"In the records of the Japanese glory, valor, fortitude in affliction, greatness in the hour of death, filial devotion, wifely affection, in all the straits of life when codes of honor, morals, and religion are tested, in the person of their professors, the literature of history and romance, the every-day routine of fact, teem with instances of the Japanese woman's power and willingness to share whatever of pain or sorrow is appointed to man. In the annals of persecution, in the red roll of martyrs, no names are brighter, no faces gleam more peacefully amidst the flames, or on the cross of transfixing spears, or on the pyre of rice-straw, or on the precipice edge, or in the open grave about to be filled up, than the faces of the Christian Japanese women in the seventeenth century. Such is the position of woman in Japan in the past."[106] In later times woman fell from her high estate and even lost power over herself, as she came under her father in the home, under her husband when married, and under her son when widowed. "The introduction of the Chinese civilization with the Confucian system of moral philosophy, and of Buddism, and later on the establishment of Feudalism, were prejudicial to this high position of women. Chinese philosophers seem not to have had much respect for women; while Buddism regards women as sinful creatures, a temptation and snare, an obstacle to peace and holiness. In our feudal system, in the code of Bushido, there was no reverence for women as in the Western Chivalry."[107] Buddism entered into Japan in the sixth century of the Christian era and Confucianism came in some earlier, while Feudalism existed in Japan earlier than in Europe and continued later, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries being the time during which the feudal system received its most perfect development and the _Bushido_, or "The Way of the Samurai," was fully elaborated. The Japanese women had a love for beauty, order and neatness; they were patient and long-suffering; their hopes lay in their children and they tended and cared for them as, perhaps, no other nation of women ever did. They had plenty to keep them busy with their numerous household duties and the making of their own clothing and that of their children. Many of them were engaged in the care of silk-worms and in tea-picking. The country wife was busy in the rice-field, doing her work alongside her husband and sons, as well as performing the other duties that came into her country life. "Among the daily tasks of the housewife, one, and by no means the least of her duties, is to receive, duly acknowledge, and return in suitable manner, the presents received in the family. Presents are not confined to special seasons, although upon certain occasions etiquette is rigid in its requirements in this matter, but they may be given and received at all times, for the Japanese are pre-eminently a present-giving nation."[108]