Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan Volume II Part 5

The Normal School is a much larger building occupying the opposite angle of the square. It is also much handsomer, is painted snowy white, and has a little cupola upon its summit. There are only about one hundred and fifty students in the Shihan-Gakko, but they are boarders.

Between these two schools are other educational buildings, which I shall learn more about later.

It is my first day at the schools. Nishida Sentaro, the j.a.panese teacher of English, has taken me through the buildings, introduced me to the Directors, and to all my future colleagues, given me all necessary instructions about hours and about textbooks, and furnished my desk with all things necessary. Before teaching begins, however, I must be introduced to the Governor of the Province, Koteda Yasusada, with whom my contract has been made, through the medium of his secretary. So Nishida leads the way to the Kencho, or Prefectural office, situated in another foreign-looking edifice across the street.

We enter it, ascend a wide stairway, and enter a s.p.a.cious .room carpeted in European fashion--a room with bay windows and cushioned chairs. One person is seated at a small round table, and about him are standing half a dozen others: all are in full j.a.panese costume, ceremonial costume-- splendid silken hakama, or Chinese trousers, silken robes, silken haori or overdress, marked with their mon or family crests: rich and dignified attire which makes me ashamed of my commonplace Western garb. These are officials of the Kencho, and teachers: the person seated is the Governor. He rises to greet me, gives me the hand-grasp of a giant: and as I look into his eyes, I feel I shall love that man to the day of my death. A face fresh and frank as a boy's, expressing much placid force and large-hearted kindness--all the calm of a Buddha. Beside him, the other officials look very small: indeed the first impression of him is that of a man of another race. While I am wondering whether the old j.a.panese heroes were cast in a similar mould, he signs to me to take a seat, and questions my guide in a mellow ba.s.so. There is a charm in the fluent depth of the voice pleasantly confirming the idea suggested by the face. An attendant brings tea.

'The Governor asks,' interprets Nishida, 'if you know the old history of Izumo.'

I reply that I have read the Kojiki, translated by Professor Chamberlain, and have therefore some knowledge of the story of j.a.pan's most ancient province. Some converse in j.a.panese follows. Nishida tells the Governor that I came to j.a.pan to study the ancient religion and customs, and that I am particularly interested in Shinto and the traditions of Izumo. The Governor suggests that I make visits to the celebrated shrines of Kitzuki, Yaegaki, and k.u.mano, and then asks:

'Does he know the tradition of the origin of the clapping of hands before a Shinto shrine?'

I reply in the negative; and the Governor says the tradition is given in a commentary upon the Kojiki.

'It is in the thirty-second section of the fourteenth volume, where it is written that Ya-he-Koto-Shiro-nushi-no-Kami clapped his hands.'

I thank the Governor for his kind suggestions and his citation. After a brief silence I am graciously dismissed with another genuine hand-grasp; and we return to the school.

Sec. 2

I have been teaching for three hours in the Middle School, and teaching j.a.panese boys turns out to be a much more agreeable task than I had imagined. Each cla.s.s has been so well prepared for me beforehand by Nishida that my utter ignorance of j.a.panese makes no difficulty in regard to teaching: moreover, although the lads cannot understand my words always when I speak, they can understand whatever I write upon the blackboard with chalk. Most of them have already been studying English from childhood, with j.a.panese teachers. All are wonderfully docile' and patient. According to old custom, when the teacher enters, the whole cla.s.s rises and bows to him. He returns the bow, and calls the roll.

Nishida is only too kind. He helps me in every way he possibly can, and is constantly regretting that he cannot help me more. There are, of course, some difficulties to overcome. For instance, it will take me a very, very long time to learn the names of the boys--most of which names I cannot even p.r.o.nounce, with the cla.s.s-roll before me. And although the names of the different cla.s.ses have been painted upon the doors of their respective rooms in English letters, for the benefit of the foreign teacher, it will take me some weeks at least to become quite familiar with them. For the time being Nishida always guides me to the rooms. He also shows me the way, through long corridors, to the Normal School, and introduces me to the teacher Nakayama who is to act there as my guide.

I have been engaged to teach only four times a week at the Normal School; but I am furnished there also with a handsome desk in the teachers' apartment, and am made to feel at home almost immediately.

Nakayama shows me everything of interest in the building before introducing me to my future pupils. The introduction is pleasant and novel as a school experience. I am conducted along a corridor, and ushered into a large luminous whitewashed room full of young men in dark blue military uniform. Each sits at a very small desk, sup-ported by a single leg, with three feet. At the end of the room is a platform with a high desk and a chair for the teacher. As I take my place at the desk, a voice rings out in English: 'Stand up!' And all rise with a springy movement as if moved by machinery. 'Bow down!' the same voice again commands--the voice of a young student wearing a captain's stripes upon his sleeve; and all salute me. I bow in return; we take our seats; and the lesson begins.

All teachers at the Normal School are saluted in the same military fashion before each cla.s.s-hour--only the command is given in j.a.panese.

For my sake only, it is given in English.

Sec. 3

September 22, 1890.

