Introduction. Before, during, and even after the Occupation years, Japanese women were sparsely represented in the various fields of science and technology. Neither the ideal of good wife/wise mother nor the educational system was supportive of young women who wished to become biologists, chemists, physicists, or engineers. Nevertheless, there were important women pioneers in the late 19th century. Among the first was Tsuda Umeko (1865-1929), who came to the United States in 1872 as a girl of seven or eight and was educated for ten years at a Georgetown academy for girls. Her host family, Mrs. And Mrs. Charles Lanham, also inspired her conversion to Christianity. Mr. Lanham had helped the Japanese government to set up its first legation in Washington, D.C., 1871, and had many American friends in artistic and intellectual circles. Back in Japan at age eighteen, Miss Tsuda gave lessons in the English language while relearning not only her own language but also Japanese manners and customs. Unable to pursue higher education in Japan, she returned to the United States and earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1892 at Bryn Mawr, a newly founded women's college, following this with a year and a half of training in a New York state teacher's college. Her subsequent career in Japan was of great significance as an educator and founder of a girl's academy (in time, Tsuda University). She was a first among Japanese women to earn a biology degree but did not purse this expertise. Although the Japanese government sponsored overseas higher education as a basic means of modernization and westernization, 1875-1940, few women were beneficiaries of state funds: 39 women to 3,170 men.

Early Women Scientists. A handful of women scientists followed in the early 20th century, among them Tange Ume (1873-1951, a nutritional chemist. Born in Kagoshima, Kyushu, she was a member of the first class to graduate from Japan Women's College, which was founded in Tokyo, 1901. She majored in home economics, as women students were encouraged to do, but increasingly took an interest in chemistry. In 1913, Tange became one of the very few women allowed to enroll at a national university—Tōhoku University in Sendai. She majored in chemistry but faced much discrimination from male students and professors who did not believe that women were suited to the profession of science. At the age forty-five, she graduated from Tōhoku, becoming the first Japanese woman to earn a bachelor's degree in science from a Japanese institution of higher learning. Managing to go abroad in the early 1920s, she studied biochemistry at Stanford and Columbia Universities and received a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1927. After a decade of teaching nutrition at Japan Women's College in the 1930s and conducting research on food chemistry and vitamins at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, she earned a second doctoral degree, this time in agriculture, from Tokyo Imperial University in 1940. Along the way, she helped to encourage young women to overcome barriers to higher education and to engage in scientific learning and scholarship. One of Ume's fellow women students at Tōhoku University was Kuroda Chika (1884-1968), who entered Oxford University after graduation to study organic chemistry. Upon returning to Japan, she both taught and conducted research at the RIKEN Laboratories.

Soon another women scientist of great potential appeared on the scene, Yasui Kono (1880-1871). As a young women, she had majored in science at the Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School and subsequently published the first scholarly paper by a Japanese woman scientist in a Japanese science journal (1906), and in a foreign journal (British, 1911). Her main interests were in entomology and botany. At first rejected by the Ministry of Education for higher study overseas, she gained permission to attend the University of Chicago and Harvard University as a graduate student, 1913-1916. While tending to her teaching duties at her alma mater upon her return to Tokyo, Kono was permitted to conduct research on properties of coal as a special student at Tokyo Imperial University, which granted her a doctor's degree in science in 1927, a first for a woman. This was not sufficient evidence, however, to persuade the university to admit more women and treat them as regular students. During the war years and continuing into the Occupation period, Yasui edited the journal Cytologia; trained a new generation of young women scientists at Women's Higher Normal School (renamed Ochanomizu University for Women); and published an astounding number of research papers, nine-five in her career. As in the case of Miss Tsuda, she never married. According to science scholar Otsubo Sumiko, there were rumors that Yasui was awarded a government fellowship back in 1913 “contingent on a tacit agreement that Yasui would never marry so that she could devote her full attention to scientific research upon her return to Japan.”

