Outposts of Asia

by Morilla Maria Norton

On one Sunday, we were invited to her house, and a very bright Yokohama girl, who spoke Japanese fluently, was our enthusiastic companion to the home of the first teacher and first poetess of the land.

I was amused as we sat and she talked for an hour in the quiet soft toned parlor of the higher education of the women of her land, to see how her glance would wander from my pencil to the face of the young girl, and of how she would interrupt her most serious remarks of history, which she has at her finger tips, of philosophy, bred in her bones, of the highest ethics of life, when she would cast one of those bewitching smiles on the girl as she pressed her to take more sweets. Life is ever the master passion of all such souls and they live only in to-day. Higher education is not new, but like all great movements, this of Japan began long, long ago, and once women held the place of almost the equal of their lords, but the strange story of reaction and retrogression, which marks the advance of the East, came in to disfigure the wonderful march of the thought life of women.

Madame Shimoda is a pioneer in her work, and to-day thousands of modern Japanese women rise up to call her blessed.

She was left a widow after a very brief married life and then all her pent up love and devotion went out to her sex.

She has travelled extensively in Europe and America, and with that master power that all Japanese seem to have, she has taken much of the good, and left the bad of the West.

The great need of physical culture for the future mothers of Japan was what appealed to her most strongly and this has been the first note in her educational scheme.

We had sought for the motto which gives the keynote to the social life of a Japanese home, and in the house of Viscount Kaneko we had found it to be: “Wealth and rank are but a fleeting show, the merit is the man.” Here it was, as we might have known: “Duty First.”

What would one expect of a woman who had spent her middle life in educating the upper classes of her people, that she would want to rest? Oh, no! for the remaining years she is to devote herself just as earnestly to the educating of middle and lower class Japanese women.

This frail but purposeful woman had fire in her eyes as she spoke of the future, a future which to such as she must only mean vaster and vaster horizons and more radiant conquests.