The Normal School is a State inst.i.tution. Students are admitted upon examination and production of testimony as to good character; but the number is, of course, limited. The young men pay no fees, no boarding money, nothing even for books, college-outfits, or wearing apparel. They are lodged, clothed, fed, and educated by the State; but they are required in return, after their graduation, to serve the State as teachers for the s.p.a.ce of five years. Admission, however, by no means a.s.sures graduation. There are three or four examinations each year; and the students who fail to obtain a certain high average of examination marks must leave the school, however exemplary their conduct or earnest their study. No leniency can be shown where the educational needs of the State are concerned, and these call for natural ability and a high standard of its proof.

The discipline is military and severe. Indeed, it is so thorough that the graduate of a Normal School is exempted by military law from more than a year's service in the army: he leaves college a trained soldier.

Deportment is also a requisite: special marks are given for it; and however gawky a freshman may prove at the time of his admission, he cannot remain so. A spirit of manliness is cultivated, which excludes roughness but develops self-reliance and self-control. The student is required, when speaking, to look his teacher in the face, and to utter his words not only distinctly, but sonorously. Demeanour in cla.s.s is partly enforced by the cla.s.s-room fittings themselves. The tiny tables are too narrow to allow of being used as supports for the elbows; the seats have no backs against which to lean, and the student must hold himself rigidly erect as he studies. He must also keep himself faultlessly neat and clean. Whenever and wherever he encounters one of his teachers he must halt, bring his feet together, draw himself erect, and give the military salute. And this is done with a swift grace difficult to describe.

The demeanour of a cla.s.s during study hours is if anything too faultless. Never a whisper is heard; never is a head raised from the book without permission. But when the teacher addresses a student by name, the youth rises instantly, and replies in a tone of such vigour as would seem to unaccustomed ears almost startling by contrast with the stillness and self-repression of the others.

The female department of the Normal School, where about fifty young women are being trained as teachers, is a separate two-story quadrangle of buildings, large, airy, and so situated, together with its gardens, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s 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 j.a.panese 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 is thoroughly mastered, the white paper has become all evenly black under the mult.i.tude of tyro brush-strokes. But the same sheet is still used; for the wet ink makes a yet blacker mark upon the dry, so that it can easily be seen.

In a room adjoining, I see another child-cla.s.s learning to use scissors --j.a.panese scissors, which, being formed in one piece, shaped something like the letter U, are much less easy to manage than ours. The little folk are being taught to cut out patterns, and shapes of special objects or symbols to be studied. Flower-forms are the most ordinary patterns; sometimes certain ideographs are given as subjects.

And in another room a third small cla.s.s is learning to sing; the teacher writing the music notes (do, re, mi) with chalk upon a blackboard, and accompanying the song with an accordion. The little ones have learned the j.a.panese national anthem (Kimi ga yo wa) and two native songs set to Scotch airs--one of which calls back to me, even in this remote corner of the Orient, many a charming memory: Auld Lang Syne.

No uniform is worn in this elementary school: all are in j.a.panese dress --the boys in dark blue kimono, the little girls in robes of all tints, radiant as b.u.t.terflies. But in addition to their robes, the girls wear hakama, [1] and these are of a vivid, warm sky-blue.

Between the hours of teaching, ten minutes are allowed for play or rest. The little boys play at Demon-Shadows or at blind-man's-buff or at some other funny game: they laugh, leap, shout, race, and wrestle, but, unlike European children, never quarrel or fight. As for the little girls, they get by themselves, and either play at hand-ball, or form into circles to play at some round game, accompanied by song.

Indescribably soft and sweet the chorus of those little voices in the round:

Kango-kango sho-ya, Naka yoni sho-ya, Don-don to kunde Jizo-San no midzu wo Matsuba no midzu irete, Makkuri kadso. [2]

I notice that the young men, as well as the young women, who teach these little folk, are extremely tender to their charges. A child whose kimono is out of order, or dirtied by play, is taken aside and brushed and arranged as carefully as by an elder brother.

Besides being trained for their future profession by teaching the children of the elementary school, the girl students of the Shihan-Gakko are also trained to teach in the neighbouring kindergarten. A delightful kindergarten it is, with big cheerful sunny rooms, where stocks of the most ingenious educational toys are piled upon shelves for daily use.

Since the above was written I have had two years' experience as a teacher in various large j.a.panese schools; and I have never had personal knowledge of any serious quarrel between students, and have never even heard of a fight among my pupils. And I have taught some eight hundred boys and young men.

Sec. 4

October 1 1890. Nevertheless I am destined to see little of the Normal School. Strictly speaking, I do not belong to its staff: my services being only lent by the Middle School, to which I give most of my time. I see the Normal School students in their cla.s.s-rooms only, for they are not allowed to go out to visit their teachers' homes in the town. So I can never hope to become as familiar with them as with the students of the Chugakko, who are beginning to call me 'Teacher' instead of 'Sir,'

and to treat me as a sort of elder brother. (I objected to the word 'master,' for in j.a.pan the teacher has no need of being masterful.) And I feel less at home in the large, bright, comfortable apartments of the Normal School teachers than in our dingy, chilly teachers' room at the Chugakko, where my desk is next to that of Nishida.

