Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Beatrice Lane Suzuki was born in 1878 in New Jersey. She graduated from Radcliffe (where she was introduced to Theosophy by William James, and shared classes with Gertrude Stein) and received a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University in 1908. While at Columbia, she went to hear a lecture at the Vedanta Society given by the Japanese Buddhist scholar Suzuki Daisetsu (D.T. Suzuki); in 1911, after she finished her studies at Columbia and he his at Oxford, they were married in Japan. Their wedding reception was held at the Hotel New Grande, hosted by Nomura Yozo and Michi. Beatrice was sometimes thereafter known by the Japanese name Suzuki Biwako.

Both Suzukis became Theosophists in Tokyo in 1920 (if not earlier). The following year, after they moved to Kyoto, Beatrice founded the Eastern Buddhist Society and began to write numerous books (in English) on Japanese Buddhist temples, Mahayana Buddhism, and related subjects. She also spent her later life spreading Theosophy within Japan, leading Theosophist efforts in Kyoto. She was known as an animal lover and a strict vegetarian (although one report says that in her early days in Japan she enjoyed a good steak). Although the Suzukis had no children of their own, they adopted a son (Masaru, sometimes known as Alan), who was the child of a maid by an unknown foreigner, and became a successful lyricist. Beatrice died in 1939.

Sources
https://www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/beatrice-lane-suzuki-an-american-theosophist-in-japan (English) Details of Beatrice’s Theosophical work and her views on its (lack of) acceptance as a religion in Japan
https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=gCxuEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=ja&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (English) Not directly about Beatrice, but an interesting-looking book about their adopted son Alan

Kawahara Misako was born in 1875 in Nagano. Her father Tadashi, a teacher and scholar of Chinese literature, was a Sinophile of sorts who believed strongly in harmony between Japan and China as the future of Asia (“harmony” here, of course, tending to refer to China’s peaceful submission to Japan), and he brought her up with an education suited to his beliefs (Misako’s mother, who died young, was named Shinako with remarkable symbolism, “Shina” being the common Japanese word for China at the time). After graduating from the Tokyo Women’s Normal School (or else its Nagano counterpart, sources differ), Misako returned to Nagano to teach high school, but found it frustrating. She visited the distinguished educator Shimoda Utako, who shared some of her father’s views, for advice and was directed to a position teaching Japanese to Chinese children at the Daido School in Yokohama.

In 1900, she was invited to go to Shanghai to teach at Wuben Girls’ School, whose founder Wu Xin believed that, unlike the numerous Western-led mission schools for girls springing up at that time, education should be in the direction of Asia and thus Japan. There she taught Japanese, arithmetic, singing, and drawing, while herself studying Chinese and living in the poor conditions of the Chinese quarter.

Misako’s sincere efforts to understand China and the Chinese drew the eye of the Japanese military, which was then winding up for the Russo-Japanese War and concerned with the Mongolian people living around the Qing-Russia border. The army invited Misako to go and teach at a girls’ school to be run along Japanese lines, founded by Prince Gungsangnorbu (Günsennorov) and Princess Shankun of the Qaracin (Harqin, Kharachin) Right Banner. However, this was not all it seemed; she was also asked to observe any Russian movements in the area and report back, given the code name of “Shen.”

Misako set off for Qaracin (now in Chifeng in China’s Inner Mongolia, in the grasslands halfway between Beijing and the Russian border), riding in a donkey cart with a dagger in her bra. The nine-day trip was plagued by weather and fear of bandits, but she arrived safely and began at once to set up her school and begin her espionage, assisted in both endeavors by Princess Shankun (who served as principal of the school, and was also incidentally aunt to Kawashima Yoshiko). The school taught Mongolian girls of high birth, numbering about sixty, and offered subjects including reading (in Japanese, Mongolian, and Chinese), Japanese, arithmetic, history, geography, calligraphy, drawing, knitting, singing (in Japanese and Mongolian), and gymnastics.

The following year, the Russo-Japanese War began in earnest. Misako was surprised to find that she recognized the faces of a group of lamas visiting the Qaracin palace; they were actually Japanese spies on their way to blow up the Eastern Qing Railway. She kept their secret and aided them on their way.

After the war Misako, decorated with the Order of the Sacred Crown for her spy work, remained in Qaracin to focus on education for Mongolian girls in earnest. In 1907 she decided to go back to Japan temporarily for further study (taking with her three students who became exchange students at Jissen Girls’ School), putting the Mongolian school in the hands of Torii Kimiko, wife and collaborator of the anthropologist Torii Ryuzo, and promising the princess and her students that she would be back. However, upon her return to Japan she found herself all unawares engaged to the banker Ichinomiya Rintaro, who was stationed in New York; she had no choice but to break her promise to the Mongolian women, which she regretted all her life. In 1909 she published a memoir of her time in Mongolia. She died in Shizuoka in 1945.

