No Quarter for Concubines

Concubinage fell into official disrepute in Japan in the late 19th Century when the Japanese discovered that Westerners considered it a barbaric practice. Many a wealthy Japanese male, however, continues to operate on the principle that two mates are better than one.

A stern exception to this easygoing rule is 70-year-old Mrs. Waka Yamada, who looks on concubines in about the way that Carry Nation looked on saloonkeepers. Sometimes admitted to the courts as a "special attorney," Mrs. Yamada argues her cause eloquently. Last January she won a precedent-shattering acquittal for a wife who admitted having murdered her husband's concubine.

Three weeks ago Mrs. Yamada, who is president of the National Association of Mothers' and Children's Clubs, carried her crusade into a meeting of the association's local chapter in the city of Isezaki. To Isezaki's clubwomen Mrs. Yamada shrilled, "No concubine is fit to be a member of a women's organization." Taking Mrs. Yamada at her word, the respected chief secretary of the Isezaki chapter, 39-year-old Nami Marata, remorsefully decided to resign. Nami, as everyone in the Isezaki chapter knew, is the mistress of a wealthy merchant.

The chapter's other officers were outraged. At a stormy general meeting they agreed that, "We can't stand quietly by while Nami, who worked so hard for the organization, is kicked out merely because she's a concubine." When a small minority of the chapter's members persisted in supporting Mrs. Yamada's anti-concubine stand, all eleven of Nami's fellow officers resigned their positions in a huff. But before the meeting adjourned, the pro-Nami majority spiritedly resolved that concubines had a right to belong to the chapter, that concubine-keeping men were as much to be censured as concubines themselves, and that equality of the sexes should be strictly enforced.

President Yamada, unimpressed by the resolution, stuck to her guns. Said she, "Before women start blaming the men, they should reflect on themselves."

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