It is Friday, December 19, 2008, today, and has been quite cool but dry.
Though Sugako Kanno had not properly educated except for elementary school, she was eager to establish herself as a writer. Then, she asked her brother’s literal teacher Bunkai Udagawa, influential playwright in Osaka, apprentice her to him. She also wrote to Tamemasa Nagae, the president of Osaka choho, regional newspaper expected to publish in a short time;
She showed a fiery spirit as a woman writer from the start.
Thank you for reading.
Have a good weekend, bye!
11 comments:
Hi, ladies!!!
How have you been?
I had several extremely hectic days in a row in the past week, and consequently in the past couple of days I had a horrible splitting headache. Fortunately, the medicines I took were quite effective and now my terrible tormenting headache is gone. I am so happy about it.
I am very sorry to hear, Cosmos, that one of your friends is partially paralyzed and thus I pray that she will recover from her disorder as speedily as possible and regain her power and strength so that she could enjoy whatever she wants to enjoy.
I was very surprised to read Alice’s message posted on December 16, saying that she was a slow person. I have never thought that Alice is a slow person and I am sure neither have you, my precious friends. I always assume that Alice is very bright and intelligent, being very quick to grasp the point of anything, such as whatever we are talking about.
English is just a matter of whether you are used to it or not. The more you get used to it, the more comfortable you will be with it. Keep doing whatever you have to do for the time being. Enjoy being perseverant and learn whatever you have to learn in a steady tempo. Take a while to learn English, you know that… Don’t be discouraged by the fact that you come across so many unfamiliar words, phrases or expressions. Try to write them down, one by one, very carefully, and say them loud, one by one, several times for each one, like we did when we learned how to write complicated Chinese characters at school, and keep going without looking back. Sooner or later you will find yourself quite comfortable speaking and writing English. Too much worry is not good for your health.
Cherry, congratulations on your finishing reading the books about their trips to the USA and England. They are fabulous books, aren’t they? The Japanese in the books is so old fashioned, complicated and unfamiliar to the contemporary Japanese readers that it is very easy to give them up. It takes a tremendous amount of perseverance to achieve that goal of yours of reading through these two books, I understand. Happy for you, Cherry. You’ve done it!!!
I am also happy, Cherry, about your introducing the subject of your essay into this blog. This is just what I wanted you to do in this blog. Please write more about Sugako and discuss her in any way you like. Your talk does not have to be consistent or systematic. Your explanation can be incomplete in this blog, because you are in the middle of essay writing, as we are all aware.
It is almost time to get ready for going to bed, my lovely friends. I hope you will have a delightful weekend. Goodnight to you all…
Dear Cherry and friends,
Good morning! How are you?
I was impressed by Plum’s message. Let me quote her comment:
“Don’t be discouraged by the fact that you come across so many unfamiliar words, phrases or expressions. Try to write them down, one by one, very carefully, and say them loud, one by one, several times for each one, like we did when we learned how to write complicated Chinese characters at school, and keep going without looking back.”
How inventive you are, Plum! You create a lot of strategies of improve English skills.
Since you gave us advice about the cross-reference-method of looking up words, my way of writing down new words has changed. I prefer this method. First, I write down an unknown word and its definition in English. You said, “read it aloud” when we do this, right? Then, I list up its synonyms which seems practical for writing. Consequently, it takes me more time to read than the way I used before. Although I used to write down new words in my notebook and look up the dictionary for it, I rarely jotted down the meanings of them. I was following the principle of extensive reading. In this, we don’t look up a dictionary for more than 3 words a page. Probably, this was the main reason for my poor vocabulary.
Now I have to go. I’m going to listen to Prof. Vera Macki’s speech this morning.
Have a good Sunday.
Hi, ladies!!!
It's Sunday, December 21, 2008, today.
I would like to discuss three female missionaries who came to Meiji Japan (1868-1912) and got involved in activities to help Japanese leprosy patients improve their physical and social conditions and made a great contribution to the progress of their wellbeing.
