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The one for the boys is on the fifth day of the fifth month, that is May fifth. It is called Flag Day or Kite Day. Big paper kites in the form of a fish called the carp are hung out on poles in front of the houses where there are boys. The carp is a fish that swims upstream against the current, which is a hard thing to do,instead of downstream, which is easy. So the carp is a model for boys—to do the hardest thing, not the easiest.
The Japanese love flowers perhaps more than any people and they have holidays when the flowers are in bloom.One holiday comes when the cherry-trees, plum-trees, and peach-trees bloom in the spring, and another when the chrysanthemums bloom in the fall. Every house in Japan has a garden, no matter how small it may be—a tiny imitation of the country-side, with tiny lakes and tiny mountains, and tiny rivers with tiny bridges over them—all so perfectly made that a photograph of such a garden looks like a picture of real mountains and lakes and rivers—like a doll garden. The Japanese grow dwarf trees—oaks and maples—which look in a picture as if they were a hundred feet tall and a hundred years old, but which are actually only a foot or so tall, but may be a hundred years old.
The Japanese school-boys seem to "hunger and thirst" after knowledge. I was looking into a shop window wherebeautiful Japanese umbrellas were displayed, when a school-boy came up to me and asked me in English if he couldn't act as my guide for a day without charge.
"Why," said I, "do you want to show me around?"
"Just to practise speaking English," he replied.
I visited a Japanese school, and a dozen boys gave me their calling cards and asked me to write them when I reached home, promising to reply in English if I did so.