Sources
Ishii

[Chronologically out of order because I only learned of her existence through last week’s person…]

Clara Matsuno was born in 1853 in Berlin as Clara Zitelmann (or possibly Tietermann or Ziedermann by some accounts). She studied at a Froebel-method school for kindergarten teachers there (there is fierce academic debate about which school she actually attended).

In 1876 she met and married Matsuno Hazama, a Japanese forestry student in Berlin; they became the first official German-Japanese marriage. In the same year Matsuno took Clara back to Japan with him, where she became the first head teacher at Japan’s first kindergarten, affiliated with the Tokyo College of Education for Women (later Ochanomizu University). Although she did not initially speak Japanese, she made use of the Froebel methods she had studied to direct the kindergarten’s curriculum, including use of its one piano (which no one else could play) for songs. She also passed on her methods to the first Japanese kindergarten teachers, Toyoda Fuyu and Kondo Hama.

As the need for more trained kindergarten teachers was recognized, Clara taught pedagogy at the same college until 1881, as well as giving German, English, and piano lessons to officials of the Imperial Household and teaching music at the Noble Girls’ School. In 1894 she performed in a piano duo concert for charity at the Rokumeikan.

Her daughter Frieda Fumi (who was to teach piano and voice to Otsuka Kusuoko) was born in 1877 and died in 1901, leaving two children. After Hazama’s death in 1908, Clara took her grandchildren back to Germany, where her granddaughter’s descendants can still be found. She died there in 1931 at the age of seventy-seven.

Mitsuko Coudenhove-Kalergi was born in 1874 in Tokyo, the daughter of an antiques dealer; her maiden name was Aoyama. While she may or may not have finished elementary school, she was taught dance and the shamisen from early on. She was eighteen when she met Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, son of a count and the Austro-Hungarian chargé d’affaires in Tokyo; accounts of their meeting vary (he saw her working as a waitress at the government’s Koyokan salon, he came to look at the antiques in the shop, she cared for him when he fell off a horse near the shop…). However they met, they promptly fell in love. (Or then again there is a theory that Heinrich fell in love with her one-sidedly and talked her father into having her marry him, regardless of her consent.)

Over various objections, Mitsuko became Heinrich’s common-law wife; she moved in at the embassy, where she learned to speak English and German, dress in the Western manner, and use a knife and fork, as well as becoming a Catholic. In 1893 Heinrich became the Count upon his father’s death, meaning that he and Mitsuko could finally register their marriage officially (although some versions have them marrying in 1892). Their sons Johann Kotaro and Richard Eijiro were born that year and a year later. In 1896, the family of four returned to the Coudenhove castle in Bohemia. Before their departure, Mitsuko was summoned to an audience with the Meiji Empress (who would never have spoken to an ordinary shopkeeper’s daughter), who enjoined her to uphold her husband’s honor and that of Japan while she lived abroad.

Heinrich’s relatives, displeased to find the Count married to an “Oriental” woman and the daughter of a merchant at that, did not treat Mitsuko well; she relied on her husband’s reassurance and spent her time learning languages (working to catch up with her husband, who spoke eighteen of them), history, geography, oil painting, and horseback riding, as well as having five more children. Heinrich preferred them to grow up as European children and forbade the use of Japanese at home. (Their daughter Ida Görres, a writer on Catholicism, was nevertheless to say much later that she “loved [the Church and its priests] and clung to them, not only as a daughter and sister, but as a Japanese daughter and sister, in the intensity of unconditional submission which belongs to Japanese filial piety.”)

Heinrich died suddenly of a heart attack in 1906, leaving a will naming Mitsuko responsible for his non-entailed assets and for the supervision of their children. His relatives challenged the will. As well as hiring lawyers, Mitsuko studied law and estate management herself to prove herself capable. Her children recalled that from this point on she was transformed from a gentle mother into a strict and short-tempered one.

Having eventually sent her oldest sons to university in Vienna, Mitsuko followed them there and became a star of the Viennese salons, not least because of the Japonisme boom of the time. During World War I, two of her sons were soldiers, both surviving; Mitsuko herself volunteered with the Red Cross. She was eventually to (temporarily) disown her son Richard when he married the older Jewish actress Ida Roland, in an ironic turn given the opposition to her own marriage. She was moved by Japanese prejudice against actresses; Richard’s older brother Hans horrified her even further by dating a circus horse-trainer, although he was eventually to marry the Jewish-Hungarian pilot Lilly Steinschneider. Richard is better known as the originator of the “Pan-Europa” concept which eventually led to today’s European Union; he may have taken after his father Heinrich, a linguist and philosopher-nobleman who dreamed of unifying the world’s religions. When his beliefs drove him into exile under the Nazis, Mitsuko remained under the protection of the Japanese government abroad.

Mitsuko had a stroke in her fifties and became partially bedridden, amusing herself with the shamisen she had brought from Japan. Her daughter Olga, to whom she left everything in her will, remained at her side to care for her. She died in 1941 at the age of seventy-six.

