More Life

Fuchizawa Noe was born in 1850 in Iwate, where her father was a farmer and teacher. Unlucky enough to be born the same year as a major fire, along with ongoing poor harvests, she was fostered out as a baby; her foster parents, the Hamadas, were affectionate, but her foster father died when she was six, after which her foster mother Karu raised her alone, having her educated to the extent possible in the village. At thirteen Noe was indentured to a local shoe store, remaining there until her marriage to the owner’s son at twenty-three. It went badly and she was soon divorced, returning to her birth family to live with a brother. Like Sono Teruko, she took up reading Fukuzawa Yukichi’s work and discovered an urge to study in America.

In 1879, her chance came by way of working as a maid with the family of the engineer Gervaise Purcell, who was returning to America. She spent a year with the Purcells and then went to live with the Prince family in San Francisco, studying English while she worked. She was baptized in 1882.

In the same year, she gave in to her foster mother’s pleas to return to Japan; at thirty-two, she entered Doshisha Girls’ School, leaving three years later when she could no longer afford the fees. She became a teacher first at Toyo Eiwa Girls’ School and then at Hitotsubashi Higher Girls’ School, interpreting for her former employer Miss Prince. After teaching at a series of girls’ schools in the south, building lifelong connections with some of her students, she kept a stationery store for some time in Tokyo, until 1904 when her foster mother Karu died.

In 1905, Noe visited Korea at the invitation of Viscount Okabe Nagamoto and his wife Okako, whom she had met on the boat home from America. She was appalled by the situation of Korean women, whom she found to be shut up inside their homes and required to submit blindly to their menfolk. Making a decision to devote the rest of her life to Korean girls’ education, she founded the Japan-Korea Women’s Association in early 1906, with the support of various eminent Koreans. In May she opened Meishin Girls’ School (later Sookmyung Girls’ School). Lee Jeong-sook, its first principal, thus became the first woman principal in Korea, while Noe served as dean (they were said to rely on each other to the point of telepathy). The school started out unpromisingly with five students, thanks to its stringent rule of taking only the purest of noble blood and to general disinterest in girls’ education. Subjects included Japanese, morals, sewing, and arithmetic among others. They resorted to a student dormitory because girls of high birth couldn’t be seen walking in the streets, requiring a carriage or a veil; when the school eventually outgrew the dormitory, they settled for confusing the eyes of passersby by having the students wear uniform. The language gap was a struggle. However, by 1936 the student body was to have grown to over 500.

Carefully selected and educated as they were, the Sookmyong students were by no means resigned to their colonial suzerains, taking part in the March First liberation movement of 1919 and holding a four-month strike against Japanese teachers and Japanizing education in 1927. Although she did not sympathize with the students’ views, Noe did her best to protect them according to her own lights, juggling connections with the Korean Governor-General and the local churches and women’s associations, having arrested students released on her own recognizance and allowing them to graduate without a stain on their records. She was dedicated to the peaceful “merging” of Japan and Korea, representing at best the “benevolent” side of colonialism while still committed to doing what she saw as the right thing, and in her own way contributing to women’s education in Korea.

Noe met in 1921 with Yajima Kajiko and Kubushiro Ochimi upon their visit to Korea to found a Korean branch of the WCTU, of which she promptly became chair. Known in her old age for spending the winters wearing hats knitted by her students, she died in 1936 at the age of eighty-six. Her funeral was held at her school and she was buried in Seoul (although after the Korean War her remains were moved to a temple in her Iwate home town). Sookmyung Women’s University remains a thriving concern in South Korea; its website names Lee Jeong-sook and the Korean royal family as participants in its founding, but does not refer by name to Noe.

Sources
https://nagoyawsrg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/essays2008.pdf (English) Essay going into more detail about Japan’s colonial history in Korea as it relates to Noe.