- Yoshioka Yayoi
nihongo|Yoshioka Yayoi|吉岡彌生|; (1871-1959) was a
physician and women's rights activist, who founded the nihongo|Tokyo Women's Medical University |東京女子医科大学| Tokyo Joshi Igaku Daidaku in 1900, as the first medical school for women inJapan . She was also known as Washiyama Yayoi.She was born in
Kakegawa ,Shizuoka prefecture , where her father, a physician, advocated primary education for the village children. Yayoi grew up in the 19th century when women's education was frowned upon. She graduated from the "Saisei-Gakusha" school of medicine, and received the 12thmedical license granted to a woman in Japan. Realizing the difficulty of this career path for women in Japan, she resolved to start her own school of medicine, which she did before she was 30 years old.The graduates of the Tokyo Women's Medical School (renamed the
Tokyo Women's Medical University in 1998) were not allowed to practice medicine until 1912, when the Japanese government permitted women to enroll in the national medical examination. By 1930, almost a thousand women had gone through Yoshioka's school.Yayoi was politically active through her life. With many of her colleagues, she advocated
sex education . [Sabine Frühstück, "Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan", University of California Press (2003) ISBN 0-520-23548-7.] In the 1930s, Yayoi was involved in the Japanesewomen's suffrage movement and the "Clean Elections" movement in Japan. In 1938, the Japanese government appointed Yayoi and ten other female leaders to the "Emergency Council to Improve the Nation's Ways of Living," a pre-war mobilization effort.The Yoshioka Memorial Prize was established to honor Yoshioka's successors. The Japan Medical Women's Association has named its two awards after Yoshioka Yayoi and
Ogino Ginko (the first woman to be licensed as a physician in Japan).Yayoi was depicted on an 80-
yen Japanesepostage stamp , on20 September 2000 together withNaruse Jinzo andTsuda Umeko . A memorial museum dedicated to Yayoi exists inKakegawa, Shizuoka .External links
* Yayoi Yoshioka, [http://www.twmu.ac.jp/U/english/e01_founder.html excerpt] from "My Vision in Establishing a Women's Medical University and the Significance of Its Existence" (1958)
References
* Sally A. Hastings, "Yoshioka Yayoi", in "Doctors, Nurses and Medical Practitioners: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook", ed. by Lois N. Magner (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 315-319.
* Yoshioka Yayoi, "Yoshioka Yayoi den" (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center, 1998); reprint from 1941 first edition.
* Yoshioka's papers are collected at the University Archives, Tokyo Women's Medical University
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