Sources
Ishii
Nakae
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQYe8DShlWU (Japanese) Excerpt from the Takarazuka musical about Mitsuko’s life (!)
https://www2.nhk.or.jp/archives/movies/?id=D0009040131_00000 (Japanese) Excerpt from the TV drama likewise.
https://www.japanjournals.com/feature/survivor/9097-mitsuko.html (Japanese) Article including photographs of various relevant people and places

Sugimoto Etsuko was born in 1873 as the sixth daughter of a samurai family in present-day Niigata; her birth name was Inagaki Etsu, with a particularly unusual character for her first name, meaning an axe or scythe used for felling trees. As a child, raised in a strict, old-fashioned household and originally destined to be a Buddhist nun, she read Confucius and studied calligraphy, writing her characters in the snow with tree branches. At thirteen, she was betrothed via an older brother to Sugimoto Matsunosuke (also called Matsuo), a merchant living in the United States whom she had never met. In order to acquire some English, she was sent to Kaigan Girls’ School in Tokyo, where, like her future husband, she became a Christian.

In 1898 Etsuko went to America to marry. At that time her new husband Matsunosuke was running a Japanese antiques business in Cincinnati, where a well-to-do family called the Wilsons, among his customers, made the Sugimotos welcome and taught Etsuko the practical business of keeping house in America, as well as hosting their actual wedding (their Puritan ways appealed to Etsuko’s strict upbringing, and their niece Florence became a lifelong friend and amanuensis to Etsuko).

The Sugimotos lived happily for some time in Ohio, where their daughters Hanano and Chiyono were born. In 1910, however, Matsunosuke’s business failed and Etsuko took her daughters back to Japan; Matsunosuke died of appendicitis before he could join them. To support the family, she worked as an assistant to Yajima Kajiko at the Japanese Christian Women’s Organization and taught English at the Friends School.

Upon her mother’s death in 1917, Etsuko took her daughters back to America, settling in New York and making her living as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines. She also lectured at Columbia University on Japanese and Japanese culture for some seven years; her students were charmed by her personality, including her steadfast resistance ever to wearing Western clothes. In 1925, writing as Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, she published the autobiographical A Daughter of the Samurai, which became a best-seller translated into nine languages. In 1927 she returned to Japan, although she continued to write novels in English which were published in the States. She died in 1950 at the age of seventy-seven.

It seems appropriate to close with a line from her book: “’Miss Helen,’ I said earnestly, ‘although our women are pictured as gentle and meek, and although Japanese men will not contradict it, nevertheless it is true that, beneath all the gentle meekness, Japanese women are like⁠—like⁠—volcanoes.’”

Sources
Nakae
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/etsu-inagaki-sugimoto/a-daughter-of-the-samurai/text/single-page A Daughter of the Samurai online; very very readable. I was especially fascinated by her young daughters’ experiences as Japanese girls in America and as Americanized Japanese girls in Japan.
https://lithub.com/a-daughter-of-the-samurai-on-the-strength-tradition-and-rebellion-of-etsu-inagaki-sugimoto/ Discussion of Etsuko and her book(s) by Karen Tei Yamashita and Yuki Obayashi

Koda Nobu was born in 1870 in Tokyo into a well-connected, high-achieving family. She began studying the koto and shamisen at the age of seven (first taught by her mother with a model mini shamisen), starting to learn Western music shortly thereafter. She attended the Tokyo Music School (now Tokyo University of the Arts) (specially selected by its founder Luther Whiting Mason, who had heard her sing in a children’s chorus), studying piano there with Nakamura Sen (Mason’s assistant, a Japanese woman pianist about whom little is known) and Uryu Shigeko (known to us as Tsuda Umeko and Oyama Sutematsu’s friend Shige). Graduating with two other women as part of the inaugural class in 1885, she next went to Boston in 1889 to attend the New England Conservatory, where she was reunited with Mason, who presented her with an Amati violin [unless it was given to her in Vienna by a charitable bookseller’s wife, accounts vary]; thereafter she studied in Austria and Germany until 1895, including violin lessons with Joseph Joachim.

In 1895 Nobu became a professor at her alma mater in Tokyo; she also gave piano lessons, composed, and performed as a concert violinist (staying so active that she was said at one point to have the second highest income of any woman in Japan, so that she was able to alarm her older brother, then a struggling writer, by sending him money). Her students included Suzuki Shin’ichi, creator of the famous or infamous if you’re me, I hated it Suzuki Method, composers Taki Rentaro and Kôsçak Yamada, pianist Kuno Hisa, and opera singer Miura Tamaki.