Yuasa Yoshiko (1909-1980) is known as Japan's first woman physicist. She too, at a crucial point in her development, would need to go overseas for advanced training. Yuasa was born in Tokyo, and after attending the girls' high school of the Higher Normal School, she entered the normal school itself and majored in physics. To continue her education, she enrolled at Tokyo Bunrika University in 1931, one of only five universities which admitted women in those years. Graduating in 1934, her first research paper was on molecular spectroscopy. Yuasa's interest in experimental physics motivated her to travel to France in 1940, despite the recent outbreak of war in Europe, for advanced study at the College de France. There, she earned another degree in physics, 1943, under Frederic Joliot as her major professor. Her next stop, in 1944, was the University of Berlin, where she is credited with developing a double focusing beta spectrometer. When Berlin was occupied by Soviet forces the following April, Yuasa had to return to Japan. During the Occupation years, she resumed teaching at the Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School and was instrumental in its conversion to Ochanomizu University for Women. She was less successful in continuing her research and utilizing her spectrometer because of Occupation restraints on nuclear physics in Japan. She was also distressed by gender discrimination in her home country. With help from Professor Joliet, Yuasa returned to Paris in 1949 and remained there for the rest of her life as a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research. She too never married.

Occupation Years. A new generation of Japanese women scientists came of age during and after the Occupation years. On October 23, 1945, the Nippon Times, ran an article by the head of the Senzoku Girls High School in Tokyo under the heading: “Re-education On Scientific Line Urged for Women Here.” However, it continued with a cautionary subtitle: “But New Womanhood Should Also Possess Traditional Refinement and Deep Modesty.” As the content revealed, the message was more about promoting scientific and rational practice in family life than academic studies in the natural and physical sciences. The report of the U.S. Education Mission to Japan, March 1946, criticized conservatism in Japan's higher education and encouraged the cultivation of science and scholarship. “In the realm of science,” it declared [reflecting a widely held Western stereotype of the time], “Japan's participation has been to a great extent imitative and absorptive rather than creative and original. Nevertheless, Japan has clearly a latent genius for independent research, as appears in the fine contributions of scientists in many fields who have been freed for exploration without restraint.” Young men and women should have “freedom of access, on the basis of merit” to higher education. The report was especially outspoken in singling out “the physical and biological sciences” as of “obvious importance, not only for their own sake, as revealing the world of nature, but also as the essential foundation for technologies and professions necessary for Japan's rehabilitation.” For equality, girls in their early years should have “an education as sound and thorough as that of boys.”

These were brave words and hard to carry out (in the United States, too). In is true that more women scientist would be trained after 1947 as Japan's private women's junior colleges and curricula were upgraded and as more women entered former all-male universities. Their ranks, however, remained thin in the face of gender bias against women in science. Saruhashi Katsuko (1920-2007), who was a student at the new Imperial Science College for Women during the war, 1940-43, and a researcher on meteorology when the Occupation began, stands out as the first woman to receive a doctorate in science as a regular student at the University of Tokyo. This was in 1957, and her field was geochemistry. The following year, Saruhashi helped to found the Society of Japanese Women Scientists and later, after retirement, became the first woman to serve on the Japan Science Council. Instead of pursuing a career in teaching at a university, she had joined the Geochemical Laboratory where one of her first projects was research on radioactivity in sea water. In her autobiography, 1981, she complained of constant gender discrimination. To designate role models and encourage young women to consider science as a career, she established the annual Saruhashi Prize, using her own funds, to showcase distinguished Japanese women scientists.

For several months in 1959 (January to April), Shiraishi Tsugi, long-time women's editor of the Japan Times, ran an informative series on Japanese women in science. Also in 1959, atomic physicist Takahashi Eiko, age thirty-two and a product of the University of Kyoto, was singled out by Time magazine in a special essay on the changing women of Japan (Takahashi had also been one of Shiraishi's scientists). She was then working on nuclear fission experiments at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute located at Tokai in Ibaraki Prefecture. The choice was good, and Takahashi would go on to have a productive career as a researcher. Another rising scientist at that time was Mochizuki Kazuko (b. 1928), who became a professor of solid state physics at Osaka University and an internationally recognized scholar.

