Transnational Women's Activism

The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859-1920

Rumi Yasutake

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780814797402
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Following landmark trade agreements between Japan and the United States in the 1850s, Tokyo began importing a unique American commodity: Western social activism. As Japan sought to secure its future as a commercial power and American women pursued avenues of political expression, Protestant church-women and, later, members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) traveled to the Asian coast to promote Christian teachings and women's social activism.

Rumi Yasutake reveals in Transnational Women's Activism that the resulting American, Japanese, and first generation Japanese-American women's movements came to affect more than alcohol or even religion. While the WCTU employed the language of evangelism and Victorian family values, its members were tactfully expedient in accommodating their traditional causes to suffrage and other feminist goals, in addition to the various political currents flowing through Japan and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Exploring such issues as gender struggles in the American Protestant church and bourgeois Japanese women's attitudes towards the "pleasure class" of geishas and prostitutes, Yasutake illuminates the motivations and experiences of American missionaries, U.S. WCTU workers, and their Japanese protégés. The diverse machinations of WCTU activism offer a compelling lesson in the complexities of cultural imperialism.

1
Tilling the Ground
American Protestant Foreign Missionary Women in Early Meiji Japan, 1859–1890

Woman’s Work for Women in Early Meiji Japan

In 1872, responding to an inquiry from the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., about the possibility of American women missionaries working in Japan, Dr. James C. Hepburn, a Presbyterian missionary doctor, reported that Japanese were increasingly enthusiastic about female education, thus creating a need for American missionary women. Hepburn wrote:

There is, at the present time, great opportunities for “woman’s work” in this country, especially in our large cities. The Japanese have awakened to the necessity of educating their females, and have pressed almost every available [missionary] woman into this service. [I]f this zeal continues, which it is likely to do though perhaps somewhat moderated, there will be a fine field for female workers. And I think the Board would do well to engage in it.¹

Two decades after the Tokugawa feudal government (1603–1867) reluctantly concluded treaties with the United States, Japan fervently began to emulate Western values and institutions, kindling Japanese women’s desire for an education. To achieve equality with the technically more advanced West, the newly established Meiji government in the early 1870s was willing to learn anything from the Western powers, including their notions of family and womanhood. Thus, the government added five female students, including Umeko Tsuda, to its diplomatic delegation to the West in 1871, and assigned them the task of living with American families and attending American schools for ten years. Furthermore, to build an educational system based on the American model, the Meiji government began promoting public primary school education for boys and girls of all classes in 1872. The social tide of the early 1870s favored new changes and westernization, and the government even established several women’s schools to provide women with Western learning or to train them to become teachers for the emerging public primary school system. The government counted on Anglo-American Protestant missionary women in Japan to assist it in these efforts.²

During this period, the so-called “enlightenment thinkers,” the Japanese male elite who had been to the West during the late 1860s and the early 1870s, also advocated female education. These male thinkers recognized that the issues of gender relations and sexual morality were crucial measures of an “enlightened” civilization. Like the United States when it was forging a republic, they emphasized the need for female education because of women’s influence on their children, the future subjects of “enlightened” Japan. For example, Masanao Nakamura, a former Confucian scholar who had been strongly influenced by Protestant values while studying in England in the late 1860s, insisted on the need for female moral and religious education in order to “create good mothers” and to ultimately “change the character of the people” for the new age. Masanao Nakamura founded Dōjinsha, a school of Western learning, in Tokyo in 1873, and opened it to women in 1874.³

Nonetheless, female education was a lower priority than that of men for government officials and progressive male thinkers. Thus, when the central and local governments faced financial difficulties in the late 1870s, they allowed female secondary schools—except those which trained female primary school teachers—to fold.⁴ In contrast, American Protestant missionary women, funded by contributions from a large number of grassroots women’s organizations in the United States, made a more persistent commitment to promoting Christian education among Japanese women. They filled the gap between the growing thirst of Japanese women for an education and the Japanese government’s undependable response, especially until the 1890s when the government increased its efforts for and control over female secondary and higher education. Despite the turbulence of the Restoration and the ban on Christianity that was not lifted until 1873, a small number of missionary wives had begun conducting English classes at open ports and open cities as early as the 1860s.