Around 1908, Nobu left the School of Music, having become an increasingly controversial figure therein, supported by her female colleagues (including her sister) and criticized by the men, who felt threatened by her success. Nothing daunted, she set off to visit the West and study further, returning in 1912 to give piano lessons from her own home-based music school, which numbered Empress Sadako and various other nobility among its students (Nobu composed a song for her birthday with lyrics by Shimoda Utako). She also established a small concert hall next door (with its walls painted gold), which featured a Steinway and a Pleyel and presented performances by Leopold Godowsky among others. In 1937 she became a founding member of the Japanese Art Academy (along with her brother Rohan, the writer, and her sister Koh, a violinist).

During the war, Western music was considered to belong to the enemy and its performances proscribed. Nobu survived the war only to die shortly after in 1946. In addition to her students, the large number of famous writers in her family, including Rohan and his daughter Aya, contributed to keeping her memory alive.

Sources
https://www.christinaknudson.com/violin-resources/female-composers-nobu-koda (English) Biographical article
https://wan.or.jp/article/show/9570 and http://pietro.music.coocan.jp/storia/koda_nobu_vita_opere.html (Japanese) Various pictures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6hBx-Ue6eg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I_p7kd00GE Nobu’s two violin sonatas, the first of their kind written by a Japanese composer

Yei Theodora Ozaki (otherwise Ozaki Ei or Eiko) was born in 1870 in London, oldest daughter of Baron Ozaki Saburo, a Japanese statesman who was studying English in the UK at the time, and his wife Bathia Morrison, whose father William Morrison had tutored numerous eminent Japanese in English and was also to give Yei a thorough literary education. Two more daughters were born in short order, but in 1873 Ozaki returned to Japan to marry a Japanese noblewoman. He and Bathia were temporarily reconciled while he was stationed in St. Petersburg, but eventually divorced, in part because of the numerous children borne by his Japanese wife and mistress (counting half-siblings, Yei was the oldest of at least eleven).

In part because of her mother’s strained financial circumstances, Yei traveled to Japan to live with her father in 1887. While she enjoyed the Japanese education she was able to receive, she had no intention of allowing her father to arrange a marriage for her (apparently due partly to her view of her parents’ troubled marriage); instead she left his house and worked as an English tutor and secretary, becoming close to the historical novelist diplomat’s wife Mary Crawford Fraser when employed at the British Legation and traveling with her in Italy. Upon her return to Japan in 1899, she taught at the Keio Gijuku boys’ elementary school and lived in a Buddhist temple, going back and forth daily between the extremely noisy and the extremely quiet.

From this point on, with Mary Fraser’s support, she began to publish English translations of Japanese fairy tales and historical romances, consulting her half-brother, the ceramics scholar Ozaki Nobumori, for occasional translation help. She had been fond of these stories since first leaving her father’s house: “The old stories had taken possession of me: they were a wonder, a joy, an exaltation, though I little imagined that I would ever write them down." Her books quickly attained success internationally, hopefully fulfilling in some degree her original intentions: “When I was last in England and Europe and found by the questions asked me that very mistaken notions about Japan, and especially about its women, existed generally, I determined if possible to write so as to dispel these wrong conceptions. Hence my stories of Japanese heroines, Aoyagi and Kesa Gozen and Tomoye Gozen.”

In 1905 she married Ozaki Yukio, then mayor of Tokyo, with whom she had become acquainted because, as they happened to share a surname, their mail was often mutually misdelivered. The widowed Ozaki was ten years older than she was and even so known as “Japan’s most eligible man” for his propriety, ability, and “largeness of heart.” They had three daughters, of whom the youngest, Sohma Yukika, was to become Japan’s first accredited female simultaneous translator as well as a noted peace activist. Yei died in 1932.

Sources
https://archive.org/details/warriorsofoldjap00ozak/page/n25/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater (English) openlibrary.org copy of Yei’s Warriors of Old Japan, with a biographical introduction by Mary Crawford Fraser
https://ozakitheodora.com/about/ (Japanese) Site focused on the house said to have been built for Yei by her father, with photos of the (gorgeous) house as well as Yei and her husband

Mutsu Iso was born in 1867 in Oxford, England, where she was christened Gertrude Ethel Passingham. She grew up in Cambridgeshire, where her father, a teacher, let rooms to supplement the family income; in 1888, one of his tenants was Mutsu Hirokichi, the son of Count Mutsu Munemitsu, then studying at Cambridge. Hirokichi (who took after his father, once called “the best-looking man in Japan”) and Ethel Passingham apparently fell immediately in love. Although Hirokichi left England for the US the following year, they remained in touch on a regular basis. They had planned to marry in 1893, when Hirokichi returned to Japan, but his father’s opposition meant that the marriage had to be postponed for the remainder of the Count’s lifetime.

In 1899 they met again in the States, but had to live apart and engage in various subterfuges (Ethel posed as a governess) for reasons of publicity, and in 1900 Hirokichi once again had to return to Japan because of his stepmother Ryoko’s ill-health. (His diary notes a moment of relief that Ethel’s period had come, suggesting that they made the most of the time they had.) In 1901 Ethel made her first visit to Japan, welcomed by Hirokichi and his sister Fuyu, and later that year accompanied him on his diplomatic posting to Italy, where they remained until 1904.

