Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/164

 most part rōnin (unemployed samurai); in the country districts headmen, physicians, and Shintō or Buddhist priests discharged the function. The priests converted the temples into schools, but in other cases the teacher's house served as a place of instruction. Class hours were from morning to noon, and the curriculum consisted almost entirely of penmanship, in which term, however, were included reading, composition, geography, and ethics. Boys and girls sat in the same room, but in different parts of it. The course for boys was, first, the two syllabaries called hiragana and katakana; then the twelve signs of the zodiac; then the names of provinces and towns, and finally the writing of letters. There were books containing forms of letters such as had to be written in compliance with the code of social etiquette, and such as might be needed in the common contingencies of every-day life. These orthodox epistles and the ideographs used in inditing them were memorised accurately, with the inevitable result that the art of letter-writing, as understood and applied in the Occident, never became known among the Japanese. In their hands letters degenerated into stereotyped formulas of congratulation, of condolence, or of inquiry, and were not at all regarded as vehicles for communicating the thoughts and experiences of the writer. Sons of merchants received special instruction in a manual of commerce, and sons of mechanics in a manual of industry, while sons of samurai learned to read