Japan’s first female mission school originated in a class initiated by Mrs. Clara Hepburn in Yokohama, the wife of Presbyterian missionary doctor James C. Hepburn, both of whom arrived in Japan in 1859. However, her efforts were often hampered by her responsibilities as wife and mother. The work of developing a school from the single class started by Clara Hepburn required the strong commitment of Miss Mary Kidder (1834–1909) of the Reformed Church in America, the first single woman missionary who worked in post—Restoration Japan. By 1890, about forty female schools in over twenty different cities were under the influence of American missionary women and supported by American foreign mission boards.⁵

This work by American missionary women in Japan in the 1870S had been preceded by more than half a century of struggle by American churchwomen to establish and expand a women’s sphere in the maledominant structure of the foreign missionary enterprises of American Protestant churches. American churchwomen, who were defined as “dependents” of men in need of male protection and supervision, strove to prove that they were capable of being independent of men and of carrying out women’s projects separate from men’s. When the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the first agency to send American missionaries abroad was formed in 1810, it began to dispatch missionaries overseas by collaborating with the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches. It allowed only married women to sail for foreign fields as “assistant missionaries.” It saw the primary roles of missionary wives as homemakers for their husbands, managing the household and bearing and raising children. Secondarily, they were expected to “assist” their husbands in missionary work by exercising their female Christian influence as “teachers” of indigenous women and children. Despite their dependent status, however, able female missionary workers demonstrated that they could be “useful” as teachers, nurses, and social workers in addition to capably fulfilling their domestic duties. These American missionary wives laid the groundwork for female mission schools throughout the world.⁶

Although American female missionary workers wanted to work for the spiritual conversion of “heathens” as much as their male counterparts did, women were hindered from being ordained, preaching, or serving as lay delegates in the church’s governing body. Thus, they directed their extradomestic activities in the secular realm toward women and children. In claiming “Woman’s Work for Woman and Children,” American church-women sought female clients in their neighborhoods, cities, frontiers, and the world by crossing the boundaries of race, class, culture, and nation, but not of gender. Establishing a women’s sphere in home-and-foreign missionary activities, American churchwomen insisted that they were engaging in work that only women could perform and made it clear that they did not intend to invade the male sphere. This strategy successfully appeased male denominational missionary boards, which wanted to dominate the “true missionary” work of preaching and ministering. Tolerated by the male authorities, American churchwomen’s missionary endeavor drew support from large numbers of American churchwomen at the grassroots level.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, building female mission schools in foreign fields became the primary tasks of American missionary women. While the foreign mission boards such as the ABCFM permitted single women, but only exceptionally, to work in foreign fields in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the demand for unmarried women to work as teachers increased as female mission schools took hold in mission fields. At the same time, expanding educational opportunities for women in the United States had produced pools of well-educated young women who were eager to take on the work. Since the male authorities of the denominational foreign missionary enterprises were reluctant to send single women as missionaries to foreign fields, in 1860 churchwomen of various Protestant churches in America formed the first women’s missionary organization, the Woman’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands (WUMS), under the initiative of Mrs. Sarah Doremus of the Reformed Church. Importantly, this was an interdenominational and ecumenical effort by churchwomen who wanted to enlist the contributions of the rank and file to assist in women’s work for women and children in foreign fields.⁷

With WUMS’s success in enlisting women for missionary work outside the churches, however, the general foreign missionary boards of various Protestant denominations began to encourage the formation of their own denominational women’s missionary boards so as to keep women’s contributions within their own churches. Thus, American churchwomen’s missionary efforts were reformulated along denominational lines. American churchwomen, who wanted to be virtuous, selfless, and helpful, committed themselves to “double giving” by supporting the regular parish work and women’s missionary work of their denominational churches. By 1880, single and married women composed about 60 percent of American missionaries working abroad.⁸ Women’s foreign missionary movements organized under women’s boards in different denominational churches became one of the most popular women’s activities in the late nineteenth century.⁹

To demonstrate the influence of American missionary women on their Japanese employees and students, who later played crucial roles as activists in Japanese women’s WCTU, I examine the experiences of two American missionary women, Mary Kidder (1834–1910) and Maria True (1840–1896), in promoting Christian education among Japanese women. Their efforts produced the first generation of Japanese women converts, including Toyojyu Sasaki (1853–1901) and Kajiko Yajima (1833–1925), both of whom later played key roles in the Japanese women’s WCTU movement. Toyojyu Sasaki attended Mary Kidder’s school for about a year around 1872 and 1873.¹⁰ Kajiko Yajima was hired by Maria True in 1878 to teach at a Presbyterian female mission school in Tokyo.¹¹

Mary Kidder and Japan’s First Female Mission School in the 1870S

Today the Japanese remember Mary Kidder fondly as the founder of a well-established institution of female education in Yokohama. Arriving in Japan in 1869, when sending a single missionary woman overseas was still uncommon, Kidder had to overcome American and Japanese conventions that treated women as subordinates to and dependents of men. Kidder arrived in Japan with Rev. and Mrs. Samuel R. Brown whom she had known for many years, having worked at Rev. Brown’s school as a teacher and attended his church in Owasco Outlet in New York. The Browns had been working as missionaries in Japan since 1859, and strongly recommended Kidder, a pious Christian and an able teacher in her midthirties, to work as a missionary teacher to promote female Christian education in Japan. Since women in her denomination did not organize a women’s board until 1875, Kidder was appointed by the general board, the Board of Foreign Missions, Reformed Church in America. Being unmarried at the time, she was placed under the protection and supervision of Rev. and Mrs. Brown.¹²

