“In Hachijo,” wrote Mr. Satow, “women, when about to become mothers, were formerly driven out to the huts on the mountainside, and according to the accounts of native writers, left to shift for themselves, the result not unfrequently being the death of the new-born infant, or if it survived the rude circumstances under which it first saw the light, the seeds of disease were sown which clung to it throughout its after life. The rule of non-intercourse was so strictly enforced that the woman was not allowed to leave the hut even to visit her own parents at the point of death, and besides the injurious effects that this solitary confinement must have had on the wives themselves, their prolonged absence was a serious loss to households where there were elder children and large establishments to be superintended. The rigour of the custom was so far relaxed in modern times that the huts were no longer built on the hills, but were constructed inside the homestead. It was a subject of wonder to people from other parts of Japan that the senseless practice should still be kept up, and its abolition was often recommended, but the administration of the Shoguns was not animated by a reforming spirit, and it remained for the government of the Mikado to exhort the islanders to abandon this and the previously mentioned custom. They are therefore no longer sanctioned by official authority and the force of social opinion against them is increasing, so that before long these relics of ancient ceremonial religion will in all probability have disappeared from the group of islands.” As with most early histories there is little description of custom or manners in either the _Kojiki_ or the _Nihongi_, but we gather what the general attitude was toward children from the fact that the conception of marriage was probably limited to cohabitation, this condition lasting until well on into the Middle Ages,[100] cohabitation being often secret at first, but afterward acknowledged. When the latter conditions had come to prevail, the young man, instead of going to his mistress under the cover of the night, brought her back publicly to his parents’ home, and that was the beginning of his own home. Little is there in the _Kojiki_ about the care of children but the harshness toward women about to have children, as shown in the frequent reference to the parturition houses, shows that unless they were children of royalty they were left to whatever care their mothers might be able to bestow on them. In the account of the making of Japan by the two Heavenly Deities, known as the Izani-gi-no-kami and Izana-mi-no-kami, the Man Who Invites and the Female Who Invites, it is stated that their first child was not retained. “This child,” says the legend,[101] after retailing the events that led up to its birth, “they placed in a boat of reeds and let it float away. Next they gave birth to the island of Aha. This is not reckoned among their children.”