The Institute devotes itself to mulberries, silk-worms and silk manufacture. There are 200 students, as many as it will hold. The young men become teachers of sericulture, advisers in mills and experts of co-operative sericultural societies. The institution, in addition to the fees it receives and its earnings from its own products, some 33,000 yen in all, has an annual Government subsidy of about 114,000 yen. There are other sericultural colleges doing similar work in Tokyo and Kyoto, and there is also in the capital the Imperial Sericultural Experiment Station (with a staff of 87), where I saw all sorts of research work in progress. This experiment station has half a dozen branches scattered up and down the silk districts. [Illustration: SOME OF THE SILK FACTORIES IN KAMISUWA.] [Illustration: VILLAGE ASSEMBLY-ROOM.] At Ueda I went through corridors and rooms, sterilised thrice a year, to visit professors engaged in a variety of enquiries. One professor had turned into a kind of beef tea the pupæ thrown away when the cocoons are unwound; another had made from the residual oil two or three kinds of soap. The usual thing at a silk factory is for the pupæ, which are exposed to view when the silk is unrolled from the scalded cocoons, to lie about in horrid heaps until they are sold as manure or carp food. The professor declared that his product was equal to a third of the total weight of the pupæ utilised, and was sure that it could be sold at a fifteenth of the price of Western beef essences. The Director of the College had tried the product with his breakfast for a fortnight and avowed that during the experiment he was never so perky. It was a pleasure to look into the well-kept dormitories of the students, where there was evidence, in books, pictures and athletic material, of a strenuous life. The young men are made fit not only by _judō_, fencing, archery, tennis and general athletics, but by being sent up the mountains on Sundays. The men are kept so hard that at the open fencing contest twice a year the visitors are usually beaten. The director quoted to me Roosevelt's "Sweat and be saved." From men we went to machines and mulberries. I inspected all sorts of hot chambers for killing cocoons. I saw, in rooms draped in black velvet like the pictured scenes at a beheading, silk testing for lustre and colour. I gazed with respect on many kinds of winding and weaving machinery. Then, going out into the experiment fields, I strode through more varieties of mulberry than I had imagined to exist. There are supposed to be 500 sorts in the country but many are no doubt duplicates. The varieties differ so much in shape and texture of leaf that the novice would not take some of them for mulberries.