A Japanese Boy
arrival, bring their books and sit _vis-à-vis_ with the teacher. The
latter first hears the pupil read the last lesson and then, after it has
been thoroughly reviewed, reads for him the next lesson. He does it
looking at the pupil's book from the top; the learner follows him aloud,
pointing out every word he reads with a stick. This is repeated until
the scholar has nearly learned the text. The scholar then returns home
to go over the lesson by himself. In this manner I have torn my Japanese
and Chinese authors, just as an American boy blots his Cæsar and Virgil;
and certain passages come up even now as spontaneously as the
translation of "_Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres_."
In school an examination was held at the end of each month; how hard we
used to work for it! It decided one's standing in class, and all through
the following month he had to remain in a given seat. Everybody wished
to be at the head and that bred strong emulation. The night before the
examination I would study and read aloud all the evening; as it became
late my eyelids tended to droop and my voice to falter; my father would
bid me not to be over-anxious and retire. The next morning he would wake
me early in compliance with my request, and light me a lamp to study by.
It was a bad habit, I grant; but if I work half as conscientiously now
as I did then I shall be the wiser for it.
My class was composed of about six members; we met in each other's
houses outside of school hours to go over our reviews together. One of
the boys was a carpenter's son and possessed with a mechanical craze.
Whenever we gathered in his house he would offer, unsolicited, to
explain and exhibit a gimcrack he had made with his father's tools, and
we did scarcely any studying. Another of our schoolmates was a farmer's
son, a big shame-faced lad sent to our beloved master's to be educated
in the city; he boarded with him. Country-fellow as we called him, he
acquired his preceptor's hand in writing so well that nobody in school
chose to pick a quarrel with him on the question of brush handling. But
no mortal man is without a peccadillo--our boy was always observed to be
moving his jaws and chewing more candies than were good for him. The
third was a staid druggist's son, sedate as his father and as particular
in trifling matters; he was "awfully smart," as the phrase is, in his
studies, having pursued them conscientiously; and besides, he belonged
as a matter of course to the category of "good boys." I used to sleep
with him in his house sometimes and study arithmetic with him.
Here parenthetically I must describe the Japanese bed. It is a very
simple affair: a thick quilt is taken out of a closet and spread
directly on the floor; you lie down on it and pull another quilt over
yourself, and you have the bed. There is no bedstead; therefore, fleas
have a picnic at your expense if the room is not well swept. In the
morning you fold the quilts and put them back in the closet, and space
is given for the day. Our pillow is no comfort to a weary head, it being
simply a hard block of wood; often it is a box with a drawer at the end.
The use of this kind of pillow or support was formerly imperative for
the men and is still to the women for the protection of the head-dress
from ruin and the bedclothes from the bandoline. The sterner sex of our
population now-a-days crop their hair after the fashion of their
European brothers, and have in great part given up the wooden block for
a soft pillow.
My schooling was continued for some time with satisfactory results, and
I advanced grade after grade well-nigh to the end of the common school
instruction, when my father saw fit to remove me and put me in a store
so that I could be a credit to myself as a business-man's son. I was an
apprentice in two trades at different times and yet unsettled in mind
and anxious to go back to school. I might go on telling all about the
period of my apprenticeship, and things I learned and people I observed
during that time: how I finally carried the day and returned to my
studies; how I studied Chinese and how I struck out in English; how I
went to Kioto and struggled through five years' academic training; and
how a few years ago I borrowed money and sailed for America. But that
would be writing a real autobiography, which would be disagreeable to me
as well as distasteful to the reader. In the story told so far I ought
to have, perhaps, prudently suppressed everything personal and brought
forward only those experiences that the generality of Japanese boys are
destined to undergo. Neither have I exhausted by any means the incidents
of my own childhood; at this moment I am conscious of things of more
importance than those set down on the foregoing pages welling up in the
fountain of memory. But I have written enough to try the patience of my
indulgent reader, and I myself have grown weary of my own performance;
it is therefore excusable, I hope, to draw this narrative abruptly to an
end.