pet in the hands of his vice-gerent.

Each girl born into a family has a pair of _O Hina Sama_ placed for her
upon the red-covered shelf, on the first Feast of Dolls that comes after
her birth. When, as a bride, she goes to her husband's house, she
carries the dolls with her, and the first feast after her marriage she
observes with special ceremonies. Until she has a daughter old enough
to carry out the observance, she must keep up the ceremony. The feast,
as it exists to-day, is said by the Japanese to serve three purposes: it
makes the children of both sexes loyal to the imperial family, it
interests the girls in housekeeping, and it trains them in ceremonial
etiquette.

_Page 40._

Because of the complexity of the Chinese language and the time needed
for its mastery, there has been a movement to lessen the study of pure
Chinese in the government schools, or abolish it altogether, and with
this to simplify the use of the ideographs in the Sinico-Japanese. The
educational department is requiring that text-books be limited in their
use of ideographs; that those used be written in only one way and that
the simplest, and that the _kana_ (the Japanese syllabary) be
substituted wherever possible. Several plans for reform in this matter
are being agitated, one of which is to limit the use of ideographs to
nouns and verbs only.

_Page 41._

No one who has been in Japan can have failed to notice the peculiarly
strident quality of the Japanese voice in singing, a quality that is
gained by professional singers through much labor and actual physical
suffering. That this is not a natural characteristic of the Japanese
voice is shown by the fact that in speaking, the voices, both of
children and adults, are low and sweet. It seems to me to be brought
about by the pursuit of a wrong musical ideal, or at least, of a musical
ideal quite distinct from that of the Western world. In Japan one seldom
finds singing birds kept in cages, but instead crickets, grasshoppers,
katydids, and other noisy members of the insect family may be seen
exposed for sale in the daintiest of cages any summer night in the
T[=o]ky[=o] streets. These insects delight the ears of the Japanese with
their melody, and it seems to me that the voices of singers throughout
the empire are modeled after the shrill, rattling chirp of the insect,
rather than after the fuller notes of the bird's song.

The introduction of European music by the schools and churche