Although a women’s university was established not long ago in Tokyo, a girl’s education generally stops with the high school, if it goes so far. As she has been six years in the primary and four in the high school, she has had ten years of schooling if she has passed every class satisfactorily from the first to the last, and she is sixteen years old when she leaves the high school. And as a Japanese girl usually marries at eighteen or nineteen, she has not much time to spare before she has to think seriously of matrimony. Two or three years of home life are all that is left her before she will have to take charge of a household of her own. And further, as she is supposed to pass the flower of her youth at four and twenty, a college course would bring her dangerously close to the lower limit of spinsterhood, and so, as things stand in Japan, female universities would, even were they plentiful, not be so popular as they should deserve. In the high school the same subjects, more advanced, are taught as in the lower school, the only new subject of importance being domestic economy.
The middle school has a course of five years, in which the pupils are taught, besides the advanced course of the subjects studied in the lower school, Chinese classics, algebra, geometry, physiology and hygiene, physics and chemistry, law and political economy. English becomes a subject of importance, being taught seven hours a week. When the course is completed satisfactorily by regular promotion every year, the pupil is seventeen years old. He is now ready to commence his secondary education, for which he will enter the special higher schools for the professions or the preparatory high school for the university.
A very large percentage of children of the school-age pass through the primary school; but of these a comparatively small proportion enter the middle school, partly because many of them are too poor or cannot be spared at home where they must help their fathers, and partly because there are not middle schools enough to take in all the applicants, though of late years these schools have greatly multiplied. Formerly, parents were content to let their children stop their education when they had passed the primary school unless they intended to fit them for the professions; but now a general recognition of the importance of education on modern lines has done much to increase the demand for middle schools. There is still another motive for entering the middle school. To the Japanese mother the greatest source of anxiety on her boy’s account is his liability, when he comes of age, to compulsory military service. Of course, he may upon medical examination be pronounced unfit for service, or he may, though strong enough, be exempted when lots are drawn among those who have been passed by the medical examiners. But the former contingency is naturally distasteful while the latter is too uncertain to be hoped for with any degree of confidence. However, a comparatively easy way of escaping some at least of the rigours of military service was opened when the authorities permitted those who had completed the middle-school course to offer themselves for a year’s voluntary service. As such volunteers leave service with the rank of sergeant at least, and even of commissioned officer if they pass certain examinations, they are, needless to state, better treated than the common soldiers. Moreover, though the prescribed age for conscription is twenty, the students who enter colleges and other institutions for secondary education are permitted to postpone their enlistment until they graduate or reach the age of twenty-eight.
Children, as we have said, are very much petted. They are never whipped or kicked, but occasionally slapped. Even at school they are hardly ever subjected to corporal punishment; caning and birching are unknown. Formerly they used to be made to stand on a school desk or in a corner with a cup of water for half an hour or more; but now the severest punishment is detention after school or suspension from attendance for a certain period. Of course, at home or at school, among their mates they may be knocked about; the hitting is done with a swinging blow on the head or on the back, and very rarely with a forward blow, for the art of boxing being unknown, the hits peculiar to it are seldom resorted to. Kicking is not practised because, with the clogs on, the kicker is as likely to hurt himself as the kicked, while with the sandals or bare socks it is naturally out of the question. People stamp with their clogs, but that can only be done on a fallen foe.
Girls, when they congregate in the open air, play at blindman’s buff, Puss-in-the-corner, and hide and seek, sing in a ring, and romp about much in the same way as do their western cousins. Their amusements are social, but quieter than those of boys, who though they play with their sisters at first, develop, as in all other countries, sovereign contempt for girlish sports when they approach their teens and engage in rougher games of their own. Japanese boys do not box or use single sticks, but they wrestle and fence. In wrestling, their object is to make their adversary touch the ground with any part of his body or to push him out of the ring, just as is done by professional wrestlers, while the great point in fencing is to hit one’s opponent in a way that would be fatal if a real sword were used. The fencing-sword is made of four pieces of spliced bamboo bound together with a stout string and capped at the tip with leather; it has a sword-guard between the handle and the hilt. The combatants put on barred visors with sides of thickly-wadded cloth, which is tightly tied at the neck. They have also on thick gauntlets and body pieces of stout leather around the waist. The legs are unprotected. Blows are given on the crown, arms, waist, and legs, and a thrust is made at the throat. Sometimes the fencers throw down their weapons and wrestle, when the victor must bring down his opponent on the ground and getting astride of him, untie the band and pull off his visor. It is an exercise more exciting and fatiguing than fencing with foils.
FENCING.
Birds’ nesting is unknown; but if birds are exempted from the Japanese boy’s cruelty, their place is taken by the cicada and the dragon-fly, and in late summer and early autumn, boys are to be seen running after these insects with long lime-tipped bamboo poles and catching the cicada as it emits its stridulous cry on the trunk of a tree and the dragon-fly as it flits and flutters in the air. As these boys flourish their poles in the open street, they not unfrequently catch the unwary passers-by in the face, or their hats and clothes. But butterflies and moths, in which Japan is especially rich, are free from their pursuit. Indeed, Japanese boys do not as a rule go in for collection of natural objects.
