Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Mori Shige was born in 1880 in Tokyo, the daughter of a judge; her maiden name was Araki. A nicely brought up young girl who studied painting, koto and flower arrangement and graduated from Gakushuin Girls’ School (the school of choice for upper-class young ladies), she daydreamed as a child about becoming the Empress of Russia, eager to marry someone unique. Her first marriage, a family arrangement when she was in her teens, was to an up and coming young banker; however, it was rapidly dissolved when his relationship with a local geisha was discovered.

Shige met Mori Rintaro (better known as the novelist Mori Ogai) in 1902, when he was a military doctor in Kyushu; he was eighteen years older than she and, like her, had been married and divorced once already. He already had a twelve-year-old son, Otto (having studied in Germany, Ogai gave all his children German names written in Japanese characters). Although he had been stubbornly refusing his mother’s urgings to remarry, Ogai gave in when he met Shige and was struck by her beauty (“like a work of art” in his words). Shige, as a fan of his novels, was pleased with the opportunity to marry her idol.

The initial harmony of their married life was disturbed three months in when Ogai was posted back to Tokyo, where they moved in with his mother and sisters and Shige experienced the classic Japanese mother-in-law/daughter-in-law struggles. She found Ogai’s mother Mineko, who ran the household (including Ogai’s military salary) with an iron grip, so difficult to handle that she ended up taking shelter with her daughter Mari (born in 1903) in a room of her own parents’ house. Ogai put this into the short story Hanjitsu[Half a Day] in 1909; upon reading it, Shige was so infuriated that she started writing and publishing her own stories (in some accounts, encouraged to do so by Ogai), submitting them to Seito [Bluestocking] among other magazines. She depicted her husband in fiction as a loving partner and gentle father, while omitting her mother-in-law entirely.

Their son Fritz was born in 1907 and died the following year; Anne was born in 1909 and Louis in 1911. As her children told it, Shige was apparently a resistant mother, getting on badly with her stepson Otto and very critical of the children’s looks, including telling Louis that he had better sow his wild oats in the West where women didn’t know what really handsome men looked like (she also bought him prophylactics when she felt he was old enough to visit the red-light districts).

Ogai died in 1922; Shige survived him by over a decade, living to see her grandchildren, and like other writers’ wives suffering from the criticism of his family (including his younger sister Koganei Kimiko, also a writer) and friends. Afraid after Mari was divorced twice running that Anne would never be able to marry, Shige sent her to France to study painting, along with Louis, who was struggling in school (in the event Anne married the painter Kobori Shiro). All four of Ogai’s surviving children made themselves known; Otto became a pathologist, Mari a novelist known for tanbi better known to cdrama fans by its Chinese pronunciation of danmei novels, and Anne and Louis essayists. Shige died in 1936 at the age of fifty-five.

Sources
Nakae
https://forbesjapan.com/articles/detail/50669 (Japanese) Includes photographs of Shige in her youth.

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

Sasaki Nobuko was born in 1878 in Tokyo, where her father ran a hospital and her mother, Sasaki Toyoju, was the head of the Japan Women’s Christian Temperance Union (founded jointly with Yajima Kajiko), working actively for monogamy and against prostitution and alcoholism; Toyoju was also aunt to Soma Kokko. Nobuko spent her youth studying at mission schools; her mother hoped to have her study in the United States and become a journalist.

In 1895, when Nobuko was eighteen, the Sasakis held a party for writers who had reported on the First Sino-Japanese War, among them the 25-year-old journalist Kunikida Doppo. Immediately struck by Nobuko’s straightforward intelligence and beauty, he began to court her with English poetry of his own as well as recitations of Wordworth. Nobuko was charmed enough to agree to his proposal of marriage, but her mother was fiercely opposed, and eventually gave in only on the condition that they married quietly and lived outside Tokyo. However, the marriage did not go well: Doppo, trying to make a living from his writing, was desperately poor, barely able to put rice on the table. He was also short-tempered and high-handed. Nobuko fled back to her parents less than six months later, where she shortly gave birth to a daughter called Urako, who was added to the family register in the guise of her younger sister.

Both her parents died not long after. In 1901, relatives sent her to America to marry a politician’s son called Mori Hiroshi; they did not expect, however, that on the long boat trip she would fall in love with the chief purser, Takei Kanzaburo, and he (although married), with her. Instead of staying in the US, she got straight back on the boat to return to Japan with Takei.
This “scandalous” behavior was leaked to the newspapers by a fellow passenger, the educationalist Hatoyama Haruko, which left Nobuko exposed to fierce criticism and slander as a “loose woman” “unbefitting to her class” and so on. The writer Arishima Takeo (a close friend of Nobuko’s unsuccessful fiancé Mori) picked up her story and made a novel out of it, Aru Onna [A Certain Woman] (in which the Nobuko figure dies in the end). Nobuko’s little sister Yoshie, furious, demanded to meet with Arishima and defend her sister’s honor, but Arishima committed suicide along with his lover Hatano Akiko before she could make this happen.

