Umeko Tsuda was a pioneer in education for women in Japan. She is most well-known for founding Joshi Eigaku Juku (now known as Tsuda University), one of the oldest and most prestigious schools for girls. Tsuda is the third woman to be on the Japanese banknote, planned to start issuing in 2024, due to her revolutional steps towards educational opportunity for women in Japan.
Tsuda was sent to the United States as the youngest participant of the Iwakura mission, one of the most impactful missions that led to the modernisation of Japan. Leaving Japan at the age of 6 led her to be one of the most successful participants in the mission. Due to her young age, she was able to adopt the Western culture quickly and grew up in a country that was less patriarchal. In the US, she was a very successful student, earning prizes for a wide variety of subjects. Returning to Japan at the age of 18, she had difficulty remembering her native language, and also found difficulty adapting to the lifestyle of Japan. Before WWII, Japan had not yet fully adopted the Western culture, and still was an extremely patriarchal society. Her father, who was westernised compared to others at that time, still had authoritarian views about women. Upon working in Japan as an English teacher, Tsuda was unsatisfied with the lack of educational opportunities given to girls. The curriculum still highly revolved around the idea of raising obedient wives that were respectable in the upper class society.
Tsuda soon returned to the United States to study and take a break from Japanese culture. Attending universities such as Bryn Mawr University and Oxford University, she reinforced her strong beliefs on education for women and returned to Japan with the goal of founding a school of her own that provided more educational opportunities and a western education for girls. In 1900, she founded the first school that specializes in English for women. Three years later, five of her students earned qualifications to be English teachers, making them the first women to do so. A mere 2 years later, the school earned the rights to have all students graduating from the school to have the qualifications due to its highly acclaimed education. Tsuda University today remains to be one of most prestigious girls universities in Japan.
Although Tsuda herself did not advocate any feminist social movements, she spent her whole life fighting for equal educational opportunity for women. Students graduating from her school, such as Kikue Yamakawa, lead the women’s suffrage movement in Japan, and the school raised young women to be feminists with strong views, much like Wimbledon High today.
