For it has well been said that the most wonderful aesthetic products of Japan are not its ivories, nor its bronzes, nor its porcelains, nor its swords, nor any of its marvels in metal or lacquer--but its women. Accepting as partly true the statement that woman everywhere is what man has made her, we might say that this statement is more true of the Japanese woman than of any other. Of course it required thousands and thousands of years to make her; but the period of which I am speaking beheld the work completed and perfected. Before this ethical creation, criticism should hold its breath; for there is here no single fault save the fault of a moral charm unsuited to any world of selfishness and struggle. It is the moral artist that now commands our praise,--the realizer of an ideal beyond Occidental reach. How frequently has it been asserted that, as a moral being, the Japanese woman does not seem to belong to the same race as the Japanese man! Considering that heredity is limited by sex, there is reason in the assertion: the Japanese woman is an ethically different [362] being from the Japanese man. Perhaps no such type of woman will appear again in this world for a hundred thousand years: the conditions of industrial civilization will not admit of her existence. The type could not have been created in any society shaped on modern lines, nor in any society where the competitive struggle takes those unmoral forms with which we have become too familiar. Only a society under extraordinary regulation and regimentation,--a society in which all self-assertion was repressed, and self-sacrifice made a universal obligation,--a society in which personality was clipped like a hedge, permitted to bud and bloom from within, never from without,--in short, only a society founded upon ancestor-worship, could have produced it. It has no more in common with the humanity of this twentieth century of ours--perhaps very much less--than has the life depicted upon old Greek vases. Its charm is the charm of a vanished world--a charm strange, alluring, indescribable as the perfume of some flower of which the species became extinct in our Occident before the modern languages were born. Transplanted successfully it cannot be: under a foreign sun its forms revert to something altogether different, its colours fade, its perfume passes away. The Japanese woman can be known only in her own country,--the Japanese woman as prepared and perfected by the old-time education for that strange society in which the charm [363] of her moral being,--her delicacy, her supreme unselfishness, her child-like piety and trust, her exquisite tactful perception of all ways and means to make happiness about her,--can be comprehended and valued.