ly shown no
disinclination, but, on the contrary, an avidity to combine athletics
with their studies, and in base-ball especially they have more than
held their own against the foreigner. I confess I have no desire to
see the craze for outdoor sports which is so much in evidence in this
country extending to Japan. Some of the public schools in England are
much more famous for their cricket, football, and other teams than for
the education imparted in them. Many a young man leaves those schools
an excellent cricketer or football player, but, from an educational
point of view, very badly equipped for the battle of life. The happy
mean is surely the best in this as in other matters, and I venture to
think that the youth of Japan in regarding education as the essential
matter and outdoor sport as merely a subsidiary one have shown sound
judgment.

In my remarks on education in Japan I have dealt principally with the
schools for boys. I may, however, remark that in the arrangements she
has made for the education of the other sex she has shown the same
thoroughness. In the primary schools the boys and girls are taken in
without any distinction, though separate classes are usually formed.
There are subsequently higher schools for girls. The percentage of the
female sex attending these schools is less than that of the other.
There are in all about seventy-five of these schools in Japan with
some twenty thousand pupils. The course of instruction in them is
moral precepts, Japanese language, a foreign language, history,
geography, mathematics, science, drawing, training for domestic
affairs, cutting-out and sewing, music and gymnastics. I think in
regard to these schools the Japanese authorities have shown sound
judgment in decreeing that music shall not necessarily form part of
the education of every young girl, but may be omitted for those pupils
for whom the art may be deemed difficult. Were a similar rule to be
adopted in this country quite a number of people would be saved a
large amount of unnecessary torture. There is also a higher normal
school for women at Tokio, as likewise an Academy of Music. The Tokio
Jiogakkwan is an institution established by some foreign
philanthropists for the purpose of educating Japanese girls of a
respectable class in Anglo-Saxon attainments. This institution has
between two and three hundred pupils, but I am not in a position to
state what measure of success, if any, it has achieved, nor ind