Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

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