The following year, upon permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Imperial Household, they were finally able to marry (seventeen years after their first meeting). At this time Ethel took her husband’s nationality and adopted a Japanese name, Iso, suggested by her husband for its similar sound and its meaning of “seaside,” due to her fondness for the sea.
Hirokichi was subsequently posted to London, where their son Yonosuke (Ian) was born in 1907. In 1910 they returned to Japan and bought a house in Kamakura, a seaside town (now) a short train ride from Tokyo. Iso was occasionally employed as an English tutor for various members of the Imperial Family; she also devoted herself to researching and writing a book about her adopted home, Kamakura: Fact and Legend, using her husband as translator and interpreter for interviews and historical reading. Her book covered the history of the town, describing its many temples in particular, and was well received.

She died in 1928. Ian Mutsu, her son, officially renounced his title of Count and became a well-known journalist and documentary producer. He described his parents as “each living independent lives, neither subsuming the other, as if there were always both Japanese and British flags flying at home.”

Sources
https://lugliolove.exblog.jp/14485155/ (Japanese) Photos of Hirokichi (who would certainly be quite handsome without the mustache, speaking personally) and of Ethel in Japanese dress
https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB:Iso_Mutsu.jpg Very pretty portrait of Iso that appeared in her book

Okay, imagine you are seven years old and you’re being shipped off to a country all the way around the world, where everything is different, and you will not be going home or seeing your family again for at least another decade. The only familiar people you have with you are four other (unrelated) girls, two teenagers and two preadolescents. When you get to your destination you will be adopted by a middle-aged couple; you will take up their religion, learn their language so well you forget your own, make friends, and graduate from high school with honors. You will not return to your own country until you’re eighteen, and it will take you painful years there to relearn your birth language. You will be constantly conscious of the responsibility conferred on you by the opportunity you were given when too young to choose for yourself. You will remain close friends with your two closest agemates on the voyage all your lives; seeing how marriage circumscribes their lives, you will be more than happy to remain single. You will be endlessly eager to learn, even as you devote your whole life to education for others, specifically for girls and women. The girls’ school you found will bear your name down into the next century. You will stay in touch with your adopted family for almost thirty years.

I apologize for the second person, but Ume gets to me. The above is pretty much the essence of her life as I understand it. She was born in Tokyo in 1864. Her father Tsuda Sen was an agricultural scientist and a Christian (notable for introducing strawberries and asparagus, among other crops, to Japan), involved in the Hokkaido colonization project for which educated women were required. Along with Ume, the girls chosen to be sent to the US in 1871 were Yoshimasu Ryo and Ueda Tei (both older teenagers who returned to Japan after a short time due to illness), Yamakawa Sutematsu, who was eleven, and Nagai Shige, who was nine. Ume, Sutematsu, and Shige remained close all their lives, even after Sutematsu married the much older Count Oyama and Shige (who later became Japan’s first female piano teacher) the up-and-coming naval officer Uryu Sotokichi. Ume lived in Washington, DC with the librarian Charles Lanman and his wife Adeline until she was eighteen.

Upon her return to Japan, Ume was kept busy relearning the language and customs, as well as taking care of her numerous younger siblings. She assisted with charity bazaars (and sometimes danced) at the Rokumeikan, served as a tutor for Ito Hirobumi’s daughter, and taught English at the School for Noble Girls (working with Shimoda Utako and the French teacher Ishii Fudeko) and the Tokyo Women’s Normal School (now Ochanomizu University), returning to the US briefly to attend Bryn Mawr College from 1889 to 1892. Thereafter she founded her own school (with help from Sutematsu, her adopted sister Alice Bacon, and Shige among others), the Women’s English Institute, now Tsuda University. Run on liberal and progressive grounds, the school began with ten students and had grown to 150 in less than ten years. A strict and inspiring teacher, Ume dedicated much of the rest of her life to administration and fundraising. She died in 1929.

Because Ume’s own voice is too good to miss, I have compiled some selections from her letters to her “American mother,” Adeline Lanman (I hope I’m not breaking copyright) to be found AT LENGTH below.

