reet, rest for a few moments, gather
themselves together, and charge once more into the crowd. There must be
some pretty tired little boys in the parish when the fun is all over,
for these performances are kept up far into the night; but for absolute
and perfect enjoyment there is nothing I have yet seen that seems to me
to compare with the enjoyment that a Japanese boy gets out of a
_matsuri_. It is worth being tired for!

There is no space in this work for a more detailed picture of life in a
Japanese home. Enough has been said in this chapter to show that it is
made up of many little things,--of cares and sorrows and
pleasures,--just as is life in any American home, and it is the little
things we care about that make the oneness of the family, and the
nation, and the oneness, too, of humanity, if we can only understand one
another.

CHAPTER XIII.

TEN YEARS OF PROGRESS.

The woman question in Japan is at the present moment a matter of much
consideration. There seems to be an uneasy feeling in the minds of even
the more conservative men that some change in the status of woman is
inevitable, if the nation wishes to keep the pace it has set for itself.
The Japanese women of the past and of the present are exactly suited to
the position accorded them in society, and any attempt to alter them
without changing their status only results in making square pegs for
round holes. If the pegs hereafter are to be cut square, the holes must
be enlarged and squared to fit them. The Japanese woman stands in no
need of alteration unless her place in life is somehow enlarged, nor, on
the other hand, can she fill a larger place without additional
training. The men of New Japan, to whom the opinions and customs of the
Western world are becoming daily more familiar, while they shrink
aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become
like the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West, show
a growing tendency to dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness
of the lives of their wives and daughters,--a growing belief that better
educated women would make better homes, and that the ideal home of
Europe and America is the product of a more advanced civilization than
that of Japan. Reluctantly in many cases, but still almost universally,
it is admitted that in the interest of the homes and for the sake of
future generations, something must be done to carry the women forward
into a position