Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/161

 the Meirin-dō in Owari, the Kōshi-kwan in Kagoshima, the Jishū-kwan in Kumamoto, the Yōken-do in Sendai and others. One of the most spacious was the Sendai institution: it had twenty-five rooms, and the buildings covered an area of one-third of an acre. Of such schools thirteen were under the direct patronage of the fiefs where they were situated, but not a few were independent of all official aid. Among the implements of education must also be counted a number of lecture halls where the philosophies of China, as interpreted by Japanese students, were publicly expounded, the lecturers generally collecting a fee from their audience.

All this educational machinery was for the samurai only: merchants and farmers had nothing to do with it. For them, however, there were popular lectures. Ishida Kampei inaugurated these lectures in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the fact bears significant testimony to the new place won by the middle and lower middle classes under Tokugawa rule. Ishida went by the name of "Baigan." At the age of forty-five he began lecturing in Kyōtō. He employed language intelligible even to women and children, and he taught a mixture of Shinō, Confucianism and Buddhism. The female part of the audience sat behind bamboo screens, a precaution which showed that practical morality occupied a prominent place in Ishida's attention. Teshima Tōan, his disciple, acquired