In the government schools for girls, much attention is paid just now to physical culture. The gymnastic exercises rank with the Chinese and English and mathematics as important parts of the course, and the girls are encouraged to spend their recesses out-of-doors, engaging in all kinds of athletic sports. Races, ball games, tugs-of-war, marches, and quadrilles are entered into with zest and enjoyment, and the girls in their dark red _hakama_ are as well able to move quickly and freely as girls of the same age in America. If it were not for the queer pigeon-toed gait, acquired by years of walking in narrow _kimono_ and on high clogs, the Japanese girls would be fully abreast of the American in all these sports. So strongly has the idea of the necessity for physical strength seized upon the nation, that a girl of delicate physique has less chance of marriage than one who is robust and strong. _Page 55._ It is in the mistakes and failures made in adapting the education given in the schools to the exact conditions that present themselves in the constantly changing Japan of to-day, that the opponents of all alteration in the education of women find their strongest arguments. The conservatives point with scorn to this girl whose new ideas have led her into folly or trouble, or to that one whose health has been broken down by the adverse conditions surrounding her student life, and say, "This will be the case with all our women if we continue this insane practice of educating them along new lines." Advance in female education, as in all other lines of progress in Japan, is a series of violent actions and reactions. In 1889, partly through ill-advised conduct on the part of supporters of the cause, one of the most serious reverses that has come in the progress of Western education for women began to show itself. The reaction was helped along by a paper read before some of the most influential men of Japan, and subsequently reported and discussed in the newspapers, by a German professor in the medical department of the imperial University in Tōkyō. The paper was a serious warning to the men of the country that no women could be good wives, mothers, and housekeepers and at the same time have undergone a thorough literary education. The arguments were reinforced by statistics showing that American college women either did not marry, or that if they married they had very few children. All Japan took fright at this alarming showing, and for several years the education of girls in anything more than the primary studies was not encouraged by the government. The lowest depth of this reaction was reached during or soon after the Japan-China war, when the growth of national vanity resulted in a temporary disdain for all foreign ideas. The tide has turned again now, girls' schools that have been closed for years are being reopened, young men who are thinking of marrying are looking for educated wives,