◆ Jiang Feng, chief writer of "Japanese Overseas Chinese Daily".
Starting April 1, 2024, the portrait of the 5,000 yen banknote will be updated. The famous female writer Higuchi Kazuha, who was originally called "Meiji Murasaki Shikibu", will quietly retire and be replaced by the famous Meiji era female educator Umeko Tsuda. If Higuchi Kazuha was the first woman to appear on Japanese banknotes, Umeko Tsuda had to settle for second place. However, it should be gratifying to be able to maintain the portrait of a female figure as a "baton" on the banknote.
The portrait on the 10,000 yen banknote will be released in 2024, and the portrait on it is Shibusawa Eiichi, who was born into a peasant family. Umeko Tsuda, who landed in 1864, was born into a family of "agricultural scholars" at the end of the Edo period, and her father, Tsuda Sen, was also a "translator". This means that Tsuda Umeko was "born with a foreign key".
Umeko Tsuda was really lucky. In 1871, she was still a 6-year-old child, but she was able to go to the United States with the Iwakura delegation as one of the first female students on official scholarship in Japan, and she studied abroad for 11 years at once. That's right, she became a professor at the age of 17.
Women, once accomplished, tend to be more aggressive than accomplished men. In order to improve the status of Japanese women, Umeko Tsuda wants to start a school of her own, and she is not willing to work forever in front of other people's faces. Thus, in 1889, she crossed the ocean for the second time to study in the United States, specializing in biology. I don't know if it was because of the lack of female scholars in that era, or because she was really academically excellent, but Umeko Tsuda's paper was published in a core academic journal in the United Kingdom, becoming "the first Japanese woman to publish a paper in a European or American academic journal."
In 1892, Umeko Tsuda returned to Japan again as a "returnee". He was in charge of the Chinese Girls' School and the Women's Higher Normal School (now Ochanomizu Women's University). In 1900, after many twists and turns, 36-year-old Umeko Tsuda finally realized her dream and opened her own school, "Girls' Eigaku". Since the office of the "Japan Overseas Chinese Newspaper", which I am currently in a state of "semi-retirement", is located in Nijo, Kojimachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, I noticed that this school was established on the No. 1 Street of Kojimachi Ward (today's Chiyoda Ward). However, there were only 10 students at the time.
In April 1901, the Girls' School moved for some reason. When a person is unlucky, he farts and hits his heels. When a person is lucky, he can't stop it. After this move, Umeko Tsuda received a large donation, and instead of transferring the money to her own pocket, she built a permanent school building on No. 5 Street in Tokyo's Kojimachi Ward in 1904. In order to educate her son well and create a good learning environment for her son, the mother of the ancient Chinese sage Mencius did not hesitate to "move Meng's mother three times"; Tsuda Umeko, a female educator in modern Japan, did not hesitate to "establish the school three times" in order to have a well-equipped school to cultivate new people, and soon had more than 150 students, leaving a perfect educational story in history.
Perfection in career does not necessarily lead to perfection in life. Because she has studied in the United States for many years, Umeko Tsuda is known as a "banana man", the outer skin is Japanese, and the inner skin is American, she has already spoken English as her mother tongue, but she does not speak Japanese, and she needs to be translated to understand Japanese. Her love also did not go well, she was unmarried for life, and finally adopted her nephew as an adopted son. She believed in "spank education", and many years later, some students shuddered when they recalled her harsh education, calling her a "ghost teacher".
Today, the "Girls' English School" has evolved into the "Tsuda Juku University". As Yuko Takahashi says in "Umeko Tsuda: A Pioneer in Women's Education" (Iwanami Shoten, first edition in September 2022), Umeko Tsuda, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1929, has an unshakable position as a pioneer of women's education in Japan. (Written on March 31, 2024 at Hotel Hachijo, Kyoto)