They are Kate Youngman (1841-1910), an American missionary from the Presbyterian Church in New York, Hannah Riddell (1855-1932), an English missionary from the Church Missionary Society of the Church of England based in London (???), and Mary H. Cornwall Legh (1857-1941), an English missionary from the Society for Propagation of Gospel of the Church of England.
Youngman lived in Tokyo for about 37 years, Riddle in Kumamoto for about 41 years and Legh in Tokyo and Kusatsu, Gunma, for about 34 years, and all of them died in Japan before the commencement of the Pacific War (1941-45) and their ashes are respectively stored in the places of their residence.
Their ages and years when they arrived in Japan are 31 for Youngman in 1873, 35 for Riddell in 1891, and 50 for Legh in 1907.
It is surprising to know that they lived in Japan for such a long time and breathed their last breath in Japan.
I will talk about their family, educational and social background next time. I hope you enjoy reading my account of the three female missionaries.
Bye-bye, my precious friends.
Dear Cherry and friends,
Hello! How did you spend this weekend?
We went to a symposium held at Noyori Memorial Centre of Nagoya University.
Keynote Lecture by Prof. Vera Macki
Prof. Macki explained how the law polices the boundaries of the nation-state, the family, and sex-gender system. Outside each of the boundaries may be the marginalized. She argued, “these are not independent systems. Rather, they are mutually imbricated,” analyzing same-sex marriages as case studies. A same-sex marriage is considered as deviated from a heteronormative family unit which assumes the heterosexual nuclear family and the heterosexual couple as normative.
Enfranchisement of Women by Harriet Taylor Mill
A practical political action for women encouraged Harriet Taylor to write this article. It was “a Convention of Women, held in the State of Ohio, in the spring of 1850. (p. 93)” Its principal demands presented covered three areas: first, “[e]ducation in primary and high schools, universities, medical, legal, and theological institutions”; secondly, “[p]artnership in the labours and gains, risks and remunerations, of productive industry”; and thirdly, “[a] coequal share in the formation and administration of laws – municipal, state, and national – through legislative assemblies, courts, and executive offices.(p. 95)”
Hi, ladies!!!
It’s Monday, December 22, 2008, today, and it’s been a bit cloudy but not cold or freezing, and so it’s good.
Alice, thank you for writing about what Vera Mackie talked about at Nagoya Uni. yesterday, which is quite interesting to me. I hope you really enjoyed her speech, by which I mean her academic point of view, and had a wonderful time with everybody who went to listen to her. (I am sure you got some good ideas for your long essay writing.)
There are at the moment three professional gardeners cutting and trimming branches of the trees in my garden. It looks nice. They are doing a very good job.
Now, I would like to tell you something about my research subject, part 2, and I hope you enjoy reading it.
(2)
Kate Youngman (1841-1910; 1873-1910 in Japan) arrived in Japan in 1873, at the age of 31.
Kate Youngman was born in Kingston, New York, on December 17, 1841, between Nicolas, a teacher, and Margaret, both of whom eventually had three sons and one more daughter. She spent most of her childhood in Massachusetts, most probably with her family, and, at 13, went back to New York in 1855.
The following year, when she was 14, her mother died and Kate quit school in order to take care of her brothers and sister. Her father died three years later when she was 17. Kate was to get married when she was 18, possibly in 1860, but her fiancé went to the civil war (1861-5) and was killed in the state of Virginia in 1862.
At 21, Kate returned to school, probably in 1863, since all her siblings settled down more or less, and, at 27, she graduated from Twelfth Avenue School, which had been converted to a normal school in 1849, and worked at the school for 4 years from 27 to 31 years of age, possibly from 1869 to 1873. Some time during that time, she came to know (or about) Mary Putnam Pruyn (1820-85; 1871-75 in Japan) who was a bible teacher, and became seriously interested in being involved in the education of Japanese girls as a missionary.
Pruyn was one of the female missionaries sent to Japan in 1871 by the Women’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands (WUMS) established in 1861, and the other two who crossed the Pacific with Pruyn were Louise Henrietta Pierson (1832-99; 1871-99 in Japan) and Julia Neilson Crosby (1833-1918; 1871-1981 in Japan), and they founded American Mission Home for the education of Japanese girls and the fostering and caring of children born between Japanese women and foreign men, in Yokohama on August 28, 1871, about two months after their arrival in Japan in June. Children of mixed parentage were generally discriminated against and had hard time living with their mothers, possibly prostitutes, and it is stated that they lived virtually as beggars.
