The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-11-04
SCHOOL CHILDREN
 FOUND IN JAPAN
10000 Girls in Cheap Tokio
 Boarding Houses
THEY HAVE WILD IDEAS
All Glasses Are Eager for an Educa- tion-Cliques Known as the Bad Students-Big Work and
 Small Wages.

There are 10000 girls in Tokio who have come from the provinces to complete their education, writes Mary Crawford Fraser in the Worlds Work. These girls are liv- ing in cheap boarding houses, where no one takes any interest in them, and the results can only be called deplorable.
 Suddenly emancipated from home su- pervision, ;he'r heads filled with wild dreams of independence and of equality with men, their leisure hours occupied with a low class of romantic literature, what wonder that scandal follows scan- dal, and that the reputation of the Jap anese girl for modesty and purity is being destroyed? The girls are really as yet quite unfitted to take care of themselves and are thrown into situations where western mothers would not allow their well taught, self-reiant daughters to re- main for a single day.
 The Japanese school system was found- ed on the American model by Dr. David Murray. He was adviser to the minister of education from 1875 to 1897.
 From the age of to l4 every child is compelled to attend school. The per centage of attendance is certainly over % at present. This is in the primary schools. There is so great rush to the secondary schools that thousands of candidates are turned back every year
 With certain number of shining eX- captions the teachers are inferior persons for the very good reason that the wretched salaries paid offer no attrac- tion to men and women of ability.
 The Japanese of the lower classes are Hooking to the schools. They want to rise socially, to have more ease and comfort. Education seems to promise il to them, and finally they persuade them selves that they are consumed with a passion for learning.
 Anxious to Go.
 They give their troubled elders no peace until they gain their point and go to one of the great towns to attend secondary school of some kind. In several cases young girls, unable to persuade their par ents to comply with their desires. have fled secretly from their homes, trusting to the kindness of strangers to support them in the further stages of their re- bellion.
 Not long ago there were 900 applications for entrance to a school which contained only seventy vacancies. Eight hundred and thirty thoro glly qualified candidates had to be sent away.
 Overcome with disappointment, enraged at the apparent injustice of their lot, the boy students in many cases join socialist societies, take to bad ways and become a serious menace to sood order. Unfor- tunately this last cannot be said Of re- jected candidates only. but applies to a certain section of students proper, who are so numerous that they have come to be classed as the bad students.
 The Japanese, as we know, have very tragic strain in them, and disappoint- ment. a setback in their career such as the failure to pass an examination at the right time, is apt to induce in the boys a mood of Byronic despair which would be laughable. if one were ever hard hearted enough to laugh at young peo- ple's troubles, and unimportant did not the terrible thoroughness of the Japa- nese character at once translate 1t into defiant and disastrous action.
 There is one great evil influence abroad here which intensifes the trouble The towns are flooded with cheap TO- mances of the most sensational and de- passing kind.
 The bookshops always have groups Of students standing before the counter and turning over the masses of magazines and cheap novels. which are unhappily often adorned with the most modifying illustrations.