Chinese Students in Japan
By P. J. Laird
A RECENT statement by the Chinese minister at Tokyo puts the number of Chinese in that city alone at more than ten thousand. The absence of the queue and the wearing of a neat semi-uniform attire renders it quite difficult, if not impossible, at first to distinguish between Chinese and Japanese students. Those more conservative, or in Japan for a brief period, retain the queue in a shortened form, platted and rolled up on front of the head and secured with an ornamental lady's hairpin. Others have adopted the Japanese students' dress entirely. The latter are the most difficult to distinguish of all classes. It goes without saying that the new Chinese student, as seen in Japan, is much superior in appearance to the vast majority of his less fortunate brothers toiling at their studies in China. Physically they appear more robust, with sometimes a freshness even amounting to color on their cheeks. We heard with great thankfulness of the absence of blood-spitting among these men so often reported among the same class in China. No doubt the distance to be traversed going to and from schools and classes is indirectly a great benefit along these lines. The Chinese do not take very readily to the food prepared in Japanese style, but have to be content with it owing to the increased cost of following the Chinese style, only obtainable at the restaurants and higher-class Chinese boarding houses. Even the rice is much different from what they have been accustomed to eat in their own land. Curiously enough, if they eat much (three meals a day) of it, it seriously affects them and causes pain in the knees. At least such is the report given by not a few. The absence of salt, oil, and vegetables is a real trial for a time, but they take it all in good part. The smallness of the average meal partaken of by Japanese is a common topic with them. Furniture may consist of a table, chair, and a small oil-lamp, if electric light is not laid on. A small bookcase makes up the catalog. Of course those having means deck their rooms out in grand style; but many have not even the things mentioned. A curious feature of their life in Japan is the development of their musical genius. Some of us had often wondered whether some of them ever possessed such a thing. Quite a number of them had organs and melodions in the rooms we visited. The tunes were often played fairly well, even if repeated a trifle too frequently. Coming, as do the majority, from the interior of China, where foreign languages have hardly penetrated the dust of ages, they are all more or less well versed in the literature of their own land. Several hold the first degree. Their desire in going to Japan is more for up-to-date modern learning than to return to China as clerks and agents for foreign firms at large and remunerative salaries, as is common among so many who have had a little taste of foreign learning. The phenomenal influx of these Chinese students into Japan, in preference to going further afield to Europe and America, can be explained by the similarity of the Japanese to Chinese literature. It is surprising how readily the Chinese fall back on the written language when difficulties are met in the ordinary routine of life. A second cause is the much cheaper rate at which they can study in the schools of Japan, when once they are admitted. This is not as easy as it might seem. Some schools have several hundred Chinese students in addition to several thousand Japanese. One for Chinese exclusively has approaching fourteen hundred in its classes. The classes are usually very large, a great drawback to good work. It will not surprise many to know the Chinese are doing well at their studies. Very few take a year to learn sufficient Japanese to enable them to follow lectures in that language. Of course many do not stop that long in the country. A few thousands must be studying privately or in small classes awaiting their entrance into the regular institutions. The weakness of the system is felt in the fact that at least three-fourths, probably more, go to Japan without any preparation and without knowing a word of Japanese or English. Consequently only a few hundred are scattered in the higher institutions of learning, as the Imperial University and First Higher School; the remainder are for the most part at the elementary stages of work. Students of technology, mechanical engineering, or medicine are not numerous. Hundreds may hardly get beyond the secondary stage, returning to China after a year or two of study in Japan. Many question the usefulness of such men in their provincial centers, or filling responsible posts under the government, to say nothing of the lack of economy in the whole system. There appears to be a real and urgent call for sound improvement of the home regulations for education in the Chinese Empire. Remarks have been made about the morals of the Chinese students, many of which are manifestly unjust, unkind, and inaccurate. The same number of students of any one nation, dumped down in one large city with its terrible temptations, we fear would be no different. Some of these young men have fallen into the vortex of temptations, which must be seen to be realized, and are grappled by the foul curse. Altho drinking and drunkenness are far more prevalent among the Japanese than one had imagined before going to live in Tokyo, we have not seen a Chinaman intoxicated. China's great sage, Confucius, was ever looking into the past. His successors, the students of China, are doing the same. He invented nothing fresh, neither do they. Great world-powers have long since risen and fallen into decay. China, like the brook, "goes on forever." Being shut in by sea, desert, and mountains, she has been led to think of those without as "barbarians" and as such, her "tributaries." "Her exclusiveness kept her ignorant, her ignorance kept her self-satisfied, her self-satisfaction kept her conservative." She is much the same to-day. Introduction of Christianity among Students.
"The Chinese must be a great factor." They are one-fourth of the earth's millions. Plant them where you will, while others succumb they thrive and multiply. Famine, war, and plague have worked terrible havoc with China's millions;13yet ere long their places are filled with new arrivals, who seem to have sprung out of the very ground. With this enormous concourse of people once awake, no nation or nations can afford to despise them as now. As a result of the Shanghai Centennial Conference, a special committee has been chosen to deal with this great question that has long baffled the effort of missionaries in China; namely, to reach the student population, and to organize a church for those who are to become members. In the providence of God it would appear that the Chinese students in Japan would furnish the key to the situation. What are we going to do to bring present truth before this enormous concourse of students in Japan?