Hi, ladies!!
I feel as if long time has already past since New Year’s Day, because a lot of events occurred during my daughters’ winter holiday. Unfortunately my poor brain had almost stopped operating as a whole for a long time, so it takes many hours to set about my task these days…and I was overwhelmed by Plum’s great amount of accounts on this Blog. But her beautiful works also opened my eye.
I’ll talk to you tomorrow, see you!
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Hi, ladies!!!
It’s Thursday, January 8, 2009, today, and again it’s a bit cloudy in the morning, though there is some shimmering sunlight among the trees coming into my lounge through the window glass. It appears to warm up in the afternoon. How lovely, isn’t it?
Alas, a series of my narratives of Kate M. Youngman overwhelmed you, Cherry. I am very sorry. It is not my intention to overwhelm you or any contributor writing into this blog if there is any, but it is simply my own English writing practice method.
The other day I mentioned the book that turned out to be quite useful to my research, didn’t I? From that book I got a few interesting pieces of information about Mary C. Parke and Anne Matilda Gamble, who were dispatched to Japan as Presbyterian missionaries in the same year 1873 as Youngman.
By the end of the year 1873 they were at B6 at the Tsukiji foreign residence area. Gamble, being sent by the Philadelphia missionary office, could not work together with Parke or Youngman sent by the New York office, and thus worked at the school (A6 School) run by Mrs. Carrothers, who got some connection with the Philadelphia office in 1874.
On May 20, in the following year, 1874, Parke married Thompson and resigned from being a missionary but possibly continued to be engaged in missionary work in some way or other. Thereby at the time there were two schools run by two different groups of missionaries on the foreign residence lot Number 6. The two groups, Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and Youngman on one hand and Mr. and Mrs. Carrothers and Gamble on the other, were not in a friendly but in rather a rivalry relationship, arguing and insisting their school was the only girls’ school in Japan authorized by the Presbyterian Church in the USA.
It is not clearly known whether or not the reason why Gamble left A6 School in 1875 was due to these conflicting circumstances, but it was officially decided and confirmed by Hugh Wadell (1840-1901), a missionary to Japan from the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland as early as in January 1875 that Gamble was to move from the USA Presbyterian Church to the United Presbyterian Church (UPC) of Scotland. A6 School was finished in the following year 1876 after Mr. and Mrs. Carrothers left the Presbyterian missionary office.
Possibly in September, 1875, Gamble commenced to work at Miura Girls’ School that was established by the UPC of Scotland at Koji-machi in 1875. The name was given after Toru Miura (1850-1925), who was the Japanese language teacher of R. Y. Davidson (1846-1909) and the owner of the school. The girls’ school, for some reason, was closed in four years and it is unknown what happened to Gamble after the incident.
Miura Girls’ School is, I believe, listed in the book Tokyo no joshi kyoiku, which I lent Alice the other day.
Here is part 15.
(15)
Let me examine the movements of Kate Youngman, Seishin Ohtsuka, and Father Testevuide, in Koyama in the latter half of the 1880s.
In 1886, Youngman built a cottage in Koyama and spent summer helping the staff of the Preach House with their mission work in that mountainous rural area.
In 1887, Father Germain Testevuide, on the road in Gotenba, saw and helped a poor woman leper and other such unfortunate outcasts, putting them in an old house he rented from a Japanese farmer in the outskirts of Gotenba.
In 1888, Father Testevuide founded a leprosarium in Koyama, which was about 500 meters away, as a crow flies, from Youngman’s Preach House by Takahashi Bridge.
In 1889, Fukusei Hospital was built and opened and by the end of the year there were 14 patients in the hospital.
In April, 1889, Youngman, Ohtsuka and his wife Kane visited Koyama together, and Youngman and James H. Ballagh decided to have Ohtsuka work as an assistant missionary of the Reformed Church at Koyama and Gotenba. (At that time Presbyterian and Reformed Church missionaries exercised their propagation work hand in hand one way or the other.)
Since Youngman’s Preach House was very close to the hospital, she must have come to know very easily and clearly how the leprosarium and hospital came into existence. So must Ohtsuka, since he was working in that area. They also must have come to know that Yae Tsushima, who was in the hospital although her faith was Protestant.
In 1890, Kate Youngman and Ohtsuka came to an agreement to found a Protestant leprosarium and put Tsushima in it.
I hope all of you are enjoying this mild weather, my precious friends. I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye for now…
Hi, everyone!
I am sorry. Today I read for the first time this blog since the new year started. Shama on myself.
Plum, I appreciate your warmly, kindly and considerately answering my quesions despite that you were busy. It is concise and grasping the point. I understand the Meiji educational situations in those days. Did the Meiji government notice that a good education cultivate good employees, infuluenced by the western industrial revolution.
My husband got home, See you again.
Hi Cherry and friends,
It was warm and beautiful in the afternoon today, but it is getting cold in the evening. The weather forecast said that it would be much colder tomorrow.
