Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/106

 that the Japanese youth shows anything like the absorbing avidity of the Anglo-Saxon for out-door games and sports, but he takes keenly to base-ball, rowing, bicycling, and lawn tennis, and he begins to think of developing thews as a business only second to that of acquiring knowledge. If there is excessive application to study, it is on the part of girls, for they are spurred by a hope that the possession of knowledge will raise them from the position of inferiority to which the strong sex has condemned them. Yet even girls are now adopting the habit of walking to and from school, where also they are encouraged to frequent the playground and the gymnasium. Public opinion is still too tyrannical, however, to tolerate cycling by women. A very few courageous ladies run the gantlet of adverse criticism from their friends and of insulting epithets from boors in the streets; but the general feeling of the gentle, self-effacing Japanese woman is that she must bow to all prejudices which affect her pleasures alone.

The rapid growth of journalism is another fact that forces itself on the attention of every one observing Japan's modern career. In describing the life of the cities during Tokugawa times, it has been shown that the people were not altogether strange to the uses of the newspaper. As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, a sheet called the "reading for sale" (yomiuri) was hawked about the streets of Yedo by a vendor who cried his wares in the familiar European style