the family, as to belaud oneself. The mother, burning as she may be to expatiate upon her children’s marvellous sharpness or sagacity, will to the last speak disparagingly of them, but in a tone which clearly expects from the hearer an emphatic protest against her depreciation of her own offspring. Indeed, to take her at her word would be to incur her undying displeasure. Children too, on their part, brighten every household; and were it not for their enlivening presence, the Japanese home with its staid manners and cold civilities would be intolerably dull. The wife, debarred as she usually is by household duties from social distractions, would if childless lead a monotonous life; and the absence of little ones she would take to heart as if she were personally to blame for it and feel that she has missed the primary object for which she entered into wedlock. She would also have to put up sometimes with the reproaches of her husband or his parents for this failure of issue and consent to the adoption of a child to whom she must concede the love which she had hoped to reserve for her own flesh and blood. But happily for the wife, we are on the whole a prolific nation untroubled by the phantom of race suicide, and every woman is prepared to bring up a family, which is in her eyes as much the wife’s destiny as in girlhood she looked upon marriage as her inevitable fate. Her absolute concentration upon her own home, though it is a serious obstacle to her social development, brings its compensation when her wedded life is crowned with maternity, and in the smiles of infancy she finds ample consolation for the monotony of her home. This intense love of children is one of the brightest traits of Japanese home life, and with the reverence for old age, gives it a tone of quiet, undemonstrative happiness.