Delivering to Someone in the Future

For days when the results are invisible. The school Umeko Tsuda started with ten students.

In the closed spreadsheet, today just added one more row.

Documents prepared for someone else. Studying that doesn't immediately turn into a score. Small errands finished so that family wouldn't be troubled.

There is no applause when it's finished. The numbers barely move, either.

When such tasks pile up, I wonder, "Does this really have any meaning?" When I'm busy but can't see the results, I feel like I'm the only one standing in the same place.

However, the meaning of work is not always reflected in today's numbers alone.

Sometimes, you are increasing the options for someone who is not in front of you right now.

The person who teaches us that is Umeko Tsuda, known for textbooks and the five-thousand-yen note.

Her journey is not a success story that went straight from studying abroad at age six to founding a school. It took eighteen years from the time she returned to Japan until she opened her ideal school.

There was no job for me in Japan after 11 years away

In December 1871, six-year-old Umeko Tsuda traveled to America as the youngest of five female students recruited by the Hokkaido Development Commission.

She was entrusted to the Lanman family near Washington, D.C., and received local primary and secondary education. She spent most of her girlhood in America and returned to Japan in November 1882 at the age of seventeen.

Since she had studied for eleven years at the country's expense, it would not be strange to think that a job utilizing what she had learned was waiting for her.

However, no position was prepared for the returning female students to utilize their knowledge.

There was also a language barrier. Having been away from Japan for so long, Umeko had forgotten the Japanese language and customs. She would have to search for what she could do in a place that was different from both the America where she grew up and the Japan of her childhood memories.

Four years after returning home, in 1886, she became a professor at the Peeresses' School at the recommendation of Hirobumi Ito.

Although she finally obtained a place to teach, what Umeko desired was an education where women could learn at a high level regardless of their social status. While teaching at an existing school, she continued to hold onto the vision of creating her own school.

She did not build a schoolhouse immediately.

In 1889, Umeko traveled to America again and studied biology and education at Bryn Mawr College. She experienced classes that looked at each student individually in small groups, and that led to her later educational philosophy.

Even here, she was not thinking only of her own learning.

While still a student, she established the committee for the "Japanese Women's Scholarship for America" so that Japanese women following in her footsteps could study in the United States. Even before she had her own school, she sought to create a path for others to study abroad.

Even after returning to Japan in 1892, Umeko continued preparations for opening her school while teaching at institutions such as the Peeresses' School.

In a chronology, these seven years are summarized in a single phrase: "preparing to open the school."

In reality, however, it was a time spent standing at the podium, refining her own approach to education, gathering supporters, and solidifying the vision for what kind of school it would be.

There were ten people in the first classroom.

In 1900, Umeko Tsuda opened the "Joshi Eigaku Juku" (Women's Institute for English Studies) in Ichiban-cho, Kojimachi-ku, Tokyo.

The first group of students numbered ten.

They gathered not only from Tokyo but also from Yokohama, Hiroshima, Gunma, and Kagoshima. It did not begin with a large school building or many students.

At the opening ceremony, what Umeko valued was not just the splendor of the facilities.

It was the ability and enthusiasm of the teachers, the students' own spirit of inquiry, and a small-group education that taught according to the individual differences of each person.

Friends from her time studying in America, such as Sutematsu Oyama, Shigeko Uryu, and Alice Bacon, also supported the entrance exams, classes, and the building of the school.

The school was not created by Umeko's ambition alone. It only became a classroom because there were ten people who needed a place to learn and others who lent their strength.

In 1903, the first graduation ceremony was held. A total of eight students graduated: two from the regular course and six from the elective course.

Knowing the scale of the university today, this might seem small.

However, what was important to Umeko was not making the numbers look large, but what each person who learned there would do afterward.

Around 1918, a map of Japan was kept in the principal's office.

It is said that Umeko would place red marks on the map where graduates had been assigned as teachers, confirming the locations where they were working.

A single day's lesson conducted in the classroom would reach a classroom in another town many years later.

The ten people in front of her did not end with just ten.

What Umeko was confirming on the map was not the school's reputation, but the places where her graduates were actually standing.

Even eighteen years after the school opened, she did not view the results as a collective number, but as the destination for each individual. What she taught would reach students she had yet to meet. That expansion became the markers on her map.

Why is it easier to keep going when you can see 'who it helps'?

We do not only feel the meaning of our work when the numbers move.

When we can see the person on the other side of our tasks, we feel like we can 'keep going a little longer.'

In organizational psychology, the people helped by one's work are sometimes called 'beneficiaries.'

In a study published in 2007, university scholarship fundraisers had a brief interaction with a student who had received a scholarship. One month later, the group that had interacted with the student spent more time making calls and raised more donations than the control group.

Other experiments have shown that careful contact with beneficiaries can lead to persistence through the sense that 'my work is useful.'

However, this does not mean that thinking of someone's face will make you stop feeling tired.

The research was conducted in specific situations such as fundraising or editorial tasks, and it cannot be said that the same effect occurs in all jobs. If the desire to help is too strong, you may find yourself unable to say no or unable to take a break. There is also research suggesting that if contact with the other party is negative, it can actually make it harder to feel the value of the work.

Therefore, there is no need to wear yourself out for the sake of someone else.

What you can borrow is the mindset of not limiting your yardstick for success to just 'today's numbers,' but expanding it to include 'whose options will increase at the end of this task.'

Write down the name of one person you cannot yet see

I would like you to think of one thing you are currently working on.

Organizing documents. Learning a skill. Fixing a store's system. Writing a text.

There is only one thing to do today.

Write this sentence on a piece of paper or a memo:

'The one person I want this task to reach is...'

It does not have to be a real name.

Make it as specific as possible until you can picture one person, such as 'a parent who is visiting the store for the first time and is feeling lost,' 'the person who will take over this job next year,' or 'myself from a year ago who was stuck on the same mistake.'

Writing this sentence does not guarantee that your results will come faster. Nor is it a reason to force yourself to continue work that is not worth continuing.

Even so, if you can see the individual behind the numbers, the line added today becomes more than just a line.

The red mark Umeko Tsuda placed on the map was also just one at first.