In the course of her lifelong missionary work in Japan, Mary Kidder wrestled with this dependent status, which curtailed her freedom in pursuing a career and personal happiness but was a widely accepted practice by American missionaries in Japan. Living with the Browns, it was Rev. Brown, not Kidder, who received her full salary from the board, and he handed over only a portion of it to her and that too only upon her request. Kidder had to struggle both with Rev. Brown and the mission board to gain economic independence.¹³ At the same time, to avoid any misunderstanding over her status in Japanese society—an unmarried woman away from her family—Kidder was reported to the Japanese government as the Browns’ daughter. Thus, Kidder taught Japanese girls at the Browns’ residence while assisting Mrs. Brown with her housework in Niigata, a newly opened port in Japan where Rev. Brown had been appointed principal of a Japanese government school. When he was discharged on the grounds that he taught the Bible at his residence, Kidder also had to give up her class in order to follow the Browns to Yokohama where Rev. Brown became the principal of another government school.¹⁴

After moving to Yokohama in 1870, Kidder, while continuing to assist Mrs. Brown at home, began helping Mrs. Hepburn of the Presbyterian mission teach English and explored ways to work outside the Browns’ residence. Clara Hepburn, who had almost completed her own child-rearing duties, had spent whatever free time she had teaching English to Japanese students at her husband’s dispensary in Yokohama. However, when she became engrossed in taking care of a baby whose Presbyterian missionary parents had died in a ship explosion, she handed the class over to Mary Kidder without hesitation. In 1871, when Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn left Yokohama for an extended trip, Kidder also began to teach at the Sunday school for the children of foreign residents in Yokohama. By the summer of 1872, there were more than twenty-eight Japanese students at the day school, and about half of them attended the Sunday school with the area’s foreign children.¹⁵

When the Hepburns returned to Yokohama, Kidder endeavored to secure a building for the expanding day school. Although Kidder could not obtain funding from the financially troubled Board of Foreign Missions, Reformed Church in America, she was able to use her personal networks to obtain assistance from Japanese and American men in Yokohama, who were sympathetic to her efforts, as well as church women and Sunday school children in New York. Although both American and Japanese societies believed in women being dependent on men, Kidder, a “teacher” from an advanced Western nation, was able to sidestep the Japanese gender hierarchy to access resources unavailable to Japanese women. In her pursuit of independence Kidder took full advantage of this status, and found her first crucial supporter in the Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, whose wife attended Kidder’s school. In 1872, he procured an official unit located in the native part of Yokohama for use as her day school. To facilitate her commute, he also provided Kidder, who still lived with the Browns in the foreign concession, with a rickshaw. The same year, Miss S. K. M. Hequembourg from Owasco Outlet arrived to lend assistance to Kidder’s efforts.

While managing her growing day school, however, Mary Kidder soon realized that her evangelical endeavors were hampered by the dependent status of her students. Many of them were daughters and wives of officers in the emerging Meiji government, and they had to leave her school whenever their fathers or husbands were transferred to new sites of duty. Kidder was chagrined at seeing her students leave Christian instruction before conversion. To keep her students under her Christian instruction, Kidder realized that she needed a boarding facility for her school. Once again, Kidder sought assistance through her personal networks in Japan and the United States. Through the efforts of the local governor, his successor, and the U.S. consul general, Kidder managed to acquire a lease on a plot of land from the Japanese government in late 1874. In addition, she found another dependable supporter in Rev. Rothesay E. Miller, a Presbyterian missionary, whom Kidder had recently married. Using $5,000 donated by women and Sunday school children of the Reformed Church in America, plus $500 contributed by her newly wedded husband, Mary, now Mrs. Miller, built a school on the plot. The school was named Ferris Seminary after Isaac Ferris and his son John M. Ferris, who served as former and incumbent secretaries of the Board of Foreign Missions, Reformed Church in America, respectively.¹⁶

However, it was extremely difficult for Mary to maintain her hard—won independence due to her new status as a missionary wife. Her aggressive attitudes in both the private and public spheres had been closely watched by the missionary circle in Yokohama and the mission boards in the United States, which pressured the Millers to follow conventional norms. When a husband and wife belonged to different denominational churches, convention required that the wife join her husband’s church. Mary, however, did not want to leave her mission at the crucial moment when the Ferris Seminary had just been founded, and transfer to the Presbyterian mission where she would not be able to avoid the intervention of Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn. Rothesay, who advocated interdenominational cooperation in ...