November 19, 1882
Sutematsu and I awoke this morning and said, “Just think only one more day—only twenty-four hours.” I am wild with joy and can hardly contain myself—next moment I am filled with strange misgivings. If I could only speak my own language, it would be so much easier for me.
December 1882
Japanese food is very nice and it has agreed with me very well indeed. It is strange how natural everything tastes. Oh, if the language would only come back to me as easily! I am bound hand and foot, I am both deaf and dumb. …when there are six or seven ways to say anything and they tell me all, I get in a muddle truly.
…To tell the truth, I do feel already much older than I did—partially because I am considered older here in Japan, and then because I have lived a long time in the weeks spent here, already—such new feelings and experience make the time seem long.
December 17, 1882
Mrs. Lanman, I’m sure you would not believe it of me, but I am quiet, orderly, regular, and punctual.
December 28, 1882
…though I often long to see you all again and be back in America, I would not have it different, for I feel I must be of use, not because I know much, but because I am a Japanese woman with an education.
January 6, 1883
I verily believe it is as hard for me as for a foreigner, and I have no talent for languages. … “O me miserum,” poor me, no one has so hard a time in learning their own tongue, and I do feel so discouraged and have no energy to look at those complicated characters or to learn six different ways to say anything. Now, when I think I have a sentence pat, and say it, is it not discouraging to be told that I must only say that to children and servants, that it would be very rude to anyone else, and that what I should say is some long-winded, intangible, incomprehensible sentence? There are more than eight different ways of saying I and you, alone, not to speak of other variations.
…Sometimes I wonder why we went to America. I don’t believe we can do any good, and the government seems to be indifferent as to our work, and we seem to be forgotten.
January 16, 1883
I would not marry unless I wanted to, no matter if I have to live like a hermit, and nothing would induce me to make a regular Japanese marriage, where anything but love is regarded.
March 27, 1883
Yet hard as many things are, hard as many things will be to a woman in Japan placed as we are in the land of such women, yet, do you know my life is not one to shrink from or draw back? I must live and work and do, and I do never want or expect to leave Japan, to live anywhere else.
June 6, 1883
But I want to have my school, and never marry, though I do not say I shall never do so, because it is so hard, so very hard, to get along alone. Oh, it is so hard to feel yourself as different from others, and be looked on with contempt! If I could only do my own way, and not have everyone think me strange, just because I am not married. But that is one of the trials—and trials have to come.
September 28, 1883
In fact, you would be shocked truly. Shige said, when we were discussing something, I think hair, and we admired [Shige’s husband] Mr. Uriu’s soft locks, “I wish you would give your baby that” before me. Now don’t you think we are losing all our civilization?
October 19, 1883
Japanese standards of beauty and niceness are just the opposite of yours—for instance, these servants were saying “What dreadfully big, high noses foreigners have and such far back eyes, and so staring too, so unwomanly, not demure and drooping, and light hair is so dreadful and fuzzy,” etc. How Japanese make fun of foreign waists—they themselves with their thick girdles make themselves big there, and try and hide and make smooth the front of their bodies, and they think the high bust, the depression below, and the again swelling out at the hip and stomach something dreadful and vulgar, and they hate it. They dislike curly hair so much and any other color than black, and straight at that. They dislike big eyes. They like them bright but shy, drooping, slanting upwards a little, and they adore above all whiteness of skin. It makes no difference in the clearness of complexion, only it must be white, and for that reason, they use so much white powder or wash and make themselves like pictures, and it is not a thing to hide or feel ashamed of—they do it most openly.
December 4, 1883
I follow my own method—no books—but I began with a few nouns of common use. Then I had a sentence like “I have,” then “I have a book, a pen, a chair, etc.,” then “Have I a pen, a book, etc.,” then “Have you, etc.,” then “Have we.” After that such sentences as “What is this,” “This is a book,” “What is that,” “That is, etc.,” then numerals, then “I have one book, two books, etc.,” and then I get up, and get things and show in that way the meaning.
January 4, 1884
You will be sorry if I tell you that Sutematsu never goes to church, and seems to have forgotten her profession. She seems so submissive to Mr. Oyama, that though he would not forbid her going, still as he doesn’t go, she doesn’t venture, especially since Sunday is his day home. I do not have patience with such wifely tameness.
January 9, 1884
I am just reading a translation of a famous Japanese work [probably the Tale of Genji], a story, written by a woman—a luxurious, dreamy, poetical thing, but full of Oriental immorality. …I am also going to read Democracy in America by de Tocqueville, which Mr. Ito lent me.
February 26, 1884
It was written in the papers that Mr. Ito and Mr. Inoue spoke most strongly at court against the custom allowing the Emperor to legally have twelve wives, and begged that such things be done away with. That a protestation arises from these men to such an effect is a great thing, though I think that their own lives might be more perfect in some of these ways.
June 15, 1884
I never would have believed it of these quiet ladies, the most of whom think talking of money, of bargaining, or anything of that kind, is a sort of disgrace and, you know, in Japan these high ladies never attend to money matters or touch a cent of money themselves. Well, they got a good lesson. I suppose they caught it from the few of us who don’t mind.
July 29, 1884
I have been lazing the summer days just as I used to in America, by reading novels, just the trashiest kind, and enjoying them. … I have not inquired for a long time how Necko is, and all her numerous children scattered over the neighborhood. Does Necko still exist, and do you pet her any?