Have a lovely Monday afternoon, my precious friends. Bye for now...
Dear Cherry and friends,
Hi.
Yes, Plum. Prof. Mackie’s presentation was quite interesting.
Today, I ordered a book written by Prof. Vera Mackie. While searching her book, I noticed that I misspelled her name yesterday.
About Prof. Mackie’s Warm Response
During the ensuing discussion, she explained the difference between sex and gender, which was, I thought, very kind of her. A woman who made a comment misunderstood the meanings of them. This young woman further deplored that men sometimes accused her of unfemininity. Although I didn’t understand her question because of obscurity, Prof. Mackie warmly said that she understood her, we had encountered similar problems, and, she believed, the teachers attending the symposium had been doing gender studies to clarify the mechanisms of such problems.
Homicide
Two patrol cars were parked by a house across from ours this afternoon. Policemen got out of the cars. One of them went into the house; the others were talking with a man. We wondered what had happened.
An hour later, one of our neighbors called and informed us that a mentally and physically challenged woman in her 40s was killed by her father. I remember this woman who was always standing outside the house doing nothing when she was young. I haven’t seen her for many years because she became unable to walk. Her stepmother neglected her. The father seems to have been taking care of her.
It was such grievous news that I feel as if I’ve been shouldering thick grey clouds the whole afternoon.
What a gloomy day it was!
Hi, ladies!!!
It’s Tuesday, December 23, 2008, and it’s the Emperor’s birthday and so a national holiday.
My husband went to work while I stayed at home, doing various chores. Yesterday I made a cake, which was a coffee cake by the way, for the first time in the past several years, and surprisingly enough this afternoon I baked some cookies, which were strawberry jam and raisin ones, for the first time this year.
Alice, thank you for writing about Vera Mackie’s warm response and what happened to one of your neighbors’ household, which is dreadful but for some reason I do understand how the forgotten mentally or/and physical disabled and their families feel and live their daily lives. It is hard, very hard, beyond our imagination, to live through the hardship of this kind… I have no words to describe it.
This is part 3 of Kate Youngman’s story as a female missionary who, in 1894, established a medical institution for leprosy sufferers.
(3)
It is stated that Kate prayed to God about her wish to go to Japan and educate Japanese girls for seven consecutive months before making a real decision to go to Japan, and eventually the WUSM, the missionary office of the Reformed Church, the foreign missionary office (established in 1870) of the Presbyterian Church approached Youngman.
At 31, on March 10, 1873, Youngman received an order to go to Japan as a missionary in charge of education from the foreign missionary office of the Presbyterian Church of New York. She left New York on May 8 and arrived in Japan on June 10, as one of the first three Presbyterian female missionaries to Japan, and the other two were Mary Park (1841-1928) from New York, who married, in 1874, David Thompson (1835-1915), an American Presbyterian missionary working in central Japan after his arrival in Japan on May 17, 1863, and A. M. Gamble from Philadelphia.
Youngman started to live with Gamble in the government-appointed area for non-Japanese residents located in Tsukiji, Tokyo, from the end of the year 1873.
She opened a various schools one after another:
September, 1875: at 33, B 6 Girls’ School (at her residence in Tsukiji)
1876: at 34, Graham Seminary (Shin-sakae-machi, Tsukiji)
1878: at 36, Daiichi-keimo-shoggako, Daiichi-keimo-shoggako night school (Tsukiji)
1879: at 37, Daini-keimo-shoggako (Atago-cho)
1883: at 41, Joshi-seisho-gakko (Shin-minato-machi, Tsukiji)
Out of the three missionaries who worked for Japanese Hansen’s disease patients, Kate Youngman was the only one who lived all her life in Japan as a missionary.
Although she left Graham Seminary in 1878, Julia Graham, head of the foreign missionary office, continued to pay her missionary salary. (Graham Seminary was named after the head of the office, Julia Graham.)
