Marian Irwin (1888-1973)

[nnozomi]

Marian Irwin was born in 1888 in Tokyo, where her father Robert Irwin was an American diplomat and her mother, Takechi Iki, a samurai’s daughter; their marriage is said to have been the first legal marriage between Japanese and American nationals. Irwin, fascinated by Japan from youth, also became close friends with the leading politician Inoue Kaoru through his work, and as their families are said to have been close, Iki presumably knew Kaoru’s wife Takeko. Marian, the second of six children, left Japan after high school to attend Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe Colleges in the United States, earning a Ph.D. in biology in 1919.

In 1921, she served as aide to Inoue Hideko (no relation), then president of the Women’s Peace Organization of Japan, in attendance at a national conference on disarmament. She became a distinguished biologist, working at the Rockefeller Institute and Woods Hole for many years; her field was cell permeability. (Marian was the only one of her siblings to settle outside Japan; her brothers were businessmen and her older sister Bella founded a Froebel-style kindergarten in Tokyo.) In 1933 she married her colleague Winthrop Osterhout. She died in 1973 at the age of eighty-five.

Sources
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2020/10/11/robert-irwin-1/ (English) Interesting article, largely about Marian’s father Robert and his granddaughter Yukiko.

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

Fascinating!!