This completes our study of the homes and characteristics of five eighths of Japan. Here the brawn of the nation is reared. Hence come the sturdy, docile, patient, and courageous soldiers. Here are raised boys and girls by the hundreds of thousands who must at an early age begin to earn a living. This is the hunting-ground of those who seek for builders of railroads, factory hands, domestics, hotel girls, baby-tenders, and occasionally geishas, concubines, and prostitutes. Considering the severe economic conditions under which Japan's agricultural classes live, who can fail to admire their courage and grit, their personal culture, their even temper and cheerful faces, their innate habits of courtesy and good breeding, their mutual patience and forbearance, and their simple artistic tastes and pleasures! Do they not compare well with the peasant classes of any other nation?
Before passing on to study the various classes of workers constantly recruited in no small numbers from the homes of farmers, we should first consider the high development of industrial occupations within these homes themselves. To appreciate both the opportunity and the need for this, we turn to the official statistics of marriage and education. Until 1908 compulsory education, as has been already stated, covered four years from the age of six to ten. According to governmental statistics (1912) 98.8 per cent. of the boys and 97.5 per cent. of the girls were actually fulfilling the requirement. This percentage seems high to American statistical students, but investigations show that, while Japanese rules for the attendance of pupils and methods of counting the same differ in some respects from those that prevail in the United States and Canada, yet, as a matter of fact, in school attendance Japan compares well with other lands. It should be remembered, however, that the nature of the Japanese written language is such that even six years of elementary education is probably not equal to four years of similar schooling in Western lands. American children, at the close of their elementary education, possess a mastery of the tools of civilization and a degree of general intelligence considerably in advance of Japanese children who have enjoyed the same number of years of school life. As we have already seen, this amount of compulsory education is insufficient to give children ability to read and write with freedom.
