place, and certainly the choice of this man was admirable for the city.
Tokyo is now expecting to buy the electric roads and make out of them
something with which to carry on these gigantic schemes of improvement.
The city of Tokyo is in the hands of fifteen aldermen, a council over
which the mayor is president, in addition to which is a legislative
body of sixty members, elected by the citizens. The right to vote is
the qualification of the tax payer and is in fact universal suffrage.
This makes the city more an independent or free institution than the
country, as the right to sit in parliament is only received from votes
held by property owners.
The mayor is elected by the municipal assembly; there is no ceremony in
the inauguration of mayor, not even a practical oath. All the members
of the assembly must be citizens of Tokyo, but the mayor need not be.
When he is elected mayor, the right of citizenship is conferred upon
him.
All the electric car system which is now in the hands of one company,
is soon to be owned by the city. It is at this present time being
considered by the Diet. The city in this way hopes to meet the enormous
expenses which are confronting it in the way of harbor improvement,
street widening and new sewerage, all of which will cost something like
100,000,000 yen. The new water works are almost completed. The water
comes from the river Fama, about fifty or sixty miles out of the city,
and is a masterly piece of engineering. It will provide Tokyo with a
water system second to none. Of it the present mayor is justly proud.
Tokyo is increasing in population at about the same rate as Chicago,
that is, about 100,000 per year. Labor troubles have not as yet become
a serious thing in Tokyo, but the prescient gaze of the administration
foresees that the day is not far distant when they may become so. The
municipality was only established about ten years ago and was before
that under the rule of a governor. The office of governor is still a
relic of the feudal times and the Governor still has some prerogatives
which remain from the ancient and somewhat archaic institution.
The preparation for the coming Exposition is the most serious thing
before the city now. There has been appropriated about 10,000,000 yen.
“After the Exposition we hope to have the Aoyama Parade ground as a
permanent park, and the construction for this gigantic affair involves
the closest attention from now on,” said His Excellency. A huge
building is projected, which will become permanent and will adorn Shiba
park. The model which we saw is very imposing indeed, and is the work
of the city engineer. It is rather of Roman style of architecture and
is massive and admirably proportioned.
[Illustration]
JAPANESE RAILWAYS
Dr. Hirai, Director of the Government Railway Bureau, graduated in
the Van Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute just after the exhibition in
Philadelphia in 1878, and on graduating was employed in the Mississippi
River Commission by the United States Government, and did not return to
Japan till 1882.
His pioneer railway service was in the Hokkaido, on the line which was
built by Col. J. U. Crawford, an American, and run on purely American
plans and methods. It has changed since, as after Dr. Hirai left the
engineer introduced English customs, but retained the American cars.
“In my day,” said Dr. Hirai, “the New York Central and the Pennsylvania
were the leading roads in America. I hope to see myself what thirty
years have brought about, on my trip to that country next year. I had
intended visiting Europe and America during the war time, but was
prevented on that account from travelling. On my return I shall have
seen and investigated modern railroading as it actually is in America
and Europe. What I shall see will naturally bring benefit to my system.”
“What do you think of American railroad men, Dr. Hirai?” we asked.
“I think they are the greatest men that you have in any line. We are
working at this moment for the amalgamation of seventeen private
railroads and are reducing them to the same standard of rates, fares,
and working staff. Our railroad system is just a little over 45,000
miles, which does not show very large, but its significance is in
the fact that it includes all the main lines of this Empire and is
therefore important. It includes the lines in the Hokkaido, Kyushiu,
all of the main island, and Shikoku, one third of which belonged before
to the Government, the rest having been acquired since 1906-07. The
method by which these seventeen railroads have been acquired is based
on the calculation that the stockholders will receive Government bonds
bearing interest at the rate of 5 per cent., equal to the average
of the dividend they have been receiving during the three years
previous to the time of nationalization. When the railroad has been
paying less on the capital than that, the amount of the bonds to be
paid for the railroad is to be agreed upon between the Government,
and the representatives of the stockholders. The whole amount of
bonds to be issued for nationalization will be nearly Y450,000,000,
or Y500,000,000, which we calculate will be paid off, interest and
principal, in 60 years. The actual result since acquiring the railways
is better than had been anticipated. Rates for goods and fares for
passengers have been reduced to a single standard. The reduction on
some lines has been more than 30 per cent., but still on the whole
our receipts are about 10 per cent. on fares and 20 per cent. on
freight more than the receipts of the previous year. The results
are, therefore, most gratifying. The total receipts for the fiscal
year ending the 31st of March this year will, I think, approximate
Y70,000,000; the net receipts are about 32 to 35 millions. The actual
net receipts for nine months to the end of last December are a little
over Y28,000,000. This is a showing which speaks for itself.
