I find the culture of Japan to be very intriguing . When ever I have a chance to learn more about the culture I will accept the opportunity to. I wanted to check out this book for marginalia because this book discusses how the women of that time period were portrayed by the men of the time period.

You can learn a lot of information from the marginalia in this book. I realized that the annotations in this book was more prevalent toward the middle and back of the book. This could mean that the middle of the book and beyond contained more valuable information or it could mean that the reader wasn’t as interested in the beginning of the book as he was in the end of the book. There could be many different reasons for the this annotative pattern. The content of the annotations holds the most value though. There are noticeably two different annotative styles In these photos provided. On page 21 you can notice how the person who annotated put brackets around the paragraph they thought was useful. From page 86 and up you can see how the sentences are underlined and connected with parenthesis instead of brackets.

From the annotations alone I was able to figure out that the Japanese wife, of this time, is responsible for the happiness of her home. Even if her husband is the reason for an unhappy home she would still take the blame. Her duty is to her husband and to her parents-in-law, but her duty is to her parents-in-law before her husband.