Once the furor had died down, Nobuko and Takei (until his death in 1921) ran an inn in the southern city of Sasebo, raising their daughter Ruriko. One of their guests, Okabe Kansuke, eventually married Sasaki Yoshie and took her to his hometown of Maoka in Tochigi. In 1925, when Yoshie became ill after childbirth, Nobuko took Ruriko and moved to Maoka to help look after her. There, as well as looking after her sister’s family, she ran a Sunday school which made her very popular among the local children, continuing it throughout World War II even when Christianity was not well regarded. She died in 1949 at the age of seventy-one.

Sources
Nakae
https://kusanomido.com/study/history/japan/shouwa/101171/ (Japanese) Biographical article with photographs of some of the relevant people

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

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)

Inoue Hideko was born in 1875 to a prosperous family in Hyogo, west of Osaka [not to be confused with the artist of the same name born exactly a hundred years later]. Succeeding, against her father’s opposition, in entering high school in Kyoto, she was roommates with Hirooka Kameko, whose mother Hirooka Asako was a founder of Japan Women’s University; as a friend of the family, she sometimes accompanied Asako on business trips. In 1895 she married Adachi Masaji, who took Hideko’s family name in order to carry on her line (the relatively early marriage, for an educated woman, may have been a family decision based on her brother’s death the year before). Their daughter Shina was born four years later.

In 1901, encouraged by Hirooka Asako, Inoue entered the first graduating class at Japan Women’s University in the home economics department; she also served as dormitory supervisor. Upon graduation, she went to the US to study pedagogy at Columbia University. Returning in 1908 to Japan, she became a professor of home economics at her alma mater. In 1911 she took over leadership of the Japan Women’s Peace Association. She also marshalled her fellow alumnae to raise money for Japan’s first daycare center in 1913.

In 1921 she returned to the US in order to attend an international women’s conference on peace; she was accompanied by her secretary, the half-Japanese scientist Marian Irwin, and traveled the long way home along with her husband (now a businessman and politician), each later writing an account of the trip. In 1931 she became president of Japan Women’s University. As Japan slid into imperialism and warfare, Hideko didn’t struggle against the status quo, continuing to work for women’s education while supporting the Japanese Empire’s colonialist and jingoist policies; she also, along with Yoshioka Yayoi and others, formed the women’s wing of the National Language Association in order to promote the use of traditional feminine language, and held various government posts throughout the war.

Not surprisingly, she was purged by GHQ in the postwar for her wartime collaboration, prohibited from educational work from 1946 through 1950. This did not discourage her from once again visiting the US on a study tour in 1954 and later serving as president of a woman’s college in Kanagawa. She died in 1963, aged eighty-eight. Her daughter Shina followed in her footsteps as a peace activist and a professor (of philosophy) at Japan Women’s University

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

Uemura Shoen was born in 1875 in Kyoto, the daughter of Uemura Naka, a tea-leaf merchant’s daughter, and her adopted-husband, who died before Shoen was born. Naka raised her daughter, whose birth name was Tsune, while running the family business; noting that from early childhood Tsune spent her playtime drawing pictures, Naka sent her to the Kyoto Prefectural School of Art.

There she studied with the classical Japanese painter Suzuki Shonen, who was impressed with his one female student; although she liked her teacher, Tsune was frustrated by the boys’ teasing and even more so by the endless assignments of traditional nature topics, when she wanted to draw people. Paintings of beautiful women had gone out of fashion with the Edo period twenty years before, however. Although she received one of Suzuki’s penname characters in her own, becoming Uemura Shoen, Tsune continued her study on her own. She drew herself in the mirror [her “Self-Portrait at 16” is the icon I use for this community, much obliged] and borrowed the neighborhood girls to use as models; come the Gion Festival, when Edo-period screens decorated the entryways of Kyoto’s great houses, she took a packed lunch and spent the day ecstatically sketching.

In 1890, Shoen’s “Beauties of Four Seasons” took first prize at the National Industrial Exhibition; it was purchased by the Duke of Connaught, who happened to be visiting Japan at the time. Shoen was fifteen years old. Over the next decade, her paintings won awards no matter where she submitted them; she also began to receive numerous proposals of marriage, all of which she turned down. She spent time studying with the painters Kono Bairei and Takeuchi Seiho. In 1900, her “Blooming Flowers” took first prize at the Japan Painting Exhibition, bringing her fame throughout Japan; her “Mother and Child” was also exhibited at the Paris World Fair.

