The name "Tsuda Umeko" is a byword for the first wave of woman's schools in Japan. She celebrated her 7th birthday on a ship to America and returned to Japan as a bi-cultural 17-year old with a desire to improve opportunities for women in her own country.
Japan Opens Up to Cultural Exchange and Trade
Japan was closed to Christianity, cultural exchange, trade from European countries for 250 years after the Portuguese and Spanish priests and English traders were prohibited access. Then, with the arrival of the Black Ships from America in 1853, Japan went through enormous changes. The Meiji Restoration toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate and birthed the modern era. Former samurai and nobility formed the new government; their motto was "Technology and Enlightenment." Umeko's father, Sen took part in the first trip of Japanese leaders to San Francisco in 1867. Eager to raise the status of his family and give his youngest daughter a Western education, he sent her Washington D.C. to study at private schools and to live with an American family.
Umeko Moves to America
What an extreme change for a little girl to travel so far from her family and country; however, at that time culture shock was unknown. Five Japanese girls arrived together, but two left after ten months. Luckily, the Lanman family in Washington D.C. was an excellent host family. Along with her studies of basic subjects, Umeko read classic Western literature and took part in the Lanmans' gatherings with top British and American writers and poets, including Charles Dickens, Henry Longfellow, Washington Irving and John Whittier.
A Stranger in Her Own Land
When Miss Tsuda returned to Japan, she felt as if she had become a stranger in her own country. She poured her frustrations out in letters, which are published in The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda's Correspondence to Her American Mother to Mrs. Lanman, "Do you remember that we three girls are entirely different from any Japanese in education, ideas and experiences, that our ways of thinking and doing are so different, and consequently we are alone among the women of Japan?" They were experiencing severe reverse culture shock. The other girls soon got married, but Tsuda floundered for a while, trying to fit in with Christian missionary women because she had become a Christian in America. Finally, she was offered a job at the school for girls in the imperial family.
First Japanese Woman to Found a School
The Japanese government had become more conservative towards women's education, so Tsuda returned to America to study at Bryn Mawr in Philadelphia. She began to raise money for women's education in her country and was praised for her eloquent speeches to women in conservative church groups and Victorian Christian feminists. After she returned to Japan she founded the Girl's English School (Joshi Eigaku Juku) and sent for her Bryn Mawr classmate Alice Bacon to teach with her. There were other women's schools by that time such as Ferris Girl's School in Yokohama started by Mary E. Kidder, a female missionary. Bacon, with the help of Tsuda Umeko, wrote Japanese Girls and Women in 1891. It can be found Online at the Gutenberg Project. Bacon expressed her angst about women's conditions, "Just as Japan's progress is stunted, so, too, are its females: beautiful but pinched, nipped, and strangulated, rather like bonsai."
As Tsuda's school progressed, new graduates became teachers there. Bacon and her predecessor, Anna Hartshorne generously refused pay for their teaching, but all three women did part-time teaching elsewhere to survive. Hartshorne, who she also met at Bryn Mawr, was to become her closest life-long friend and the author of Japan and Her People (which is still available). Tsuda may have felt like a stranger in her own land, but she will always be remembered as an innovative woman pioneer in education who felt her legacy was to help women by teaching them English, good Victorian values through the Bible and Western literature, and to prepare them for paid work. The school eventually became Tsuda College, which continues to be a very respected educational institution. In 2000, Tsuda College celebrated its 100th year.
For twelve years, I taught at three Japanese women's colleges: Kanto Gakuin Women's Jr. College, Bunkyo University Women's College and Ferris University. Two-year women's colleges were starting to become obsolete by the end of the twentieth century because of the economic downturn. It was sad to see two of my colleges close in the first decade of this century. Students from Japan used to be the largest group to study in the U.S. until recently; however, the two largest groups are now from China and India. East and West were world's a part in Tsuda's time, but we are no longer isolated from each other. There is growth and decay, ebb and flow in international education.
References
Bacon, Alice. Japanese Girls and Women, The Project Guttenberg EBook, 2000.
Furuki, Yoshiko. editor. The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda's Correspondence to Her American Mother. New York: Weatherhill, 1991.
Rose, Barbara. Tsuda Umeko and Women's Education, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
Carmen Sterba - Carmen Sterba has a B.A. in Far East Asian Studies and an M.A. in Literature. She is keen about Japanese history & Asian American ...