Yesterday morning I went to the dentist for check-up and cleaning. I was very shocked to be known that I was almost in the early stage of periodontal disease, or shishūbyō, near a back tooth. The dentist said that there is no medicine or cure for shishūbyō if it becomes the advanced stage. He also said that the only thing that I can do now to prevent worsening is to brush my teeth more carefully and go back to the dentist two more times to remove the plaque between my teeth and under the gum line as much as possible. I haven’t had any problems in my teeth for many years, so I didn’t concern about my teeth or gums. But I realized that I shouldn’t neglect my gums and I felt that I’m getting very old. I really hope I will be able to eat delicious food with my healthy teeth for all my life.
Good night, my friends.
Hi, ladies!!!
It’s Friday, January 9, 2009, today, and it was raining so quietly and gently in the early morning. To be honest with you, I do like winter rain, because it seems to me for some reason to be one of nature’s preparations for spring. In a sense it is a sign of spring to me.
Last night I had a bizarre dream. I, as a young woman, came on my way home to a point where I was able to see a great number of tiny bare fields of no plants at all with some groups of wild rabbits squatting here and there on them. It was 2:30 a.m. (I actually looked at my watch, strangely enough.) It was less dark, or rather light, due to bright moonlight. (Very mystifying, isn’t it?)
It was a weird and odd sight to me but I started to walk on a narrow footpath. Eventually several rabbits hopped up to me and bit me, one rabbit after another, on the hand and hopped away. Their bites did not physically hurt me at all, but I was astounded to death, because my belief was that rabbits were so timid that as a human being approached they ran away furtively, but these rabbits were different and sort of attempted to attack human beings, without any actual effects though.
I wonder if this dream of mine tried to teach me that I should not take anything for granted. Or I should think twice before doing something. Or I should not believe commonsense as it is…
I had some pancakes with maple syrup and margarine, along with two cups of English tea this morning. (I made a lot of pancakes the other night and put them in the freezer so that I could take out some whenever I wanted to eat.)
What did you have for breakfast, my dear friends?
Here is part 16.
I hope you enjoy reading it.
(16)
Youngman went home in the USA on leave for one year from July 1898 to July 1899. An unexpected happening occurred while she was away.
On May 30, 1899, Ihai-en received an offer from Shibasaburo Kitazato, head of the National Contagious Disease Laboratory (presently The Institute f Medical Science, The University of Tokyo) that was converted in 1899 from Contagious Disease Laboratory (est. 1892) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Home Affairs, to the effect that the laboratory would provide medical assistance if 20 patients of his laboratory would be accommodated at Ihai-en, and Kozen-sha decided to take the offer and Ihai-en was officially authorized as a private medical hospital by the Tokyo government on June 27, 1899.
Youngman, who prioritized Christian propagation, objected the scheme to no avail, and the facility accepted 20 patients, and also in 1904 (Meiji 37) ten patients were entrusted by Tokyo-city Yoikuin following the petition of the head, Eiichi Shibusawa.
Yoikuin was created as a facility affiliated to Eizen-kaigisho in Tokyo on October 15, 1872 (Meiji 5), one day before the day when the then Russian Prince made a diplomatic visit to Tokyo, for the purpose of gathering as many beggars and vagabonds as possible in time for the Prince visit day so that he would be impressed with the city without any outcasts. Those who were confined numbered in about 240.
After that incident, Yoikuin continued to take any outcasts brought to it, among whom there were leprosy sufferers. In 1897, the first international conference on Hansen’s disease was held in Berlin, Germany that Shibasaburo Kitazato and Keizo Doi attended. The conference came to a conclusion that Hansen’s disease was contagious. (Armauer Hansen, a Norwegian physician, discovered mycobacterium leprae in 1873.)
In July 1898, Kensuke Mitsuda, at 22, began to work at Yoikuin, and, in 1899, believing that leprosy patients should be segregated, based on the conference decision that leprosy was contagious, founded a room (named Kaishun-byoshitsu) for patients of that illness in Yoikuin.
According to the patient record of the colony, the number of leprosy patients started to increase in about 1897 (Meiji 30).
End of June, 1901
18 patients
End of December, 1901
19
End of June, 1902
20
End of December, 1902
23
End of June, 1903
23
End of December, 1903
24
End of April, 1904
23
The segregation of leprosy patients practiced by Mitsuda in Yoikuin is considered to be the first of its kind in Japan. However, the room was too small to take more patients, and therefore Tokyo-city government decided that some of the patients should move to Ihai-en, after Shibusawa submitted a letter to the government stating that Yoikuin could not take more than 14 or 15 leprosy patients due to the limited size of the room. Thus, in 1904, ten patients were transferred to Youngman’s institution.
I sometimes wonder what my parents would have done to me if I had been a leprosy patient in Meiji Japan. Would they have abandoned me under a bridge far, far away from their house? Probably not, but they would have taken me to some institution. What would I have done in the institution? How would I have spent my time in the segregated room?
You may think I am just a silly dreamer, my precious friends. Yes, I know that I am a silly dreamer, but I hope I am not the only one…
It is getting cold, according to the weather forecast. Please keep yourselves as warm as possible, my lovely friends. Bye for now.
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