read American history any more. We want to read how balloons are made." Such is a specimen of the requests which every teacher in Japan must have had to listen to over and over again. Actual insubordination unknown under the old regime became very frequent, during the closing years of the nineteenth century, scarcely a trimester passing without the boys of some important school striking work on the plea of disapproval of their teachers methods or management. Moreover, there sprang up a class of rowdy youths, called sōshi in Japanese, juvenile agitators who, taking all politics to be their province, used to obtrude their views and their presence on ministers of state, and to waylay bludgeon and knife in hand those whose opinions on matters of public interest happened to differ from their own. These unhealthy symptoms, like others incidental to the childhood of the New Japan, seem now to have passed away without leaving any permanent ill effects.
Books recommended. The annual Report of the Minister of State for Education, and the Calendars of the Universities and of the various other educational institutions.—See also Miss Bacon's Japanese Girls and Women.
EE—EE. These letters which, to the perplexity of European travellers, adorn the signboards of many forwarding agencies in modern Japan, stand for the English word "express."
Embroidery. The reader may tire of being told of each art in succession that it was imported into Japan from China via Korea by Buddhist missionaries. But when such is the fact, what can be done but state it? The greatest early Japanese artist in embroidery of whom memory has been preserved was Chūjō Hime, a Buddhist nun of noble birth, who, according to the legend, was an incarnation of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy. After enduring relentless persecution at the hands of a cruel stepmother, she retired to the temple of Taema-dera in Yamato, where her grand embroidered picture, or mandara as it is called, of the Buddhist heaven with its many mansions, is still shown. The gods themselves are said to have aided her in this work.
