Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Kanno Suga, also called Sugako, was born in 1881 in Osaka, where her father was an itinerant mining engineer. Her mother Nobu died when Suga was twelve, to be replaced by a wicked stepmother who abused her (according to some accounts, having her raped and spreading rumors of her bad behavior); at age nineteen, she was married off to support the family’s failing finances. Shortly divorced, she returned home and helped support her younger sister and brother.

She studied writing with the author Udagawa Bunkai, joined Yajima Kajiko’s WCTU, and thereby developed an interest in socialism and pacifism through her acquaintance with the writer, editor, and all-around good guy Sakai Toshihiko [to whose daughter Magara Suga willed her best kimono], then running the Heimin Shimbun left-wing newspaper. She was apparently particularly moved by an article in which Sakai argued that women who had been raped should bear no more responsibility for it than women bitten by mad dogs.

Suga addressed woman’s issues from her own earliest days as a journalist, working for the Osaka Morning News: she criticized the plan to have geisha dance at the Fifth National Industrial Exhibition held in 1903, calling them “women of low repute,” a daring move given how many high governmental officials were then married to ex-geisha (she later regretted this stance, shifting to criticize the social structure in general rather than the women involved in it.) In 1906, with help from Sakai, she moved to Wakayama to edit a newspaper there while its original editor was in prison; she subsequently married her colleague Arahata Kanson and moved to Tokyo with him, although this marriage likewise did not last more than a year. Her articles continued to call on women to stand up for themselves against men’s double standards and perfidy.

In 1908, she was arrested as part of the so-called Red Flag Incident, in which anarchists including Arahata, Osugi Sakae, and Kotoku Shusui waved red flags marked with anarchist and socialist slogans when welcoming a comrade back from prison, clashed with police, and were arrested in large numbers. Shortly after the incident, Suga and Kotoku began to live together (he was technically still married, but his wife Chiyo had stayed home when he came to Tokyo. Arahata, Suga’s ex-lover, did not hesitate to use this and other points to blacken Suga’s name in later years; he famously described her as “not at all pretty, but very sexy” or words to that effect, implying that she had slept with almost every man she met). Along with Kotoku, Suga became editor of the journal Liberal Thought, which was promptly banned.

In 1910, Suga, Kotoku, and a number of their comrades were arrested in what became the High Treason Incident, on suspicion of plotting to assassinate the Meiji Emperor. Even at the time it was widely known that most of the charges were entirely falsified (in part by chief prosecutor Hiranuma Kiichiro), as part of the increasing crackdown on the left wing. According to some accounts, Suga, who was already suffering from tuberculosis, knew herself not to be long for this world in any case, and decided to die with her comrades rather than plead her innocence; others have her a central part of the conspiracy, considering herself a latter-day Sofia Perovskaya. Regardless, she was hanged for treason in January of 1911, at the age of thirty.

Buried in a Tokyo temple, her remains disappeared during the war. While it was originally thought that they had been ravaged by the wartime military, a postwar survey found that they had been taken by comrades for safe reinterment in Okayama; her grave is still with her sister's in Tokyo.

Sources
Nakae, Ishii, Mori 1996, Tanaka
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kanno-sugako-reflections-on-the-way-to-the-gallows (English; translator unknown) Suga’s record of her sentencing and thereafter. A LOT.

Hasegawa Shigure was born in 1879 in Tokyo, where her father was a lawyer; her birth name was Yasuko and her intimates knew her as O-Yat’chan all her life. She was fond of novels and plays from childhood on, popular among her elementary school classmates for her recountings of the stories she had read. At age fifteen she began to study waka poetry with Sasaki Nobutsuna, until her mother Taki, who resented her oldest daughter Yasuko for the short shrift given Taki by her husband and mother-in-law, sent her out to train as a maid.

Four years later she was married to the son of nouveau-riche family friends, a wastrel who was shortly dispatched to a remote mining town in the north to teach him proper behavior. Yasuko, lonely and isolated in what might at the time as well have been a different country, consoled herself with writing and sent the results to various magazines, winning an award in 1901 for a short story. This gave her the impetus to return to Tokyo in 1904 in order to focus on her writing, eventually divorcing her husband. It was at this point that she began to use “Shigure” as a pen name.