“The most marked results of nationalization of our railroads is seen
in the Hokkaido, where the best part of the railway was under the
control of the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company. Naturally this
company transported their coal in preference to all other freight, and
the development of paper mills and other manufactures was slow. Since
the Government has taken over the railway, no preference is given to
any particular freight, and in consequence the development of other
industries is facilitated.
“The steel works at Wakamatsu are supplying the army and navy, so we
are short of materials from this source, but we obtain the greater
part of our rails from them. We are building our cars in our own shops
and in three private shops, but we import our locomotives from foreign
countries, and you see English, German and American locomotives on our
road. The most economical engines so far in use we find to be English.
We hope to introduce greater ease and luxury in our cars every year. We
are now exporting wood for ties and sleepers to America. Our first aim
is for cheap and quick transportation of goods. Heretofore our receipts
have been mostly from passengers, over 70 per cent., but of late we
are giving more facilities to freight. We expect to build a central
station in Tokyo, beginning the work this year, and Shimbashi will be
like an old horse which in pride has once drawn his master’s carriage,
but is later relegated to a dray, for it will be used for goods alone.
We expect to connect the elevated line we are building now to Uyeno and
Ochanomidzu. The plan of the new central station is already complete.
It will be located in Marunouchi and will be a thoroughly modern
station costing about Y2,000,000. It will be completed in time for
the exposition, and we expect to have a station hotel in connection
with it, after the plan of the Canadian Pacific hotels. But, when
it is all finished, we shall have, like the man in the scripture, to
pull down and build bigger, so fast does the tide and onward sweep of
modern life outreach even the large projects of man’s brain. We have
something like 70,000 employes, a good standing army, and our Society
for the relief of the injured and disabled has on its list 50,000
members; this provides for medical treatment and care for those laid
aside in any way. It is a society in which the railroad and the men
co-operate. The men pay in every month 3 per cent. of their wages,
and the government 2 per cent., so that 5 per cent. of the income of
all wages is appropriated for this relief fund. The officers of the
road get a pension after 15 years’ service amounting to one quarter of
their salary. We have to supply the staff of the Korean, Manchurian and
Formosan times, who are men trained with us.
“During the war we sent 15,000 men to work the military lines in
Manchuria and Korea. A Railway School is situated near Uyeno Station
in Tokyo, where the course is preliminary. After graduation the men
come to us and work up. For high grades we employ university graduates
or those from high commercial schools. The most urgent work we have
on hand in the coming year is the extension of station facilities,
doubling of tracks, extension of repairing shops for the existing
lines, for which we have an estimate of eight millions for the coming
year. In the line of new construction, we have an estimate of about 25
millions yearly extending over twelve years, which will add about two
thousand miles to our railway when completed.”
Dr. Hirai speaks the English of a generation gone, with the clear
cut pronunciation of another age when men and women had time to do
things well, and as he speaks English, so he stands at the head of
one of the great railroads of the world, with the gentle suavity and
calm reflective face of a scholar, not a man of affairs, with a serene
self-possession which is the unmistakable mark of genius combined with
self-mastery. He is more like the great Dr. Charcot than any man I ever
met, and I remembered on coming home that in Dr. Charcot’s Paris house
was placed, in his vast library, a statue of Buddha.
[Illustration]
MADAME SHIMODA
Madame Shimoda is one of those rare beings, who have the singular
fortune to have not only fame, but what is far more to be coveted, a
place, in the hearts of thousands of her countrymen and women.
Hardly any one in Tokyo, who reads at all, but could guide you to the
little wooden house, on the hill, one of a million homes of her city,
where this virile and delicate woman lives, surrounded by the care of
relatives and friends, who it is easy to see give her, not only care,
but love.
Born in a feudal castle in the picturesque country of the Japan
mountain region, with the country spirit still in her, which the life
for many years in the palace of Tokyo could not destroy, that spirit
you feel in the touch of her diminutive hand, in the glance of her
powerful eyes, where dwells unquenched the freshness of free spaces.
Before she was twenty she was a reader to Her Majesty the Empress and
began the severe training of court etiquette, with its demands, more
than those of a soldier for self-control, yet even after years of such
experience and the still more severe drill as a teacher of young ladies
she has as charming a naturalness as a girl, so great is the gift of
the “kind old Nurse” Nature.
These men and women of Japan, who have crossed the half century line,
are all of them, more or less, the inheritors of the chivalry of
the ages gone by, and of all those ideas which Japan once held as
absolutely necessary to the making of a lady or a gentleman.
They tell us with a soft resigned sigh, that those ideals are passing
away before the inroads of western civilization, and who can not regret
it?
A volume of this little lady’s work with her round, generous
hand-writing, is one of my treasures, as she stands first among the
“singing birds” among the women of her land.
Her tastes are as varied as her life, with always that passionate love
of nature in the foreground.