January 25, 1885
They had no idea what Christianity was, having only heard of it now and then. They asked me if it was true what people said, that it was a part of Christians’ worship to stamp daily upon the Emperor’s photograph… . They asked what I believed about future life and I told them, and also that those who believe shall meet again. … I said “Do you think when one dies, that is the end of everything?” and they said “Yes.”
June 13, 1885
My scholars at school are doing nicely. I have two or three that are studying splendidly, and they are very fond of their English. They study it so much, and are so anxious to get on, to the neglect of their Japanese studies, that they have been dubbed by their schoolmates “English-crazy.”
June 15, 1883
I met Mrs. Mori [Arinori] also there, and had quite a little talk with her. What a very homely person she is! Nothing pretty about her, and yet they say Mr. Mori’s marriage was a pure love match, and he is considered a man of the highest morals and very faithful and dedicated to Mrs. Mori. So it is not always beauty in this world, and in rank, too, she was a Miss Nobody, I think. Think of Mrs. Ito [Hirobumi], beautiful as she was, and is, and yet from such a rank that their beauty is their all, and when men tire of that, then it is all up.
July 1, 1886
I think the men dressing in foreign dress is well enough, but the women! and Japanese dress is so nice. They are throwing away the good of their native land together with the evil. The Empress will also begin one of the foreign languages—I don’t know which. I don’t envy whoever teaches her—it will be so much trouble and bother, and one would be afraid to move. All this is Mr. Ito’s doing. I think he is going too far—should like to tell him so, but don’t have any chance to do so at all.
August 1, 1886
I have not had any matrimonial arrangements made for me with anyone lately, and least of all with anyone of any rank, but the Pages you met seem to have decided that it was a count. I have not heard of any count of any kind that was marriageable, or I might have set my cap for him, but unluckily I can’t recall one, nor have I heard the least thing from Father or anyone about it, so your advice to accept him was a little premature, wasn’t it? But the wonder is, how such a story got around. I must ask Mrs. Page about it when I see her next time. I think I had better be an old maid after all, so please don’t talk about “Why don’t you fall in love, etc.”
September 23, 1886
How does the opera The Mikado flourish? Items have appeared in the Japanese papers about it…and the general feeling is quite a sore one. …Just the costumes and manner would not be so much, but to make fun of the government, and to put such absurd things in the mouths of the officials and the Emperor especially when the mass of people are in ignorance of the true state of affairs and believe it to be something like this—why, it is an insult. If people ask you, tell them this, and that it is an insult to everyone, Japanese feel—and to a country as well and reasonably governed as Japan, a farce. Can’t you send me the libretto of it just for fun? The costumes and all are very, very absurd, I hear from Japanese, and I should like to see and read it anyhow to judge of it.
…If I were a man, I think nothing would daunt me if I wanted to do something very much.
October 9, 1886
A few days ago, the Emperor’s only son, the Heir Apparent Prince Haru, came to visit our school. He is still a wee bit of a fellow, being only ten years old. I wonder what he thought of so many rows and rows of girls as there were. The poor little fellow seemed quite bewildered, and I don’t suppose it interested him very much. I fear he won’t amount to very much, from all accounts.
November 28, 1888
(Private) When I received the garters you sent me the other day in the box, those that come from the waist, I thought I would ask you if you wouldn’t some time, when you have a chance, send me one of those bands for ladies to use at certain times. I want one as a model and should like to show the Japanese ladies, as their method is so uncomfortable.
November 1, 1899
Our school has been quite excited over the fact that one of our little pupils, the daughter of Prince Kujo and sister to the Princess I teach is to be engaged to the Crown Prince and the engagement is expected to be announced in a few days. Of course, our school is very proud having been the place where she got her education. The young lady is only sixteen, and quite clever and accomplished.
February 5, 1900
How strange it seems to be writing 1900! I make mistakes all the time, and write eighteen and then have to correct it. It is very strange that we are in another century, is it not?
January 22, 1902
It was only a few days ago I was thinking how useful has been all that miscellaneous reading I did as a child in your library. Much of it has been more useful to me than the schooling I got, and the hard lessons I learnt, especially in the English teaching I am doing lately, when the odd reading gave me so much that has proved useful.
August 21, 1904
We are daily waiting to hear of the fall of Port Arthur. It will be a terrible struggle. I am so sorry they refused to surrender—the fools. No one doubts that the place will be taken, and yet for the empty name of honor, they are willing to sacrifice thousands and thousands of lives on both sides. It is a terrible thing to think of, and when will this false standard of bravery give way and people get to see the truth plainer?
May 23, 1910
Just a line to tell you that our new building is actually finished and paid for, and we are using it. It is such a fine, splendid building, and we are rejoicing greatly over it. The girls and teachers were so glad to go into the fine, clean, bright schoolrooms, so light and airy and pleasant. It is a big, beautiful building and cost nearly seven thousand dollars, which is a very big sum in Japan. It is anywhere, but especially in Japan. I only wish you could see it, for it is so beautiful and convenient and a joy to us, in every way. I feel it a great responsibility to have such a big place here to look after and run.
June 5, 1910
We were very much excited about the Comet and all the girls thought that we might be burnt if we got into its tail. However, nothing has happened. On some of the different nights last week, it shone very brilliantly and we saw its tail a long, long distance.

