ections, but from my own observation I am inclined to think that
there is little change in the employments of women except in the
neighborhood of the larger cities, and that the new occupations as yet
have a very slight effect upon the conditions in this country at large.

It is not possible to understand the actual progress made in Japan in
improving the condition of women, without some consideration of the
effect that Christian thought and Christian lives have had on the
thought and lives of the modern Japanese. If Japanese women are ever to
be raised to the measure of opportunity accorded to women in Christian
countries, it can only be through the growth of Christianity in their
own country, and for that reason a study of that growth is pertinent to
a study of their condition.

The past ten years in Japan have been discouraging to the missionaries
in many ways, and it is not unusual to hear from the less hopeful of
them the statement that their work has been at a standstill, or even
going backward, during that time. The statistics of missionary effort
show a steady, though slight, increase in the number of professing
Christians, but if the sum total of the results of missionary effort
were the number of converts made, it might, perhaps, be doubtful whether
the money spent on missions in Japan might not be better turned to other
purposes. There are now in Japan, of Christians of all sects,
Protestant, and Roman and Greek Catholic, 121,000, or about one half of
one per cent. of the total population of the country; but the influence
of these Christians as leaders of thought is out of all proportion to
their number. Christian men are found in the Diet, in the army and navy,
in the universities and colleges, and in the newspaper offices, in a
proportion far beyond their ratio to the total population, exerting
their influence in many ways for the uplifting of the nation to loftier
moral ideals. The proportion of Christian men and women in the
government schools with which I have been connected is rather
surprising. In the Higher Normal School, training young women to go out
into the whole country as teachers, the proportion of professing
Christians upon the teaching staff is striking; and in the Peeresses'
School, which is as conservative and anti-foreign as any educational
institution in Japan, there are five professing Christians among the
thirty-five teachers. While, on the one hand, the Japanese Christians
are not all