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Through Americanized Japanese Women’s Eyes: Tsuda Umeko and the Women’s
Movement in Japan in the 1910s
traditional women’s roles in family rather than in society.
Japanese women in the privileged class who like Tsuda
gained access to western liberal ideologies, but who were
alienated from society and from women in other classes as
well, were not able to overcome the double standards
embedded in gendered policies to transform knowledge into
social movement in the 1910s in Japan.
In 1871, at age six, Tsuda was sent to America as a
Japanese government student with four other Japanese girls
as a part of “civilizing nation” program, the so-called,
Iwakura Mission. Since Japan gave up its isolation policy
and formed a new government in 1868, Japan had hastened
its modernization “by seeking knowledge in the world” (Go
Kajo no Go Seimon, Five Principles for the new government) iii
To do so, the government sent the Iwakura Mission to start
negotiation with America and European nations to revise
unfair trade treaties that Japan was forced to conclude
during the Edo era and to acquire western knowledge,
including of political systems, science, technology and
culture, which was considered necessary to remake Japan as
a civilized state. For these purposes the Meiji government
sent 108 personnel in total, including embassy members and
forty-three government students. iv
The fact that the government added these girls to the
mission showed the government’s intention to use women
with western knowledge to modernize Japan in the future. In
retrospective, Tsuda noted,
It is said that when Count Kuroda was in America he
was struck with the position and influence of women in
that country, and found that it was because the
American women as well as the men receive education.
The desire to have Japanese women equally enlightened
made him take the step which led to our being sent
abroad (Tsuda, 1980, p. 77).
Noticing that educated western women played significant
roles in society, the government decided to send girls to have
them educated in America and study western education
methods for women so that as future teachers, they would
be able to apply these to instructing girls in Japan. v The
Meiji government in the 1870s expected women to work in
the public sphere. It was within such a historical context
that Tsuda and four other girls were sent to the U.S.
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