By 1908 Shigure’s theater and kabuki works were beginning to be staged; she was the first female playwright to be recognized by name at the Kabuki-za theater. Rapidly becoming known as a popular playwright (even her mother Taki applauded her success at this point, although she may have had financial motives), she also wrote for dance productions and experimental troupes, working with the kabuki actor Onoue Kikugoro VI, who became a lifelong friend. In 1917 she fell in love with the writer Mikami Otokichi, twelve years younger than she. They lived together from then on but were never formally married.

In 1928, Mikami—whose popular novels were raking in enough cash for him to support multiple mistresses, thanks in part to Shigure’s support and networking—offered to buy her a diamond ring. She requested instead the seed money for a magazine, and subsequently founded Nyonin Geijutsu [Women’s Art] in order to cast light on more women authors: serving as a Japanese equivalent of sorts to the English Time and Tide, it offered a platform to writers including Okada Yachiyo, Hirabayashi Taiko, Sata Ineko, Hiratsuka Raicho, Ozaki Midori, Kamichika Ichiko, the two Fumikos (Enchi and Hayashi), Tamura Toshiko, Takamure Itsue, and many others. Adopting the left-wing orientation of literary circles at the time, the magazine was banned more than once. While its publication run was only five years long, it was a major event in the history of twentieth-century Japanese women’s literature.

Shigure continued to write in her later years while caring for her ill husband. In 1936 she published Kindai Bijinden [Modern Beauties], a collection of biographical sketches of women of the time which she had written over the last two decades, including essays on O-Yuki Morgan, Yanagiwara Byakuren, Matsui Sumako, Raicho, Tazawa Inabune, Takemoto Ayanosuke, Shugensha Hamako, Kujo Takeko, Otsuka Kusuoko, and Iwano Kiyoko among others. As the war took shape, she founded a women’s organization called the Kagayaku Kai [Shining Group] which worked on behalf of Japan’s wartime machine, supporting Japanese troops overseas, Chinese women students in Japan, injured veterans, and the families of soldiers killed in action. She died in 1941 at the age of sixty-three, frustrated on her deathbed that she would not live long enough to write a biography of Higuchi Ichiyo.

Sources
Nakae
Mori 2008
Ishii

Isomura Haruko was born in 1877 in Fukushima; her maiden name was Koizumi. She attended Miyagi Girls’ School (but unlike Soma Kokko, a year older, apparently did not participate in the students’ strike there), and became a teacher there after graduating. She also probably became a Christian at some point during her schooling.

In 1903 she married the businessman Isomura Gento and moved with him to Tokyo. He handled various manufacturing and trading concerns; Haruko helped out by using her school English to read technical documents, and in order to polish it spent time studying at Japan Women’s University and the Women’s English Institute (founded by Tsuda Umeko), remaining in school even when she became pregnant.

In 1905 she was hired by the Hochi Shimbun newspaper as a reporter, following in the footsteps of Hani Motoko. She had small children by this point (she was to bear a total of eight children), and because of her habit of bringing her children to work, became known as the “reporter with the ruby text,” a pun on the use of a smaller (ruby) font to add pronunciation text next to the larger main text. She reported on the visit of an American fleet to Yokohama in 1908, making use of her English, and at some point (probably in 1907) secured an exclusive interview with future President Taft. In 1911 she went up in Yamada Isaburo’s experimental airship and reported on the experience.

In 1913 Haruko published a collection of her writing called Ima no Onna [Women of Today], containing dozens of interviews and word-sketches of both individuals and situations, the former including Hasegawa Shigure, Okada Yachiyo, Shimoda Utako, and Soma Kokko, as well as many lesser known women (a midwife, a clerk, a young mother, a printing press worker, a beautician, a tea master, the wives of a detective, an actor, a miner, and a hotelier, and more) the latter covering topics from a station waiting room to a marriage brokerage, a movie house, a rakugo theater, an advice bureau, and so on).

Haruko’s husband’s business failed in 1915; they moved to a much smaller house and she went to work for the Yamato Shimbun newspaper and then became a freelancer. In 1918, she died of heart disease at the age of 41.

