INTRODUCTION

YASUI TETSU WAS an educationalist, who contributed significantly to the promotion of women's higher education, especially Christian education, in Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa Japan. She studied at the Cambridge Training College for Women Teachers (hereafter CTC), where she was deeply influenced by Elizabeth Phillips Hughes. After her three years’ study in England, she took up a full-time teaching post in Tokyo and became a Christian. However, in 1904 she was posted to Thailand. This interlude was followed by a further year's study in Wales. On her return to Japan, she helped Nitobe Inazō establish Tokyo Joshi Daigaku (Tokyo Women's Christian University), to which she devoted the rest of her life. She died in 1945. Although her life in Japan is well documented by the biography written by her former student, Aoyama Nao (1900–1985), who later taught at her old university, Yasui's life in Britain has scarcely been researched. This article focuses on her studies in Britain and the impact, which they had on her later life and career, as a leading Christian educationalist in Japan.

EARLY LIFE IN JAPAN

Yasui Tetsu was born in Tokyo on 23 February 1870, the eldest child of Yasui Tsumori and his wife Chiyo.2 The couple had six further children, so her paternal grandparents brought up Tetsu. The Yasui family had been samurai for many generations, serving the Doi family, the former feudal lords of the Furukawa domain. Both her parents and grandparents lived on the large estate of the Doi family home. Her grandfather, a spear (yari) master, had a strong samurai spirit, which Tetsu inherited despite being a woman.

In 1876 she entered Gyōkō Elementary School in Tokyo, but moved to Hongō Seino Elementary School in 1879. At the age of twelve, she was admitted to the fifth-year class of a preparatory course for Tokyo Women's Teachers’ Training College (Tokyo Joshi Shihan Gakkō) in 1881. Three years later, she went on to the college, which eventually became Ochanomizu Women's University and whose main objective was to train female secondary school teachers. Immediately after her graduation, she was appointed as a teaching assistant at the college. In 1892 on the advice of its deputy head Nakagawa Kenjirō (1850–1928), she left Tokyo to start a new job at Iwate Prefectural Normal Teachers’ Training School (Jinjō Shihan Gakkō), where she remained for two years.