Last came the curious game called 'Taking the Castle.' Two models of Japanese towers, about fifteen feet high, made with paper stretched over a framework of bamboo, were set up, one at each end of the field. Inside the castles an inflammable liquid had been placed in open vessels, so that if the vessels were overturned the whole fabric would take fire. The boys, divided into two parties, bombarded the castles with wooden balls, which passed easily through the paper walls; and in a short time both models were making a glorious blaze. Of course the party whose castle was the first to blaze lost the game.
The games began at eight o'clock in the morning, and at five in the evening came to an end. Then at a signal fully ten thousand voices pealed out the superb national anthem, 'Kimi ga yo, and concluded it with three cheers for their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and Empress of Japan.
The Japanese do not shout or roar as we do when we cheer. They chant.
Each long cry is like the opening tone of an immense musical chorus:
A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a..a!
Sec. 6
It is no small surprise to observe how botany, geology, and other sciences are daily taught even in this remotest part of Old Japan. Plant physiology and the nature of vegetable tissues are studied under excellent microscopes, and in their relations to chemistry; and at regular intervals the instructor leads his classes into the country to illustrate the lessons of the term by examples taken from the flora of their native place. Agriculture, taught by a graduate of the famous Agricultural School at Sapporo, is practically illustrated upon farms purchased and maintained by the schools for purely educational ends. Each series of lessons in geology is supplemented by visits to the mountains about the lake, or to the tremendous cliffs of the coast, where the students are taught to familiarize themselves with forms of stratification and the visible history of rocks. The basin of the lake, and the country about Matsue, is physiographically studied, after the plans of instruction laid down in Huxley's excellent manual. Natural History, too, is taught according to the latest and best methods, and with the help of the microscope. The results of such teaching are sometimes surprising. I know of one student, a lad of only sixteen, who voluntarily collected and classified more than two hundred varieties of marine plants for a Tokyo professor. Another, a youth of seventeen, wrote down for me in my notebook, without a work of reference at hand, and, as I afterwards discovered, almost without an omission or error, a scientific list of all the butterflies to be found in the neighbourhood of the city.
Sec. 7
Through the Minister of Public Instruction, His Imperial Majesty has sent to all the great public schools of the Empire a letter bearing date of the thirteenth day of the tenth month of the twenty-third year of Meiji. And the students and teachers of the various schools assemble to hear the reading of the Imperial Words on Education.
At eight o'clock we of the Middle School are all waiting in our own assembly hall for the coming of the Governor, who will read the Emperor's letter in the various schools.
We wait but a little while. Then the Governor comes with all the officers of the Kencho and the chief men of the city. We rise to salute him: then the national anthem is sung.
Then the Governor, ascending the platform, produces the Imperial Missive—a scroll of Chinese manuscript sheathed in silk. He withdraws it slowly from its woven envelope, lifts it reverentially to his forehead, unrolls it, lifts it again to his forehead, and after a moment's dignified pause begins in that clear deep voice of his to read the melodious syllables after the ancient way, which is like a chant: