as to be totally isolated from all other buildings and invisible from
the street. The girls are not only taught European science by the most
advanced methods, but are trained as well in Japanese arts--the arts of
embroidery, of decoration, of painting, and of arranging flowers.
European drawing is also taught, and beautifully taught, not only here,
but in all the schools. It is taught, however, in combination with
Japanese methods; and the results of this blending may certainly be
expected to have some charming influence upon future art-production. The
average capacity of the Japanese student in drawing is, I think, at
least fifty per cent, higher than that of European students. The soul of
the race is essentially artistic; and the extremely difficult art of
learning to write the Chinese characters, in which all are trained from
early childhood, has already disciplined the hand and the eye to a
marvellous degree--a degree undreamed of in the Occident--long before
the drawing-master begins his lessons of perspective.

Attached to the great Normal School, and connected by a corridor with
the Jinjo Chugakko likewise, is a large elementary school for little
boys and girls: its teachers are male and female students of the
graduating classes, who are thus practically trained for their
profession before entering the service of the State. Nothing could be
more interesting as an educational spectacle to any sympathetic
foreigner than some of this elementary teaching. In the first room which
I visit a class of very little girls and boys--some as quaintly pretty
as their own dolls--are bending at their desks over sheets of coal-black
paper which you would think they were trying to make still blacker by
energetic use of writing-brushes and what we call Indian-ink. They are
really learning to write Chinese and Japanese characters, stroke by
stroke. Until one stroke has been well learned, they are not suffered to
attempt another--much less a combination. Long before the first lesson