We think of the Japanese as unalterably small, yet here is a class, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, who are huge, strong, large-framed men, taller than the tall races of the north. They are another and a living contradiction of the imaginary minisculism of the nation. If the Japanese desire to produce big things, in war, in statues, or in men, they take thought, they take care; much thought, infinite care, and somehow it is done. * * * * * So Tokyo wrestles, works and plays, and this left bank of the river toils and lives hard. Across the water Tsukiji, secluded in its “foreign” residences, dwells genteel, and gossips. The Ginza shops. The suburbs far within the circle of the streets grow hedged-in gardens and long avenues of trees, where the houses lie unseen. The schools, the training colleges, and the university, a cityful of students study, and boys in cotton _hakama_ and dark-peaked soldiers’ caps walk through the streets--boys who are passing from the indulged childhood of Japan to the iron self-control of manhood. There is apparent in their ways and manners a touch of self-assertiveness, a touch of almost self-conceit, which at no other time in their own lives, and at no time at all in any other member of the community, will ever be observable. It is but a touch, and would pass unseen in any other land, in any other setting; here it stands out palpable. A little hard these boys look and very earnest. They will strike work if they think a teacher is not competent to teach, so bent are they on learning. They seem to have accepted school as the modern training of the _samurai_, and to study in that spirit. The scholarship boys at Government Colleges work harder still and on the narrowest of means. They can afford so little for their board that one whole college gave up playing base-ball in its recreation hour because “it made them too hungry.” And at the University, where the students matriculate at twenty and stay till twenty-four and five, for beside their own learning, beside the ten thousand Chinese symbols and all the philosophy of the East, they must to-day add the learning of the West, the languages of Europe, the laws, the sciences, and the arts of another civilisation and of an alien race, at the University the students live lives of hardest brainwork and rigidest economy. Many spend their evenings in earning the money that buys their day. Some deliver newspapers and sleep in the porches of “foreign” houses. Many die of consumption, brought on by over-work and under-feeding. Across the river the hammers ring, the wheels whir round, the hum of a people’s toil sounds in all ears. Here within the girdle of the streets, between the factories and the palace is a work doing, silent, less perceptible but harder, higher and undertaken for that end. * * * * *