On the walls there are maps, crowded with j.a.panese ideographs; a few large charts representing zoological facts in the light of evolutional science; and an immense frame filled with little black lacquered wooden tablets, so neatly fitted together that the entire surface is uniform as that of a blackboard. On these are written, or rather painted, in white, names of teachers, subjects, cla.s.ses, and order of teaching hours; and by the ingenious tablet arrangement any change of hours can be represented by simply changing the places of the tablets. As all this is written in Chinese and j.a.panese characters, it remains to me a mystery, except in so far as the general plan and purpose are concerned. I have learned only to recognize the letters of my own name, and the simpler form of numerals.

On every teacher's desk there is a small hibachi of glazed blue-and- white ware, containing a few lumps of glowing charcoal in a bed of ashes. During the brief intervals between cla.s.ses each teacher smokes his tiny j.a.panese pipe of bra.s.s, iron, or silver. The hibachi and a cup of hot tea are our consolations for the fatigues of the cla.s.s-room.

Nishida and one or two other teachers know a good deal of English, and we chat together sometimes between cla.s.ses. But more often no one speaks. All are tired after the teaching hour, and prefer to smoke in silence. At such times the only sounds within the room are the ticking of the clock, and the sharp clang of the little pipes being rapped upon the edges of the hibachi to empty out the ashes.

Sec. 5

October 15, 1890. To-day I witnessed the annual athletic contests (undo- kwai) of all the schools in Shimane Ken. These games were celebrated in the broad castle grounds of Ninomaru. Yesterday a circular race-track had been staked off, hurdles erected for leaping, thousands of wooden seats prepared for invited or privileged spectators, and a grand lodge built for the Governor, all before sunset. The place looked like a vast circus, with its tiers of plank seats rising one above the other, and the Governor's lodge magnificent with wreaths and flags. School children from all the villages and towns within twenty-five miles had arrived in surprising mult.i.tude. Nearly six thousand boys and girls were entered to take part in the contests. Their parents and relatives and teachers made an imposing a.s.sembly upon the benches and within the gates. And on the ramparts overlooking the huge inclosure a much larger crowd had gathered, representing perhaps one-third of the population of the city.

The signal to begin or to end a contest was a pistol-shot. Four different kinds of games were performed in different parts of the grounds at the same time, as there was room enough for an army; and prizes were awarded to the winners of each contest by the hand of the Governor himself.

There were races between the best runners in each cla.s.s of the different schools; and the best runner of all proved to be Sakane, of our own fifth cla.s.s, who came in first by nearly forty yards without seeming even to make an effort. He is our champion athlete, and as good as he is strong--so that it made me very happy to see him with his arms full of prize books. He won also a fencing contest decided by the breaking of a little earthenware saucer tied to the left arm of each combatant. And he also won a leaping match between our older boys.

But many hundreds of other winners there were too, and many hundreds of prizes were given away. There were races in which the runners were tied together in pairs, the left leg of one to the right leg of the other.

There were equally funny races, the winning of which depended on the runner's ability not only to run, but to crawl, to climb, to vault, and to jump alternately. There were races also for the little girls--pretty as b.u.t.terflies they seemed in their sky-blue hakama and many coloured robes--races in which the contestants had each to pick up as they ran three b.a.l.l.s of three different colours out of a number scattered over the turf. Besides this, the little girls had what is called a flag-race, and a contest with battledores and shuttlec.o.c.ks.

Then came the tug-of-war. A magnificent tug-of-war, too--one hundred students at one end of a rope, and another hundred at the other. But the most wonderful spectacles of the day were the dumb-bell exercises. Six thousand boys and girls, ma.s.sed in ranks about five hundred deep; six thousand pairs of arms rising and falling exactly together; six thousand pairs of sandalled feet advancing or retreating together, at the signal of the masters of gymnastics, directing all from the tops of various little wooden towers; six thousand voices chanting at once the 'one, two, three,' of the dumb-bell drill: 'Ichi, ni,--san, shi,--go, roku,-- shichi, hachi.'

Last came the curious game called 'Taking the Castle.' Two models of j.a.panese towers, about fifteen feet high, made with paper stretched over a framework of bamboo, were set up, one at each end of the field. Inside the castles an inflammable liquid had been placed in open vessels, so that if the vessels were overturned the whole fabric would take fire.

The boys, divided into two parties, bombarded the castles with wooden b.a.l.l.s, which pa.s.sed easily through the paper walls; and in a short time both models were making a glorious blaze. Of course the party whose castle was the first to blaze lost the game.

The games began at eight o'clock in the morning, and at five in the evening came to an end. Then at a signal fully ten thousand voices pealed out the superb national anthem, 'Kimi ga yo, and concluded it with three cheers for their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and Empress of j.a.pan.

The j.a.panese do not shout or roar as we do when we cheer. They chant.

Each long cry is like the opening tone of an immense musical chorus: A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a..a!

Sec. 6