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Through Americanized Japanese Women’s Eyes: Tsuda Umeko and the Women’s
Movement in Japan in the 1910s
for Japanese women students, she laid out her original
goals. She said:
Japan can never really progress so long as her growth
is all on one side, and while one half of her people are
pushed forward, the other half are kept back. I have
felt that not until the women were elevated and
educated, could Japan really take a high stand (Tsuda,
19080, p. 96).
Tsuda believed that without women’s participation in every
phase of society, the society remained less-civilized. For
Tsuda, patriarchal control over women confined women to a
subordinate position in society, but at the same time, women
themselves were trapped by the notion of the ideal
womanhood in accepting this ideology. For Tsuda,
“Japanese women under the old ethical codes have led,
many of them, pure, noble, unselfish lives of devotion; but
their virtues were passive, they lack breath, fire, life.” 1 In
her analysis, what people admired as Japanese women’s
femininity was, in fact, the result of gender oppression.
To challenge such an alarming complacency about
women's status quo, Tsuda planned to raise socially
responsible and economically as well as psychologically
independent women. In other words, she aimed to educate
women in the way that they would “think and act on their
own initiative” (Tsuda, 1980, p. 97). In this sense, her
educational policy was significantly different from that of
mainstream women’s schools in Japan. This is because
mainstream women’s schools primarily aimed to produce
“charming, modest [women], innocent with great powers of
self-sacrifice and self-restraint” (Tsuda, 1980, p. 96).
Students of these schools were taught what they ought to do
and to be, but they were never encouraged to discuss
questions of personal freedom and to develop independent
thinking (Ishimoto, 1938, p. 56). vii
To pursue her aims, Tsuda differentiated her school
curriculum from those of other women’s schools. While
other schools functioned as finishing schools, which taught
western and Japanese arts, sewing, cooking and “manners
and etiquettes,” Tusada’s school taught Japanese and
1 Tsuda Umeko, “The Student World” July, 1913 in the Papers of Tsuda
Umeko, 502.
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