sudden overturning of thousands of candles and braziers all over the city. Truly these are gruesome books.
Education. During the Middle Ages, education was in the hands of the Buddhist priesthood. The temples were the schools, the subject most insisted on was the Buddhist sutras. The accession of the Tokugawa dynasty to the Shōgunate (A.D. 1603-1867) brought with it a change. The educated classes turned Confucianist. Accordingly the Confucian Classics—the Four Books and the Five Canons—were installed in the place of honour, learnt by heart, expounded as carefully as in China itself. Besides the Chinese Classics, instruction was given in the native history and literature. Some few ardent students picked their way through Dutch books that had been begged, borrowed, or stolen from the Hollanders at Nagasaki, or bought, for their weight in gold, for the sake of the priceless treasures of medical and other scientific knowledge known to be concealed in them. But such devotees of European learning were forced to maintain the greatest secrecy, and were hampered by almost incredible difficulties; for the government of the day frowned on all things foreign, and more than one zealous student expiated by his death the crime of striving to increase knowledge.
With the revolution of 1868, the old system of education crumbled away, indeed, even before 1868 the learning of foreign languages, especially English, had been tacitly connived at. A complete reform was initiated—a reform on Western lines—and it was carried out at first chiefly under American advice. The present Imperial University of Tōkyō is the representative and heir of several colleges established some thirty-five years ago, a Language College, a Medical College, a College of Engineering. At the same time, primary instruction was being placed on a new basis, and specially promising lads were sent across the sea to imbibe Western learning at its source. When not allowed to go abroad, even well-born young men were happy to black the shoes of a foreign family, in the hope of being able to pick up
