From Mission to Secular: localization, imperialisms and transnational women’s activism in 1920s Japan

The American Protestant foreign missionary movement reached its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries owing largely to the expansion of women’s participation. Based on the nineteenth century mission ideology of “women’s work for women,” women enjoyed autonomy in foreign missionary movement until they faced a turning point in the interwar years when most of the women’s missionary boards were forced to merge with their male-dominated denominational boards. As a case study taking a distinct local vantage point within Asia to examine this turning point, this study argues that the ideology of “women’s work for women” undergirded the whole expansion campaign and was salient in the mission field of Kobe.

For Kobe College, one of the pioneering women’s missionary colleges in Japan, a transfer of control from mission boards to secular organizations took place in 1920s, right before the three woman’s boards were merged into the male-dominated American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1927. Struggling to establish an institution for women’s higher education in Japan against the obstacles of waning American church donations for missionary work in Japan due to the rise of Japanese empire in China and Korea, the 1924 Japanese exclusion bill and increasing Japanese governmental suspicions against Christian education, woman missionaries struggled to seek alternative means of financial support by incorporating two transpacific secular organizations across the Pacific, Kobe College Corporation based in Chicago in 1920 and Kobe College Foundation in Japan in 1925. Accordingly, women in missions managed to accomplish the one-million-dollar expansion campaign and a successful relocation of Kobe College at the new Okadayama campus in 1934.  Using a combination of sources in Japanese and English, this paper examines the shifting power relations between American missionary and Japanese secular organizations in the field of education for Japanese women, when tensions of imperialisms of the East and the West were mounting,

Paper presented at the International Federation for Research in Women’s History Conference 2018, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, August 16-19, 2018.