JAPANESE EDUCATION OF AN EARLIER GENERATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 13006, 25 October 1905, Page 1 (Supplement)

JAPANESE EDUCATION OF AN EARLIER GENERATION.

Baron Suyematsu contributes to the August number of the Independent Review an interesting article on Japanese education.

After sketching in outline the origin of the Japanese colleges, with their methods of education, Baron Suyematsti touches on the enforced hardships of their schools of an earlier generation : — "The chief feature of the college institutions of those days," he says, "especially of private institutions, was enforced privation and hardship. 1 can never forget the days when I, in common with all others, of course, ate meals only twice a day, and those, too, of the simplest diet. The food often consisted of nothing else than a little rice with a very little salt, or the-like. We ourselves were cooks in turn. We swept and washed out, not only our own rooms, but those of the master also. We often, used cold water in the depth of severe winters for the purpose of washing and such like.

"We sometimes sat up whole nights in winter, with scarcely any fire to warm us, in order to accustom ourselves to rigid discipline. In those days no idea of sanitation, .in the modern sense, entered the minds of the master or of ourselves; neither did any outward show of appearance trouble us, nay, the more one was regardless of those things the more was one thought strong in character. " It is, no doubt, due to the training of those days* that I, personally, for instance, cannot bear the trouble of appearing like a grandee, or a fashionable person. Thus, for example, I, who never used gloves in my boyhood, cannot endure the discomfort of wearing thcnij even on winter days.'