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