Bryn Mawr, Ume Tsuda, and Me / Yasu Furukawa
Since its publication, "Ume Tsuda: The Path to Science, the Dream of a University" has been well-received. Below, we share a portion of "Bryn Mawr, Ume Tsuda, and Me," an article contributed by the author, Dr. Yasu Furukawa, to the March issue of 'UP.' While conducting research at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Dr. Furukawa decided to move to the small suburban town of Bryn Mawr. That is where his connection with Ume Tsuda began.
Very close to my apartment was Bryn Mawr College, known as a prestigious women's university. By the end of the 19th century, seven private women's colleges known as the Seven Sisters had been founded in the eastern United States, and Bryn Mawr College was one of them, established in 1885 through the donation of funds and land by the Quaker physician Joseph Taylor. Although it is a small university with about 1,700 students today, the campus is vast and as beautiful as a park. Walking around the campus on weekends became my pleasure.
While living like that, I learned that 100 years ago, Ume Tsuda (1864–1929) had studied at this college. At the age of six, Tsuda went to the United States as the first Japanese female exchange student, was raised in an American family, and returned to Japan at seventeen. While working as an English teacher at the Peeresses' School, she studied at Bryn Mawr College for three years from 1889 (Meiji 22) to 1892 (Meiji 25) while still holding her government position.
I don't clearly remember how I obtained it, but I acquired Minako Oba's "Ume Tsuda" (Asahi Shimbun Publications, 1990), which was published around that time, and read it avidly in my apartment. Sometimes when living abroad for a while, one can strangely miss the Japanese language, and perhaps that helped. I may have also felt a sense of realism by reading this book in Bryn Mawr. In any case, I was immediately drawn into that biography of Tsuda. In 1984 (Showa 59), hundreds of letters (handwritten in English) that Tsuda had addressed to her American foster mother were discovered in the attic of the main building of Tsuda University. The author, Minako Oba, was a graduate of Tsuda University, and she carefully read those letters to reconstruct Tsuda's life with a beautiful touch. Incidentally, this collection of letters was transcribed and published the year after the book (The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her American Mother, ed. by Y. Furuki et al., Weatherhill, 1991).
In the latter half of Oba's biography, there is a story about Tsuda studying biology at Bryn Mawr College. Reading that part, my interest in the history of science sprouted rapidly. I immediately visited the archives at Bryn Mawr College's Canaday Library. There, Tsuda's transcripts and letters were neatly preserved, and from those historical materials, I was able to confirm that Tsuda had received quite serious biology education at Bryn Mawr, that she had studied under the zoologist Thomas Hunt Morgan and conducted experimental embryological research on the eggs of the wood frog, that her talent in this field was highly regarded by her professors, and that she had even served as a laboratory assistant in the biology department.
The old library at Bryn Mawr College. Photographed by the author in 1993.
This archive houses a vast amount of material related to the history of Bryn Mawr College. Not just Bryn Mawr, but many American universities have archives with several professionally trained archivists who will politely answer any questions. Their thorough service is far more comprehensive than in Japan. Without cumbersome procedures, you can pick up and view even private documents like letters. They do not have an attitude of "letting you see" their holdings, but actively assist so that their school's historical materials can be useful for the research of domestic and international scholars. This way of responding is very much appreciated by a history researcher like me.
With the cooperation of the archivists, I was able to investigate not only Tsuda's personal files but also materials regarding the faculty composition, course syllabi, curriculum systems, and the students of the time to understand the situation of the university when Tsuda was studying there. By connecting the knowledge gained from there with my knowledge of the history of science, various things came to light. I learned that the education at Bryn Mawr at the time was not merely focused on liberal arts education, but aimed at training researchers at the exact same level as men, and that Bryn Mawr's biology department possessed an outstanding faculty and educational program even in the United States at the time.
I also visited Merion Hall, where the dormitory Tsuda lived in was located, and Taylor Hall, where the biology laboratory was, and imagined Tsuda's study abroad life 100 years ago. As I continued to visit the Bryn Mawr College archives, it seems that professors at Penn began to worry, asking what happened to Yasu (my first name) as they hadn't seen me lately.
Even so, my questions only grew. Why did a female English teacher of the Meiji era choose to major in biology while studying in America, and why did she not walk the path of a biologist after returning to Japan, or why was she unable to? What did the Bryn Mawr experience mean for Tsuda's life? Above all, what was science to Tsuda? The road to solving the mystery was just beginning. My original research theme was the history of 20th-century polymer chemistry, but through these circumstances, research on Tsuda became my enjoyable side work.
For a while after returning to Japan, I was swamped with the work of publishing my research on the history of polymer chemistry as a book. Even so, I collected materials and information about Tsuda little by little. In Japan, the Ume Tsuda Archives at Tsuda University holds many first-class historical materials. I found new materials related to Tsuda's study abroad at the Gakushuin University Archives (now Gakushuin Archives) and the Archives of the Imperial Household Agency. Since then, I have stopped by Bryn Mawr College several times in conjunction with academic conference trips to the eastern United States. I also extended my trip to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (Massachusetts), where Tsuda participated in summer training, and conducted research on historical materials in their archives.
Many biographies have been written about Ume Tsuda to date. Seven full-scale biographies have been published alone. There are also novels and books for children. The fact that Tsuda studied biology during her second study abroad is mentioned partially and fragmentarily in these existing documents (including Oba's biography). However, in most cases, they only describe the fact that she studied biology and do not develop any further in-depth discussion. At the very least, there was almost no research that took up this issue and examined it independently. It was a long detour, but now, 30 years after I started my research at Bryn Mawr, I have compiled a biography of Ume Tsuda drawn from my own perspective into a single book. The answers I reached to the aforementioned questions are written there, so I would appreciate it if you would open this book for details.
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