Sources
Nakae
Yoshiko Furuki et al. ed., The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her American Mother, Weatherhill, 1991
https://www.city.kodaira.tokyo.jp.e.fj.hp.transer.com/kurashi/111/111677.html (machine translated, ignore the text, but there are lots of good illustrations)

Ishii Fudeko was born in 1861 in Nagasaki, the daughter of a highly reputable samurai called Watanabe Kiyoshi who later became an official in the new Meiji government, moving his family to Tokyo in 1872. Fudeko entered the prestigious Tokyo Girls’ School, the first public school for girls in Japan, and also studied English with the government-hired American educator William Whitney, becoming a Christian along the way. When former US President Ulysses S Grant visited Japan in 1879, Watanabe greeted him in Nagasaki and Fudeko served as the interpreter; Grant called her “the brightest woman in Japan.”

Since childhood Fudeko had been betrothed to Ogashima Hatasu, another samurai’s son known for his brilliance, but as she wrote to Whitney’s daughter Clara, she was reluctant to marry him. Salvation arrived in the form of Omura Chikuko, the domain lord’s daughter, who was about to marry the Minister to the Netherlands and wanted Fudeko, her childhood playmate, to accompany them. Fudeko studied Dutch and French to go along with her English and found Europe invigorating and enlightening. She wrote to her mother asking her to break the engagement with Hatasu, wanting to contribute to society rather than become a wife, and was told “They’ve been very poor since the Restoration, and also he’s ill. I don’t have the heart to do it, you tell him yourself.”

With the matter still unresolved, Fudeko returned to Japan in 1882 and taught French (alongside Tsuda Umeko, the English teacher) at the School for Noble Girls. Without any great enjoyment, she became one of the flowers of the Rokumeikan, along with Mutsu Ryoko, Oyama Sutematsu, and other well-born ladies. The Imperial physician Erwin Baelz, himself married to a Japanese woman called Hana, met Fudeko there and wrote that she was one of the most impressive Japanese women he had ever met, with her languages and her ability to move between cultures. At the Rokumeikan Fudeko also took part in charity bazaars, which she found frustrating, writing to Clara Whitney that ultimately they did no long-term good, and that education was what poor women needed for independence.

At 24 she gave in and married Hatasu, who was already very ill with tuberculosis. Three daughters (Sachiko, Keiko, and Yasuko) followed [Sachiko’s godmother was Tsuda Umeko, who wrote “I am afraid the infant won’t have too good a godmother on one side, but I think Mrs. Ogashima is a true Christian and will bring up herlittle girl in the way she should go”]. One of the three girls died in babyhood [reports differ on which one] and both the other two proved to be developmentally delayed. Hatasu died in 1892. Fudeko, age 31, turned down any and all offers of remarriage. She was active in charity groups supporting women’s education, also acting as Alice Bacon’s interpreter; she continued to teach, becoming principal of the Seishu Girls’ School, which offered vocational education for girls from poor families. In 1898 she joined Umeko as the Japanese representatives to the International General Convention of Women’s Clubs in Denver, reporting on its results to the Empress and writing “Are women men’s possessions?”. By the time they returned, the School for Noble Girls under Shimoda Utako’s leadership had become more conservative in its stance; Umeko founded her own school, while Fudeko took a hand in a kindergarten for poor children run by Noguchi Yuka.

At this point she found herself involved in the work of Ishii Ryoichi, a fellow Christian who was involved in education for disabled people. A seasoned educator, Ishii had come to realize the need when he rescued a number of girls from trafficking after being orphaned in a major earthquake; he discovered that several of them had intellectual disabilities. His solution was to found Takinogawa Gakuen as a school for children who needed this kind of help. Among them was Fudeko’s daughter Sachiko.

Fudeko wrote to her father “I’ve found my own path at last.” She and Ishii married when she was 46; he was six years younger. They lived in the next thing to poverty, dedicating their lives to their school; among other things, they set up a silkworm room where the school could earn its keep and the children could acquire a trade. In 1920 the children’s carelessness led to a fire which burned the school to the ground; Fudeko rushed in to rescue the ones left behind and was seriously injured, needing a cane to walk thereafter, which she minded less than her sense of responsibility for the children who died. They might have closed the school at this point if not for encouragement from Empress Sadako, who had been one of Fudeko’s students at the Peeresses’ School. Ryoichi died in 1939; Fudeko continued to keep the school running until the material and personnel scarcities and heightened prejudices of World War II made it impossible. She died in 1944, succeeded as school principal by her half-brother Watanabe Tei. Takinogawa Gakuen remains an active school to this day.

Sources
Ishii
Mori 2014
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2024/2/7/umeko-to-fudeko/ (English) Account of Fudeko and Tsuda Umeko’s visit to Chicago to tour Hull House, etc.