The Japanese girl may pursue her education along lines on full equality with her brother, and just as far as she chooses; but there is no real co-education. Schools for girls are many, with a curriculum based on that of foreign nations, and often conducted by foreigners or by foreign-trained teachers.
The Japanese love the theater, and it is a thoroughly national institution. You will be told in select circles how up to the Restoration in 1868 the theater was looked down on, and actors in the view of the samurai class were beneath contempt--the offensive manifestants of a degrading kind of exhibition. There was, no doubt, much affection in this. The popular theater was supposed to clash with the traditions of the Japanese classic drama known as the "No" or "No Dance". Today there are hundreds of theaters giving popular drama. The "No" are only given at stated intervals four or fives times a year, and in a few places in the Empire. The "No" is a collection of some two hundred and thirty-two dramatic episodes, mostly tragic, which were collected and given permanent form in the early fifteenth century.
The geisha or singing girl to the "Western" mind fills out the romantic ideal of modern Japan. To the native she is simply a sublimated waitress with dancing and singing trimmings, but she is also a chosen vehicle of Japanese romance. Visions of her dressed in showy silken robes waving a large fan, her black hair marvellously coifed, a fixed smile on her face and moving in rhythmic steps with a special flowing elegance of gesture, rise before those who have seen her at high functions. Ever to the accompaniment of the tinkling strings of the samisen and the full beat of the tsuzumi that picture comes back to the foreigner as the flower of his reminiscence of Japan.
The 47 Ronins committed suicide to escape death by the executioner and in death have become popular heroes. The temple burial place where the little squared headstones of the forty-seven stand in a touching oblong is the shrine in all Japan most thronged every day in the year. Before every stone incense is burned by the visitors. Not one is neglected. For the grave of the youngest, a lad of seventeen, the incense receptacle is many times the largest. I laid my bundle of sticks upon the grave of the oldest, a man of seventy-two, who in this competition of the death ordinarily had the fewest. (Japan at First Hand.)
When the Buddha priest of Japan seats himself among his congregation to preach, he wears the simplest of robes, a white or sober-hued cassock, but when he opens the sutra or recites the litany, his vestments are of brocade that would serve worthily to drape a throne. Buddhist priests live on contributions of their parishioners and on the income of their lands, now greatly reduced.
A Geisha House is not generally a large establishment--six or seven to a dozen geishas and half as many musumes make it up. The mother or keeper is generally an old geisha, often as one may guess from the many middle-aged or aging men who will sit down beside her and swap stories with her about merry old times of other days.
The geisha house, rather humble, certainly unpretentious abodes, group themselves in certain quarters, and the hiring of girls is done methodically through a central office. The hiring should be accomplished by the retaurant keeper or by the housewife as early in the afternoon as possible, but not after six in the evening, unless absolutely unavoidable. For the preparation of the geisha is an elaborate affair from the wonderful coiling and adorning of her hair to the fit of her white, heelless shoes. They are taken in rickishas to the house of entertainment and carried home in the same way when all is over.