I hope you enjoyed reading part 3.
It’s almost time that my husband gets home, my lovely friends. Goodnight to you all…
Hi, ladies!!!
It’s Wednesday, December 24, 2008, and it’s one day before Christmas Day. Are you having a good time this evening, eating a Christmas cake and drinking wine?
Me? No way. I don’t have a cake or drink wine. It has been a quiet day other than talking about their long essays with Alice and Gloriosa at my lounge.
I just would like to let you know that I am going to Sydney for about 6 weeks on January 14, 2009, and I am not taking my computer with me, and thus I will not be able to write in this blog as often as I have been so far. I will try very hard to talk to you in this blog, I promise you. But again you may not hear from me for quite a long time. I really hope you work hard on your essay writing and submit your essays by the end of February as scheduled.
Here is part 4.
(4)
Kate Youngman was a Presbyterian missionary all her life in Japan, while Riddle (1855-1932; 1891-1932 in Japan) left the CMS in 1899 eight years after her arrival in Japan, and Legh, who came to Japan as an unpaid missionary from the SPG, eventually became a missionary of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America.
Previously I told you that all of them died before the commencement of the Pacific War (1941-5), but that is wrong and I do have to change my statement because Legh died on December 18, 1941, which is after the start of the war on December 8, 1941.
As I told you before, Kate Youngman opened various schools, and I would like to elaborate on these schools.
September, 1875: at 33, B 6 Girls’ School (at her residence in Tsukiji)
1876: at 34, Graham Seminary (Shin-sakae-cho, Tsukiji)
1878: at 36, Daiichi-keimo-shoggako, Daiichi-keimo-shoggako night school (Tsukiji)
1879: at 37, Daini-keimo-shoggako (Atago-cho)
1883: at 41, Joshi-seisho-gakko (Shin-minato-machi, Tsukiji)
Youngman, six months after her arrival, and Park had two Japanese students at B 6 residence in the non-Japanese residential area in Tsukiji by the beginning of 1874, and by September, 1875, Youngman and Park (probably presently Mrs. Thompson) created B 6 School for Japanese girls. (Gamble resigned from being a missionary in September of the same year for some reason.)
In 1876, Youngman, receiving 3,000 dollars from the foreign missionary office in the USA, bought a piece of land at Shinsakae-cho near the Tsukiji foreign residence place, built a school and named it after Julia Graham, the head of the women’s missionary office, who wished that there would be three missionaries, thirty boarders and a number of day students at the school. (Please notice that Park was married, being possibly out of the education duty, and Gamble left, and therefore Youngman was the only missionary involved in this school.)
The students at B 6 School moved to Graham Seminary. Later on, the seminary was integrated to be Joshi Gakuin, which still exists as a prominent elite girls’ school in Tokyo.
I hope all of you have a delightful evening tonight, my precious friends. Bye for now...
Dear Cherry and friends,
Merry Christmas!
I got 2 Christmas cards this year. One is from Niigata; the other is from Canada.
Gloriosa and I visited Plum and talked about the structures of essays and our research plan in detail. Thanks to Plum, both of us learned what we should do from now on.
Overwhelmed by mountainous tasks, I remembered a quote.
The quote from a calendar encouraged me. It says, “You never stumble over a mountain but a small stone.” The person who quoted this interpreted that there was no such a big trial or difficulty in our life. In other words, our problems are always trivial. I rather interpreted that if we choose we can overcome a big challenge, we don’t have to be afraid of stumbling over it. But we have to be aware that there is always a possibility that a very trivial thing can discourage us to achieve it.
On my way home, I stopped in at Sanseido, a bookstore at Nagoya station, and got books on a history of Christianity and on a history of churches in England.
A Good Day to Learn about Christianity
Tonight is the most suitable day of a year to read about Christianity. On Christmas Eve, a lot of Japanese celebrate without thinking about Christianity, not to mention the Nativity.
The book I bought today was Carter Lindberg’s A Brief History of Christianity translated by Renta Kidera. It first describes how the Books of Canon was edited a few centuries after the Resurrection. The word, “canonization” explains the close relationship between Church and the Bible.
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