d in the foreground, tea
alongside the buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the
background; also, an unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of
cattle. The lower picture shows the work of transplanting rice.

{20}

[Illustration: JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN.]
Boys predominate in the upper picture, girls in the lower. A system
of compulsory education is enforced in Japan, and 98 per cent, of
the children of school age attend. Even the country schools run ten
months in the year--longer than in a majority of our states.

{18 continued}

With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make any
vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of our own
states these last twenty years: However much progress we have made,
these brown Japanese "heathen" have beaten us. While there is no
official census on the question of illiteracy here, every Japanese man
in his twenties must serve {21} two years in the army (unless he is in
a normal school studying to be a teacher), and a record is made as to
the literacy or illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is a
place where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would be
recorded, but the Department of Education informed me to-day that the
illiterate column is now absolutely blank.

There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation.

More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty that
the Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in our plenty. We
waste more in a year than they make. Even with a hundred acres of land
the American farmer is likely to consider himself poor, but when I
asked my Japanese guide the other day if two _cho_ (five acres) would
be an average sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a man
would be regarded as a middle-class farmer--a rather large farmer."
And the figures which I have just obtained in a call on the national
Department of Agriculture and Commerce more than justify the reply.

Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than one and one
quarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own less than two and
one half acres, and only one man in a hundred owns as much as
twenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation also I find that 70
per cent, cultivate less than two and one half acres, and nearly half
are tenants.)

This year the situation is even worse than usual, for disastrous
floods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one hal