Yoshioka Yayoi (1871-1959)

[nnozomi]

Yoshioka Yayoi was born in 1871, one of a large family (including an assortment of half-siblings and step-siblings) in a Shizuoka village; her father, Washiyama Yosai, was a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, and she learned classsical Chinese along with cooking and sewing in her childhood. In 1889 she left for Tokyo to become a doctor, entering the Saisei Gakusha medical school (also at times home to Takahashi Mizuko, Marumo Mune, and Migita Asa) where her brother, already a student, had told her that women could enroll. Her male classmates’ bullying only motivated her to work harder; chatty and curious, with an excellent memory for everyone she met, she got along with her female classmates and became a central point of solidarity for the women in school, who were outnumbered twenty to one. They studied together as well as taking on the male students who called women “bacteria,” bonding with one another and with their predecessors like Mizuko, Ogino Ginko, and Okami Kei.

Yayoi was qualified as a doctor in 1892, with a specialty in gynecology. Her first job was assisting her father back in her hometown. In 1895 she returned to Tokyo in order to learn German, hoping to study further in Germany; unexpectedly, she found herself married to the principal of her German school, Yoshioka Arata, then twenty-eight (his younger brothers apparently did the proposing on his behalf, declaring “we want her for a sister”). Her first clinic, opened in order to support the wavering finances of his school, thrived. In 1899, however, her husband’s illness meant the school had to be closed.

Around the same time, a movement to revise the qualifications for doctors was employed as a way to block women from becoming qualified. Yayoi’s alma (?) mater, the Saisei Gakusha, likewise dismissed its existing women students and closed its doors to new ones. Yayoi, fuming, devoted a room of her clinic to four women medical students, calling it the Tokyo Women’s Medical School, with herself and her husband as professors. Although struggling at first, the school gradually gathered more students, moving to new quarters with more instructors in 1903 (a year after Yayoi’s son Hiroto, later a medical researcher, was born). By 1912, it gained official recognition as the Tokyo Women’s Medical Vocational School (now Tokyo Women’s Medical University).

Yayoi’s husband died in 1922. She continued to work for sex education and women’s improved status, including suffrage, all her life (she also delivered her own two grandchildren as part of her gynecological practice). During World War II she was a leading figure in various women’s patriotic organizations; for some years after the war she was forbidden to hold public office or educational positions on those grounds. She died in 1959 at the age of eighty-eight.

Sources
Nakae
Shimamoto
https://www.twmu.ac.jp/univ/about/faq.php (Japanese) Various photos.

Comments

[sakana17]

Yayoi, fuming, devoted a room of her clinic to four women medical students, calling it the Tokyo Women’s Medical School, with herself and her husband as professors.

Yay! Wonderful!

[nnozomi]

She clearly did not let anyone oppress her or hers.

[luzula]

During World War II she was a leading figure in various women’s patriotic organizations; for some years after the war she was forbidden to hold public office or educational positions on those grounds.
Why? Was there something controversial about those organizations she'd been involved in?

his younger brothers apparently did the proposing on his behalf, declaring “we want her for a sister”
Ha!

[nnozomi]

During World War II she was a leading figure in various women’s patriotic organizations; for some years after the war she was forbidden to hold public office or educational positions on those grounds.
Why? Was there something controversial about those organizations she'd been involved in?
It's a good question with a very long answer. Basically having been prominently patriotic during the war was itself controversial/taboo in the postwar in many circles, because it meant being in favor of Japan's militarism, imperialism etc. etc. Honestly I don't know a whole lot about the women's organizations. I can tell you more about the left-wing types, mostly too young to have shown up here yet, many of whom "converted" to the government line in wartime (in order to avoid imprisonment and torture and other fun things, or just being put out of work) and were then subject to a huge postwar backlash for it. My guess re Yoshioka Yayoi is that she was a particularly prominent figure who also, as a very dominant woman, made a lot of people uncomfortable, and so she was made an example of in a way a lot of others were not.

[luzula]

Ah, I see! That does sound complicated...

[nnozomi]

Yup. Wait until we get to the women born about 20-30 years later and the war will be looming everywhere, sigh.

[chestnut_pod]

Another very interesting life! Thank you as ever for introducing me!

[nnozomi]

Thank you as ever for reading! <3