The heroic, as is natural in a Japanese woman, comes next, and the late
war comes often into the short simple lines, where self-poise is again
so marked.
Her fondness for youth and the sentiments of youth come into play on
every other page.
I had spent a number of hours in the school which is her greatest
monument, the “Peeress school,” where the daughters of the nobility
are educated, and found there a duplicate of a first class European
institution, from the kindergarten to the graduating class.
I had listened to the eloquence of the teachers as they spoke of the
French Revolution, and watched the faces of the English class, as they
went over the ever imperial verses of Tennyson.
In those pretty, demure eyes, there was just the passion for the “good,
the true and beautiful,” which all fine youth has, the same we know so
well, before the Dawn has left them.
We passed a group in the hall and there was the daughter of the
greatest admiral of modern times, Miss Togo!
We saw them in the cooking school and heard their bursts of laughter
as they made the interesting and doubtless indigestible dishes they
were soon to partake of.
From the Auditorium to the garden, where the children play and make
those queer shapes and forms in the sand which latter are enlarged in
the vaster designs of manhood and womanhood, we found everywhere the
mark of this woman, her care and her genius.
On one Sunday, we were invited to her house, and a very bright Yokohama
girl, who spoke Japanese fluently, was our enthusiastic companion to
the home of the first teacher and first poetess of the land.
I was amused as we sat and she talked for an hour in the quiet soft
toned parlor of the higher education of the women of her land, to see
how her glance would wander from my pencil to the face of the young
girl, and of how she would interrupt her most serious remarks of
history, which she has at her finger tips, of philosophy, bred in her
bones, of the highest ethics of life, when she would cast one of those
bewitching smiles on the girl as she pressed her to take more sweets.
Life is ever the master passion of all such souls and they live only
in to-day. Higher education is not new, but like all great movements,
this of Japan began long, long ago, and once women held the place of
almost the equal of their lords, but the strange story of reaction
and retrogression, which marks the advance of the East, came in to
disfigure the wonderful march of the thought life of women.
Madame Shimoda is a pioneer in her work, and to-day thousands of modern
Japanese women rise up to call her blessed.
She was left a widow after a very brief married life and then all her
pent up love and devotion went out to her sex.
She has travelled extensively in Europe and America, and with that
master power that all Japanese seem to have, she has taken much of the
good, and left the bad of the West.
The great need of physical culture for the future mothers of Japan was
what appealed to her most strongly and this has been the first note in
her educational scheme.
We had sought for the motto which gives the keynote to the social life
of a Japanese home, and in the house of Viscount Kaneko we had found it
to be: “Wealth and rank are but a fleeting show, the merit is the man.”
Here it was, as we might have known: “Duty First.”
What would one expect of a woman who had spent her middle life in
educating the upper classes of her people, that she would want to
rest? Oh, no! for the remaining years she is to devote herself just as
earnestly to the educating of middle and lower class Japanese women.
This frail but purposeful woman had fire in her eyes as she spoke of
the future, a future which to such as she must only mean vaster and
vaster horizons and more radiant conquests.
[Illustration]
PEERESS’ SCHOOL
If you walk from Hibiya Park between two imposing public buildings, up
the broad avenue to the top of the hill, you will come to the high wall
which encloses the Peeress’ School, with the court, a fine entrance
space, with porter’s lodge and a porte cochere of Gothic arches, and
the whole a good bit of English architecture, with wide door and a
lofty hall. Opposite you as you enter is the refectory, with its low
tables and the plain and substantial effect of age and use. Two pretty
portresses will meet you at the door, with their eyes full of fun, as
all boarding-school maids have, as they are the secret ambassadors of
much mischief and are initiates of that occult society of fun. Their
demure manners, assumed for the occasion, do not blind you to their
roguery, for you have been a boarding-school girl long ago.
The instructor in English is as courteous as a guide as he is clever
in the use of your mother tongue, and you begin with a keen relish the
tour of inspection.
The reception room is rather like the meeting room of a committee,
for which purpose it is doubtless often used. Here the wise heads are
doubtless laid together and those plans for the education of Japan’s
future wives and mothers laid. Out of this room leads the Empress’
reception room, with the heavy damask curtains, the high ceilings and
the empty walls where, on the two yearly visits, the gracious and
“first woman of the land” receives the homage of the director and his
staff and gives in return the interest of all true women, be they high
or low, in the education and welfare of their sex.
The school has three terms,--one week’s vacation in April, and more
than two months in summer, and a short vacation at the New Year. About
the end of October is the exhibition in physical exercises, and about
the end of March that awe-inspiring epoch of graduation, when the high
functionaries of State and the distinguished clientele of Tokyo come to
see their girls step out of the schoolroom into the school of life--a
moment mingled in every land and school with gaiety and pathos.
