At three or four years children are sent to kindergarten, that is, if they can gain admission, for these useful institutions are still few even in Tokyo. There they are kept in good humour, everything being done for their amusement. They sing together simple songs, have object lessons, are set to make little things out of paper, and are also allowed to romp about as they please. At six years, the minimum school-age, they enter the primary school, the course at which extends over six years. Here they are taught Japanese, arithmetic, elements of history, geography, and natural history, elementary drawing, singing, and gymnastics, and hand work for boys and needlework for girls. This six years’ course is compulsory for all children; and there is a higher primary school with two years’ course for those boys who cannot afford to receive any higher education. The pupils who have completed the course at the ordinary primary school are qualified to present themselves for the entrance examinations of the higher schools, the middle school for boys and the high school for girls. Although a women’s university was established not long ago in Tokyo, a girl’s education generally stops with the high school, if it goes so far. As she has been six years in the primary and four in the high school, she has had ten years of schooling if she has passed every class satisfactorily from the first to the last, and she is sixteen years old when she leaves the high school. And as a Japanese girl usually marries at eighteen or nineteen, she has not much time to spare before she has to think seriously of matrimony. Two or three years of home life are all that is left her before she will have to take charge of a household of her own. And further, as she is supposed to pass the flower of her youth at four and twenty, a college course would bring her dangerously close to the lower limit of spinsterhood, and so, as things stand in Japan, female universities would, even were they plentiful, not be so popular as they should deserve. In the high school the same subjects, more advanced, are taught as in the lower school, the only new subject of importance being domestic economy. The middle school has a course of five years, in which the pupils are taught, besides the advanced course of the subjects studied in the lower school, Chinese classics, algebra, geometry, physiology and hygiene, physics and chemistry, law and political economy. English becomes a subject of importance, being taught seven hours a week. When the course is completed satisfactorily by regular promotion every year, the pupil is seventeen years old. He is now ready to commence his secondary education, for which he will enter the special higher schools for the professions or the preparatory high school for the university.