)
to the meanest Japanese, the most necessary part of education is an
elaborate training in the ceremonial rules of life. Bows proper for
every occasion, elegant kotoos, the whole science and practice of
good-breeding, have to be learned through many tedious years. To boys
there is given special training in the hara-kiri, or the art of ripping
one's self up. Many occasions present themselves on which it as much
concerns the honor of a Japanese to cut himself open, as it concerned an
Englishman some years ago to fire a pistol at his friend. The occasions
are so frequent, that a Japanese boys' school would be incomplete in
which instruction was not given in this art of suicide. Boys practise
all the details in dramatic fashion, and in after life, if a day come
when disgrace, caused often by the deeds of other men, appears
inevitable, he appoints a day, and according to the exigencies of the
case, before his family or his assembled connections, ceremoniously cuts
open his own belly at a solemn dinner. Dying in this way, he is said to
have died in the course of nature; dying before shame came to him, he is
said to have died undisgraced, and so has saved his family from that
participation in his fall which otherwise was imminent. Now we must
leave this house, in which we have spent perhaps a little too much time:
yet in the whole time we did not once hear the squalling of a baby,
though a baby was there certainly. If this should meet the eye of Mr.
Meek, he is informed that in Japan, children, until they are three years
old, are not allowed to wear any thing tight about their persons.

Now we are once more in the streets of Nagasaki, and observe, that for a
gentleman to turn his back upon a friend, is true politeness in this
most original of lands. It signifies that he who so turns is unworthy to
behold the face, &c. A bridal procession passes us; the bride in her
long white veil. There is a touch of poetry connected with that veil--it
literally is the shroud in which she will be buried.

We are out of town, now, and delighting in the open country. Exquisite
views of hill, and dale, and wood, and water, tempt the sight. Rice
fields, of course, we pass; rice is a staple article of diet to the
Japanese, as to so many other millions of the human race. It is the
vegetable food that finds its way into more mouths than any other. There
is wheat also in Japan, used chiefly for making cakes and soy; barley
for feeding cattle. The c