Two years later, Shoen gave birth to a boy she named Shintaro. The theory widely believed is that his father was Suzuki Shonen, her old teacher, but Shoen never told anyone, even Shintaro herself, the name of her son’s father. Shintaro was raised by his grandmother Naka, who was determined to let Shoen devote herself to her painting. He eventually took the name Uemura Shoko and became a painter in his own right, going from a little boy entering his mother’s studio only to be told “hush, don’t move” to a fellow artist painting alongside her late into the night.

Shoen served as an Imperial Household Artist from 1904 to 1917, only the second woman after Noguchi Shohin to do so. In her later years she was appointed to various highly prestigious art juries, often as the first woman to hold the position. During World War II, her paintings depicted the war effort and women in moments of everyday life; as a “homefront artist” she traveled to China on a government-sponsored propaganda trip. In 1948, she became the first woman to receive the Order of Culture. She died the following year, surrounded by her family.

Her paintings, influenced by Edo-period ukiyoe, woodblock prints, and Noh drama, focused on beautiful women; famous works other than those noted above include “Flame,” apparently painted in a season of struggle, “Yang Guifei,” “Noh Dance Prelude” (for which her daughter-in-law Taneko is thought to have modeled), and “Woman Walking Through a Snowstorm” among many others.

Sources
Mori 1996
https://art.nikkei.com/shoen/exhibition/ (Japanese) Beautiful reproductions of several paintings
https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/shoen-uemura/ (English) Brief article with links to other related articles

Hani Motoko was born in 1873 as Matsuoka Motoko in far-northern Aomori, where her father was a former samurai; he left the family in disgrace when she was small, having lost the status he gained by marrying in when his disporting with local geisha became public (as a child Motoko would stride into the geisha house and sit down right next to her father as he drank, refusing the sweets offered her by the madam, until he could be dragged home). From early on she was a determined student who did not accept what she was taught at face value: “all right, one plus one is two, but why is it?”

After graduating from the local girls’ school, she moved on to study in Tokyo with the support of her education-mad grandfather (it took five days on a sled to Sendai, the nearest big city, and from there a day on the train). She eventually enrolled in the Meiji Girls’ School in order to study with its principal Iwamoto Yoshiharu (husband of Wakamatsu Shizuko), editor of the magazine Jogaku Zasshi [Women’s Learning], a liberal, Christian, quasi-feminist organ of which Motoko was a devoted reader. She earned her dormitory fees by working as a proofreader for the magazine.

In 1893 she returned to the north to teach elementary school, where she fell into a brief marriage which lasted only six months, apparently due to her husband’s dissolute ways (or possibly to his mother’s refusal to accept Motoko as his wife); they met by correspondence and she may not have known what he was like until meeting him in person. Another theory is that she married him thinking she could change him and found out she was wrong. Later she called it her “first love (I’d rather not think of it as a marriage).”

Afterward, she went back to Tokyo and found a home with the doctor Yoshioka Yayoi as a live-in maid. Yayoi and her husband were helpful in finding work better suited to Motoko’s abilities: after another stint as an elementary school teacher, in 1898 she went to work for the Hochi Shimbun newspaper as Japan’s first woman reporter, or at least one of the very earliest (originally hired as a proofreader, having bluffed her way past the gender barrier on the strenght of her work, she wrote articles on spec that impressed the editors enough to let her move up). Her articles tended to focus on often-neglected social and women’s issues.

Three years later, Motoko married her colleague Hani Yoshikazu, seven years younger than she; the two subsequently left the paper to found their own magazine, Katei no Tomo [Household Friend] (later Fujin no Tomo [Housewife’s Friend]. Written by Motoko and managed by Yoshikazu, the magazine was full of interviews, accounts from readers, and housekeeping hints (including Motoko’s rational template for keeping a household budget), which brought it immediate popularity.

Their oldest daughter Setsuko was born in 1903, followed by Keiko in 1909 (a middle daughter died young). In 1921 Motoko and her husband, realizing they couldn’t find a school where they wanted to enroll their children, founded the Jiyu Gakuen [Free School, named based on the Biblical quotation “the truth shall set you free”], originally aimed at girls from age twelve to nineteen, offering a liberal education not in accordance with government regulations or the “mechanical” rote education then prevalent (the more things change). The students met in “family groups” of five rather than classes, cleaned their own rooms and made their own meals, and studied according to their interests. The only hitch was that tuition and meal costs were high, meaning that the students came uniformly from well-to-do families. However, the school gained considerable social recognition for its students' volunteering to help the disaster-afflicted, including in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. The school kept its “Free” name throughout World War II, in spite of governmental pressure, and retains it today (it now runs from kindergarten through college, coeducational although with separate boys/girls sections for junior high and high school).