Sources
宮城女学校第7回生の夫たち：顔写真特定と目歯比率 (I can’t link this because it’s a PDF, but googling it will get the link; Japanese) An account of Haruko and her husband’s history, along with those of several of her classmates and their husbands; interesting photographs
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/951262/1/139 (Japanese) Haruko’s book on Women of Today online; it looks extremely interesting if one takes the time to struggle through the prewar characters (also a good example of what ruby text looks like)

[I’m sorry this is both late and too short; Qiu Jin deserves better, but I’ve been sick this weekend and thought I was better off posting what I had. I hope other people can fill in more]

Qiu Jin was born in 1875 in Fujian, China, the daughter of government officials. Although her feet were bound according to the custom of the time, she was taught to ride a horse and use a sword along with writing poetry in her childhood. She was briefly and unhappily married in her early twenties, moving to Beijing with her husband, where she unbound her feet.

In 1903 she traveled to Japan to study, leaving two children behind in China; she attended the Girls’ Practical School run by Shimoda Utako, where she joined various revolutionary societies and made herself notable by wearing Western men’s clothes. She also edited the Vernacular Journal, which published revolutionary articles in vernacular written Chinese (still a rarity at the time), including her own protests against bound feet and forced marriage, as well as (with Xu Zihua) the China Women’s News.

In 1905 she returned to China and became principal of a girls’ school with a revolutionary focus in Shaoxing. She was arrested and put to death in 1907 for plotting against the Qing Dynasty. She wrote poetry and (often unfinished) novels throughout her life.

Sources
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/qiu-jin-five-poems/ (translations of Qiu Jin’s poetry by Yilin Wang)

Tsuneko Gauntlett was born in 1873 in Aichi; her birth name was Yamada Tsune. Her parents Kenzo and Hisa were the children of a doctor and a horsemaster respectively, but had little luck in their own career trying to do business in Tokyo. For a while Tsune was fostered out to an aunt married to a doctor working with Hansen’s disease; she continued to seek advice and support from her aunt and uncle throughout her youth.

At age six she entered the Sakurai Girls’ School. When its first principal, Sakurai Chika, resigned her post in favor of Yajima Kajiko, Tsuneko was prepared to rebel; eventually, however, she became Kajiko’s devoted supporter and remained so all their lives. In 1890 she went to teach English at the Kyoai Girls’ School in Gunma north of Tokyo; among her students there was Okubo (Kubushiro) Ochimi, Kajiko’s niece, who was later to be her colleague in the Women’s Suffrage Association.
It was through the introduction of a British colleague that she met Edward Gauntlett, a missionary and fellow English teacher. He fell first; she was reluctant to accept his proposal for a long time, not sure she was attracted to him and also cognizant of the trouble inherent in marrying a foreigner. He persevered, however, and on the advice of her aunt and uncle as well as Kajiko, they were married in 1898 (Tsuneko’s mother, fiercely opposed, was persuaded to come to the wedding but sat sulking the whole time). Gauntlett was a respectable young Englishman with an extra dose of intellectual curiosity which had brought him to Japan. They shared not only a religion but also an interest in music; Gauntlett was an amateur organist, and Tsuneko had studied the organ and had the family musical ability (her brother became the noted composer Yamada Kôsçak ).

They were married in a Tokyo church. When they went to register their marriage at the local ward office, however, they were turned away: “there is no precedent for such a thing [as international marriage].” At the time, Japanese women taking up with foreign men were still seen as Madame Butterflies at best. Tsuneko applied to every relevant Ministry she could think of to find out the correct procedure, and was told only that nobody had ever done such a thing before, so nobody knew how to do it. In the end, she “ran away” in order to abandon her Japanese citizenship, applying at the same time for British citizenship, which she was eventually granted via a letter from Queen Victoria.

In 1901 the Gauntletts moved to Okayama (where a friendly Zen priest let them set up a pipe organ in the middle of his temple) to teach at high schools there. It was at this point that Tsuneko began to wear Western clothing, and to make Western clothes for her children likewise. Tsuneko’s brother joined them in Okayama for a while, receiving his early training in music from his brother-in-law (who also joined him in introducing table tennis to Japan there). The Gauntletts eventually moved to Kanazawa and then to Yamaguchi before returning to Tokyo in 1916, having gone through various health problems and had six children.

