Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Nomura Michi was born in 1875 in Kanagawa, where her family ran an inn of long standing. Her father died when she was six. After her graduation from elementary school, her mother Hiro sent her to the Toyo Eiwa Girls’ School in Tokyo where she studied English; she was baptized at fourteen. Hiro would have liked her daughter to study in the US, but gave up in the face of fierce opposition from relatives. (Incidentally, after seeing the inn passed into her son’s hands and all three of her children securely married, Hiro herself chose to become a Buddhist nun.)

In 1898 Michi married Nomura Yozo, who made use of his own fluency in English to run an antique shop in Yokohama serving mainly foreign customers. In addition to raising their five children, she also took over the antique shop from her husband when he proved to be on the foot-loose and feckless side (although apparently a good guy on the whole, eventually reformed by his wife and cooperating with many of her later endeavors). She was among those responsible for establishing the Japan YWCA in 1905, along with Tsuda Umeko, Hani Motoko, and others; later on she was also a prime mover in the development of the Yokohama YWCA.

In 1908, Michi was chosen to take part in the Asahi Shimbun’s “Around the World” program, as one of only three women among 54 participants; her record of the 96-day journey was later published as a book. After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, she helped organize a league of women’s organizations which worked toward disaster relief, although their own shop and possessions had suffered major damage. For all her Christian beliefs, she did not hesitate to summon the Buddhist philosopher Suzuki Daisetsu to minister to his friend Yozo when the latter was suffering depression after the disaster.

In 1930, she and five others submitted a petition with 3000 pages of signatures calling for an end to legal prostitution. She and Yozo were still running their shop as well as seeing their children educated and married; they kept busy in middle age, Yozo nearly arrested as a spy while traveling in China (and, discovered not to have written a single letter home during his voyage, promising in his official apology that he would make no travels in future without his wife’s advance permission) and Michi having shouting matches with the Russian Ambassador, who was a frequent and contentious customer.

In wartime, with no foreign customers left, Michi and Yozo closed their shop and became hoteliers at Yokohama’s Hotel New Grand, still in charge there at the end of the war when it was taken over by the occupying troops; they were permitted to go on living there while giving house room to General MacArthur among others, taking the opportunity to call on him to protect Japanese women and share the occupying army’s food with the Japanese populace.

Michi died in 1960 at the age of 85, leaving numerous descendants. (Her great-granddaughter Eiko Todo, taking after her female ancestor clearly, is the founder of the Japan Dyslexia Society.)

Sources
Nakae, Shimamoto

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.

Uryu Iwako was born in 1829 in Aizu (now Fukushima), the oldest daughter of an oil merchant. Taken in at age fourteen by her uncle, a court physician, she studied the basics of medicine and nursing in his house. She married Sase Mosuke at seventeen; they opened a kimono shop in the castle town of Aizu-Wakamatsu and became parents to a son and three daughters. After a short period of busy happiness, however, a run of misfortune began: her uncle died, the store clerk ran away with the proceeds, her husband died young after a long illness, and her mother died. In despair, Iwako took her children back to her family home in Atsushio Village, where she confessed to a local priest that she would like to bury her sorrows in the nunnery. “A lot of people are worse off than you. Why not do something for them instead?” the priest responded, setting her on her future path.

The 1868 Boshin War gave her an opportunity to begin: she tended wounded soldiers (with a devotion said to have inspired Niijima Yae to do a similar task much later) and, after the war, reopened the old Nisshinkan domain school as a home and school for samurai-class war orphans, teaching abacus arithmetic, silkworm cultivation, weaving, papermaking, and other useful traditional occupations. When the school was closed in accordance with the new Elementary School Edict of 1872, Iwako set off to Tokyo to train in charity work and management on the ground, returning to Aizu to care for children and the poor, set up a school of sewing for farm girls, and so on.

As an acquaintance of the controversial Governor Mishima Michitsune, she was able to expand her scope throughout the newly created Fukushima Prefecture, establishing the Fukushima Charity School in 1890; she also served briefly as head of care for young children at the Tokyo School for Orphans and established numerous other similar institutions around Fukushima (sometimes selling candy and rice sweets to raise money, proving that bakesales are universal). Her supporters included the liberal politician Itagaki Taisuke and the field marshal Oyama Iwao (husband of Oyama Sutematsu).

She was noted for being anti-abortion in the sense that she was opposed to abortions caused by poverty, and did her best to provide funds to families which needed them and to support those imprisoned when abortion was made illegal.

In 1895, when the First Sino-Japanese War broke out, she went back to Tokyo, met Goto Shimpei and worked toward the nationwide establishment of free clinics, and sent her son Yuzo to Taiwan to further her charity aims there. She was also involved in recovery work after the 1896 Sanriku Tsunami. Shortly before her death in 1897, she became the first woman to receive the Medal of Honor with Blue Ribbon for contributions to public welfare.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.city.kitakata.fukushima.jp/site/iwako/ readable summary in Japanese