Hani Yoshikazu died in 1955 and Motoko followed him in 1957, aged eighty-three. Her reflections on life included “There are two forces in life: ‘give it a try’ and ‘it won’t work anyway.’ You’ve got to choose one or the other.” Her younger daughter Keiko took over the school after her parents’ deaths, while Setsuko became a feminist writer and activist; Setsuko’s son Susumu and his daughter Mio were both film directors, and Susumu’s sister Kyoko was a music educator.

Sources
Nakae, Ishii, Mori 1996, Shimamoto
https://www.fujinnotomo.co.jp/about/life/ (Japanese) Very cute photos of Motoko and her husband in their youth
https://jiyu.jp/ (Japanese) Photos of the Jiyu Gakuen school, including the dazzling Myonichikan designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Urata Tada (or Tadako, or Yui) was born in 1873 in present-day Kumamoto, down south in Kyushu, the daughter of a traditional physician and businessman. At seventeen she was married to the son of another local merchant, but either a few months into married life or during the wedding (stories differ), she ran away, leaving a note saying “It’s not that I don’t like you, I just want to study more.” Her would-be husband recognized that she was not going to change her mind, and the marriage was cancelled.

After training as a pharmacist, getting her license in Osaka in 1892, she moved to Tokyo in 1895 and entered the Saisei Gakusha (familiar to us from various other faces here) to study as a doctor. Although there was no shortage of prejudice against women, she was undisturbed (tall even for a man of the time, she dressed as a man for convenience when attending school and enjoyed it when rickshaw drivers asked her “and where would you like to go, sir?”). She was licensed to practice in 1898, having taken only half the normal period of study, thanks in part to her pharmaceutical experience and partly to her habit of staying up to study whenever she woke in the night.

She worked briefly on the study of infectious diseases with Kitasato Shibasaburo, an enormously distinguished doctor and Kumamoto landsman who kept a friendly eye on her throughout her life, before returning to Kyushu in 1899 to practice medicine.

In 1903 Tada went to Germany to study ophthalmology in depth, able to do so in part because of her family’s wealth (she also studied German without marrying her German teacher, unlike Yoshioka Yayoi, who was among the friends seeing her off). Notwithstanding the news of her father’s death during her first year overseas, she went on to earn a doctorate from the University of Marburg in 1905 as not only the first Japanese woman but the first woman of any nationality to do so. Her doctoral thesis (dedicated to her mother and to her father’s memory) was, of course, in German, as were her oral exams. (She later submitted a thesis to the Japanese Ministry of Education and requested a doctoral degree based thereupon, but was rejected on the basis that “there was no precedent for granting doctoral degrees to women” (plus ça change, Japanese bureaucracy).)

Returning to Japan in 1906 (where she received a heroine’s welcome she could have done without), Tada practiced in her hometown, taught at the Gakushuin School for Girls, rejected an offer to serve as physician to the Meiji Emperor, and finally opened an ophthalmology clinic in Tokyo. In 1911 (or maybe 1907?) she married Nakamura Tsunesaburo, also a doctor; the following year they moved to Tianjin, China, where they ran a hospital in the Foreign Concession. Tada was the hospital’s director (her husband managed the pharmacy and the print room); she spoke with her foreign and Chinese patients in English, German, and her newly learned Chinese, eschewing an interpreter and thus gaining her patients’ trust. She also did not hesitate to eat Chinese style as her patients did, including garlic, when the opportunity arose.

As the presence of the war became felt more strongly, Tada’s activities were limited, although she continued to set off in rickshaws to see patients, explaining to Japanese and Chinese soldiers alike that she was a doctor on business. In 1932 her husband died, unexpectedly, of diabetes; Tada blamed herself and questioned her mission as a doctor for being unable to save him, but kept the hospital open until the war made it impossible to do so, later that same year, when she returned to Japan.

She died in 1936. Visitors to Marburg can (I’m told) set foot on “Tada-Urata-Platz” there.

Sources
https://kyusyu-manga.azusashoin.com/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E4%BA%BA%E5%A5%B3%E6%80%A7%E5%88%9D%E3%81%AE%E5%8C%BB%E5%AD%A6%E5%8D%9A%E5%A3%AB%E3%80%80%E5%AE%87%E8%89%AF%E7%94%B0-%E5%94%AF%EF%BC%88%E3%81%86%E3%82%89%E3%81%9F-%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A0/ (Japanese) Excerpt from a manga about Tada’s life
https://www.asahi.com/articles/photo/AS20231128003809.html?iref=pc_photo_gallery_1 (Japanese) Photos (click on the right arrow for more)