Tsuneko shifted her focus to social activism, working with Yajima Kajiko in the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs (Japan’s branch of the WCTU) for temperance and peace and against prostitution. She traveled overseas numerous times to speak at conferences on these issues. In 1920 she accompanied Kajiko to the West, taking care of her daily needs as well as tutoring her in English, acting as interpreter, and mending her aged kimono when it gave way unexpectedly during a party. She took the chance to travel to her husband’s hometown while in England, where his brothers and stepmother (who was relieved to find that her Japanese daughter-in-law was human and not a monster out of distorted paintings) received her warmly. In 1937 she was named president of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association.

During the war, Tsuneko and Ted remained in Japan but kept to themselves, effectively under house arrest under the eye of the thought police as one-time citizens of a hostile country, although both had become Japanese nationals by this point (their oldest son Owen sued the Japanese government after the war for forcing him to take Japanese citizenship); they were fortunate enough to survive and not to be imprisoned, however. In 1946 Tsuneko became head of the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs. She died in 1953 at the age of eighty, followed three years later by her husband. Of their six children, two settled in Britain while four remained in Japan; all six worked as teachers at some point.

Sources
Nakae, Shimamoto
https://www.japanjournals.com/feature/72-culture/survivor4/1085-2011-03-21-12-00-10-9917180.html?limit=1 (Japanese) Article with various pictures (click through from pages 1 to 7)

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)

[Sorry this is so late! Busy/sleepy/forgetful.]

Hirose O-Tsune (or Tsune, or Tsuneko) was born in 1855 to a family prominent under the bakufu government which fell on hard times during the Meiji Restoration. Seeing a path to an independent life, she attended the girls’ branch of the Temporary Pioneer School set up in Shiba, Tokyo, which was intended to train would-be pioneers to settle in Hokkaido (“temporary” because it was to move to Sapporo and become the precursor to Hokkaido University; it also included a wing for male and female Ainu students forcibly brought to Tokyo to study). The school taught languages, arithmetic, geography, history, and handicrafts to girls aged twelve to sixteen; O-Tsune, eighteen, lied about her age and entered in 1872. Not only would the government pay her tuition, but there were Dutch teachers from whom she could learn English and European ways. One of them offered to marry her; she turned him down, but he was persistent. Marriage to the up and coming young diplomat Mori Arinori seemed like the ideal way out.

Their 1875 marriage was considered extremely modern and unusual for involving a contract between the two parties, which stated among other things that the two parties should respect and love one another, that they had a duty of chastity [by which I assume they meant fidelity], that they shared equal rights to any assets owned by the couple, and that unilateral breach of contract could be met with an appeal to the law. This was Mori’s attempt to put his belief in monogamous marriage (as opposed to one wife and several concubines, the standard among well-to-do men at the time) into practice. Their wedding was witnessed by Fukuzawa Yukichi.

Two years after their marriage Mori became Ambassador to Qing China, and two years after that Minister to the United Kingdom. With her good English and personable ways, O-Tsune made an excellent diplomat’s wife (Ambassador to Japan Ernest Satow remarked on her beauty in his diary). O-Tsune and Mori had two sons born in England, who were named for their stations: 清 (Kiyoshi, or Qing) and 英 ([Suguru?], or England). A daughter called Yasu was also born before their return to Japan.

They returned in 1884, just in time to grace the Rokumeikan. In 1885 Mori became Minister of Education; the next year, however, they dissolved their marriage contract in a divorce. O-Tsune left her children with their father and disappeared. It is not known for certain a) why they divorced (Mori was to marry again later on) or b) what happened to her afterward. Theories on a) include that O-Tsune had had an affair in England, resulting in their daughter Yasu “being born with blue eyes,” or that, as her stepbrother Hirose Shigeo had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in a plan to assassinate Ito Hirobumi, she was deliberately saving Mori from disgrace.

As to what happened to her afterward, one rumor is that the Japanese woman registered in the Glasgow Medical School under the name of “Iga Mori” was in fact Tsune, but this is probably an error for the actual (male) Iga Mori, unrelated. No one knows where she ended up or when she died.

Sources
Nakae
https://note.com/rokurou0313/n/n9cf9ffb56c7f (Japanese) Article on a novel about O-Tsune and how much of it can be considered fact
http://whiteplum.blog61.fc2.com/blog-entry-3521.html?sp (Japanese) Short summary of O-Tsune’s life after returning to Japan
https://decolonization.jp/article/2487 (Japanese) Article on the Temporary Pioneer school’s Ainu students