It will therefore be readily imagined with what eagerness the arrival of the little stranger, is awaited and how the childless wife will move heaven and earth for the blessings of motherhood. She will try nostrums of every kind, submit to any regimen however irksome, that may be prescribed for her, and visit watering-places and other resorts for the improvement of her physical condition; she will offer prayers at one temple after another, or sometimes make long pilgrimages for the purpose, in defiance of the popular belief that a child born in answer to prayer is either itself doomed to early death or destined to cut short its parents’ lives.
When the unpleasant symptoms of morning-sickness warn the wife that she is about to become a mother, a midwife is called in from time to time to examine her and relieve her pain. In the fifth month an auspicious day is selected on which her relatives are invited to dinner to hear the formal announcement of her interesting state. On this day the midwife girds her under her clothes with a wide strip of bleached cotton, with the object of keeping the child as small as possible so as to ensure a light delivery. This girdle is worn up to the moment of birth. With the same object the wife does considerable amount of active housework, such as cleaning and sweeping the rooms, until the beginning of the last month when she ceases from all work and calmly awaits the delivery. Meanwhile, the midwife pays periodical visits, and in a well-to-do family she is often made to live in the house during the last month. She usually assists alone at the birth, for a doctor is seldom called in unless complications have set in or surgical operations are necessary. The accouchement, if indeed it can be so called which in Japan takes place in a sitting posture, is effected, if in the daytime, in a room darkened with half-closed doors and a screen round the bed. The delivery is left as far as possible to nature. The midwife, who is deeply versed in the intricacies of the lunar calendar, can always tell the exact hour at which the tide begins to flow, when the delivery oftenest occurs; and until that time she merely soothes and alleviates. On the whole, the curse of Eve sits lightly on her daughters in Japan, for which we have probably to thank the simplicity of our diet and mode of life. The woman who dies in child-birth is an object of infinite pity; her fate is supposed to be the consequence of her sins in a former state of existence. In lonely country-sides, in memory of such a woman, a piece of white cloth supported on four sticks is set over a stream, together with a ladle, with which passers-by are entreated to pour water into the cloth, because only when the cloth rots away completely will she be purged of her sins and enabled to enter Paradise.