The children enter the kindergarten at the end of the toddling age, and
the little lads and lassies sit side by side in their delightful rooms
and make their first songs of life, as they end them, together, their
little arms and hands making the first efforts at rhythm together,
awkward movements full of grace. They pass at eight years to the
primary department and begin the toilsome upward pull of real study,
and here their ways part,--the boys for the Peers’ School and the
ruder ways of masculine effort. From the primary course they enter at
about the age of fourteen the “middle course,” and that is in grade
substantially our High School. From this they can take post-graduate
courses in special studies, such as the classics, music and other
branches. The branches are technical departments, music, needlework and
embroidery, and a thorough course in cooking. Of the painting we will
speak later.
The Literary department must include courses in advanced Japanese
classics and English and French literature. The Science department
comprises a small laboratory, not overstocked with apparatus, and a
good class-room for experiments. This department has few devotees, as
might be expected, and also mathematics, and there is “little Latin and
less Greek” in the regular curriculum.
These sparkling-eyed young damsels take mostly to the gentler arts and
the gentler paths of learning. Our first visit was to the painting
department, as was fitting in a land which is above all things an
amateur of art. Here some ten young girls were painting on silk the
flowers and butterflies so dear to the Japanese heart. They were
fifth-year students and were very clever. The first year’s work hung
about on the walls. We looked for still-life subjects and casts, and
were told we would find them later, as we did, and some good work
in oil, and were told that animals and more ambitious subjects were
attempted by these embryo Rosa Bonheurs. The work was about on a level
technically, without being as original, as similar work of the same age
at home.
The gong struck for the end of a forty-five minutes’ period as we
left these rooms and the girls rushed out to the playground with all
the excitement of such times at home. The playground is much too
small. It had a tennis court where the girls were striking wildly at
a tethered ball, an amusement they seemed much to enjoy. There is
a fine gymnasium with the omnipresent piano, and here the marching
and physical exercises are practised. The kindergarten department
playground has piles of sand for the little folks, and they begin their
engineering and their landscape gardening in the bright sunshine there.
In the halls we saw two ping-pong tables, and certainly the physical
side of the young ladies’ training is not neglected. The auditorium
is spacious, and here are held the overflow recitations occasionally.
We saw a class in ethics file in, their faces alive with youth and
happiness, a charming ethical picture! As we were passing one door a
group of these eager beings emerged, and our guide informed us that the
tall young lady was Admiral Togo’s daughter.
Four hours a week are given to foreign languages, and French or
English may be selected. German is not taught to the girls. We were
particularly entertained in the history class. The young ladies were
as intent as their master, who told them in impassioned language
of that impassioned epoch of the French revolution. “Danton and
Robespierre,” how strange those names sounded so far away, mingled with
the hurrying voice of the speaker! The revenge of the years on evil,
how far-reaching! In the English class we heard some very creditable
rendering of English verse by the girls, and the charm of Tennyson’s
“Idylls of the King” lost nothing on those pretty lips. The Knight
Sir Lancelot and the maid Elaine and all their chivalric woes and
their exquisite love story was dainty enough in its new setting. We
saw the cooking class at work and the little maids frying fish and
preparing the lunch that was to be served at the long table in the
airy dining-room which opens into the garden. For myself I was willing
to try the cooking, however indigestible, after seeing the cooks. The
teacher was an old Japanese gentleman who was as cool, apparently, with
these too many “cooks spoiling the broth” as a young chef would not be,
patience being the supreme qualification for a cook, as for a Cabinet
Minister.
We found the kindergarten department, after all, the most alluring, for
the rooms here were more attractive and the little pupils passingly
dear. They sang so sweetly and played so charmingly in the wee garden
and came running about us with all the abandonment of childhood and the
laughter of fairies that we were captives to education at once.
If we could have one of those baby companions as a seat mate we would
be willing to go over the whole course again, beset with the terrors of
examinations and failure marks as it was.
The teachers of the Peeress’ School are specialists and have received
the training of many lands. We had a cosy chat in the director’s study,
and he amusingly informed us in very idiomatic English as a beginning
“that as he had arrived only a day before us he did not know much more
than we about the school.” This admission was certainly promising of
great good to the school, as wisdom is not hasty in its judgments, nor
rash in its methods.
Looking into that face which bears the beauty of refinement and culture
to an eminent degree, as well as that soul light, without which all
education is vain and all teachers worse than vain, we felt that in
the hands of a man associated for more than twenty years with the
education of the youth of Japan, Mr. Gentaro Matsumoto, the future of
the Peeress’ School might be even brighter than its past.
[Illustration]
KANEKO
The subject of this chapter is one of the forces,--which unobtrusively
and unostentatiously is not only felt in Japan, but in the world. He
is a world man. In order to pass into this category of world men, a
great deal is required, and process is always of intense interest to
humanity,--which from the lowest to the highest is aspiring to be felt.