Organizer: Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University
Chair: Anne Walthall, University of California Irvine
Because women were largely
excluded from the network of publicly funded universities that produced
the civilian leadership of modern Japan, private institutions, some of
them mission-sponsored, continued to attract bright and ambitious women
in the early twentieth century. In several respects women’s schools
were sites of international exchange. Native speakers of English from
the United States and Canada served as teachers. Some schools
facilitated opportunities for their graduates to study abroad. The
facility in English that students acquired allowed them to serve as
interpreters and translators and to produce what Mary Louise Pratt has
termed “autoethnographies,” constructions of subordinate Japan for
consumption in the cultural metropole. In this panel, three historians
will examine three women’s schools as sites of international exchange:
Tsuda, founded by Tsuda Umeko with American financial support; Kobe,
originally founded by women supported by the Congregationalist American
Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions; and Tōyō Eiwa, a project of
Canadian Methodists. The three papers will contribute not only to
understanding of women’s education but also to recognition of how women
have functioned as agents of international exchange across the divide
of war.
1) Noriko Kawamura Ishii, Otsuma Women’s University
Kobe College Graduates as Students in the United States
Kobe College, which traces its
origins back to the activities of American Congregationalist
missionaries in 1875, aspired in the late nineteenth century to
establish a collegiate department to train Japanese women educators. By
the early twentieth century the school had graduated hundreds of
Japanese women, a few of whom pursued further education in the United
States. From 1922, Kobe maintained a sister college relationship with
Rockford College in Illinois, the alma mater of one of the two founding
missionaries, Julia Dudley. This paper will focus on the American
education of some of the Kobe College graduates and the contributions
that the women made to Japan. Some, such as Mibai Sugi and Takeda
Kiyoko became academics or reformers in the public sphere. One case of
particular interest is that of Makiko Hitotsuyanagi Vories, class of
1908. An adopted daughter of Tsuda Umeko’s friend Alice Bacon, Makiko
attended the Preparatory Course for Bryn Mawr College and spent a year
as a regular college student before dropping out because of illness.
She subsequently married William M. Vories, the missionary-architect of
Omi Mission. Makiko was dedicated to educational work, especially the
pre-school education at Omi Brothers Academy.
2) Patricia G. Sippel, Toyo Eiwa University
Toyo Eiwa Girls’ School As a Site of International Exchange: The Experiences of Canadian Methodist
Women
In the last days of 1882,
Martha J. Cartmell arrived in Tokyo as the first overseas missionary of
the newly founded Women’s Missionary Society (WMS) of the Methodist
Church of Canada. Less than two years later, in September 1884,
Cartmell had completed her initial mission of establishing a school for
girls in Azabu, Tokyo. From its earliest years, Toyo Eiwa Girls’ School
was an educational and even financial success, attracting enrolments
from the daughters of Japan’s political and cultural elite while at the
same time reaching out to poorer families. Through the early decades of
the 20th Century, it gained attention for its modern facilities, for
its progressive, Western-style curriculum, and for the international
environment created and sustained by the Canadian missionary women who
followed Martha Cartmell in supporting it.
While much of Toyo Eiwa’s success can thus be attributed to its
international character, for its foreign staff, the experience of
international exchange was neither simple nor universally positive.
Even among those who enjoyed long and productive careers as teachers
and administrators, the personal and professional challenges were
enormous. Many struggled to maintain their health and a sense of
well-being. Some were embroiled in a near-disastrous conflict with male
missionaries. A few experienced physical violence. There was even
occasional disenchantment with the ideals that had brought them to
Japan. This presentation will examine Toyo Eiwa Girls’ School as a site
of international exchange, focusing on the complex experiences of the
Canadian women missionaries who participated in its early development.
3) Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University
Learning from Travel: Tsuda Graduates in the United States, 1900–1941
The school that Tsuda Umeko
founded in Tokyo in 1901 served not only as an institution for
educating Japanese women in the English language but also as a space in
which students encountered women from the United States and could
observe their way of life. Alice Bacon, Anna Hartshorne, and Fanny
Greene were just a few of the American teachers at Tsuda. Thanks to a
strong network of international friendships, a select number of
graduates of Tsuda traveled to the United States to study at women’s
colleges such as Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. The American-educated
students, in turn, became educators and writers, continuing to
facilitate international exchange. This paper will examine the memoirs
of Tsuda graduates such as Sumie Seo Mishima, Hoshino Ai, and Kamiya
Mieko in order to explore how Tsuda prepared them for study abroad and
facilitated their admission to American institutions, how study in
America was financed, and how the time in the United States affected
the students’ understanding of both international relations and
personal relationships.
Discussant: Anne Walthall, University of California Irvine