Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/73

 given up to out-door exercises, and every sunny morning processions of youngsters file by, with banners and colored caps to distinguish them, and go to some park or parade-ground for exercises, drills, and athletic games.

Besides the public schools maintained by Government, there are scores of private schools and mission schools. With its higher institutions reaching up to the Imperial University, with its special schools of law, medicine, engineering, science, and the arts, Tokio offers the best education to the youth of Japan. The public-school system is the equal of that of the United States, and the Government employs foreign teachers in even the remotest provincial schools. At a kindergarten the aristocratic pupils, with a repose of manner inherited from generations of courtly and dignified ancestors, trot in, in their little long-sleeved kimonos, like a Mikado opera company seen through the wrong end of an opera-glass, sit down demurely around low tables, and fold their hands like so many old men and women of the kingdom of Lilliput. There is no tittering, no embarrassment, nor self-consciousness; and these grave and serious mites will take the blocks from the teachers with a reverent bow and present them to other children with another formal salute, quite as their grandfathers might have done at court. In some of the girls’ schools the old Japanese methods are followed, and they are taught the traditional etiquette and the cha no yu, to embroider, to write poems, to arrange flowers, and to play the samisen. The koto, once almost obsolete, is restored to favor, and girls delight to touch this sweet-toned, horizontal harp.

The great summer festival is the opening of the river. This is the beginning of the nightly water fêtes on the Sumidagawa, and in the innumerable tea-houses that line its banks. This fête, appointed for the last week of June, is often postponed to the more settled season of July. Flat-bottomed house-boats, with open sides, 57