Yonezawa Fumiko (b. 1938), a theoretical physicist of great distinction, was one of the first women to win the Saruhashi Prize. In the 1960s, she had been the only women in her physics cohort at the University of Kyoto—another prestigious university opened to women following Occupation reforms. Her mentor was Nobel laureate Yukawa Hideki. After receiving her degree in 1966, Yonezawa entered the University's Research Institute for Fundamental Physics as an assistant to Yukawa, later shifting to the Department of Applied Physics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and back again to Kyoto in 1976. Her breakthrough to international recognition in her field had come in 1967-68, when she published her new theory on the electrical properties of non-crystalline substances. This earned her an invitation as a visiting scholar for three years in the early 1970s at the City College of New York and Yeshiva University. To look ahead, in 1984, Yonezawa became a full professor in physics at Keio University in Tokyo, a rare achievement. In 1995, was elected president of the Physics Society of Japan. And in 1998, she edited a work in English on the Physics of Complex Liquids. She also broke the mold for women scientists in another way by marrying and becoming the mother of three daughters.

In the meantime, Okazaki Tsuneko (born 1933—), a molecular biologist, had attracted considerable attention in 1967 for a discovery with her scientist husband—the Okazaki fragment, a short fragment of DNA. She is a true child of Occupation period reforms in education. As she relates in a memoir, she grew up in Nagoya, where her father was a physician and recalls the difficulty of studying during the B-29 raids over Japanese cities. As her schooling continued during the Occupation, in junior high school and high school, she became interested in antibiotics and biology. She is quick to give credit to co-education for opening doors to women. In 1952, Okazaki entered the Nagoya University School of Science, and, following the lead of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953 by Watson and Crick in England, she became fascinated by the problem of “solving the puzzle of DNA replication.” Later, Okazaki and her husband were able to conduct research together at Stanford University in 1961 under a Nobel Prize scientist, and, upon returning to Japan, they discovered how small fragments of DNA were formed. The term, “Okazaki fragments,” was soon coined and entered biochemistry texts. After the loss of her husband in 1975, Okazaki persevered with much help from friends, and, by 1978, as she tells it, “succeeded in separating and analyzing the substance that triggers the formation of the Okazaki fragments.”

It is difficult to turn up information on Japanese women engineers. The first doctor of engineering in Japan was Gohara Sawako, who received her bachelor's degree in 1953 from Ritsumeikan University, a private institution in Kyoto, and then entered Osaka University as a major in telecommunications engineering. She was the only woman in her course of study; little is known about her subsequent career. In 1992, the Japanese Women Engineers Forum was founded to enhance networking and improved opportunities. Little was happening despite the passage in 1985 of equal opportunity legislation. The Forum conducted a series of important studies in the late 1990s on Japanese women engineers and scientists, covering such topics as engineering and science courses in the schools, the environment of the work place, balancing work and family life, and legal and human resources for protection and development.

Into the Future. Mukai Chiaki, born one week after the end of the Occupation, in early May 1952, would become Japan's first woman astronaut. Her initial flight was in 1994, when she performed experiments on plants. Her second, in 1998, was to study space and aging under Captain John Glenn, the first man to orbit the earth and the oldest man to fly in space. She too represents the advantages gained by young women in expanded high school and university curricula as a result of Occupation reforms in higher education. Mukai, who went to the Keiō Girls' High School in Tokyo, earned a medical degree from Keiō University in the 1970s, specializing in emergency and cardiovascular surgery. By her own account, she became interested in space travel after seeing a Japanese Space Agency ad in 1983 for astronaut trainees. Civilians, she realized, could also apply. Mukai went through nine years of rigorous training, two in Japan and seven at the NASA Space Center in Houston, while also teaching in the Surgery Department at the Baylor College of Medicine. Ultimately, on her two missions, she would log more hours in space than any other Japanese astronaut.

Overall in postwar Japan, although educational opportunities expanded and individual Japanese women made impressive achievements, women scientists made only modest gains by the 1990s in professional careers, salaries, and promotions. When the Physics Society of Japan elected Yonezawa as President in 1995, for example, it had only a small membership of women—three percent. Fifteen years after its founding in 1992, the Japanese Women Engineers Forum had a small membership of only 200. Despite the push for equal rights and the fight against harassment, as of 2001, according to a study by Kuwahara Motoko, women were only ten percent of Japanese scientists and engineers.

Supportive Male Mentors. Of considerable interest, the first publication to present important Japanese women of scientists (ten in all) to English language readers was Blazing a Trail: Japanese Women's Contributions to Modern Science, 2001. It was the product of a committee chaired by a male in engineering science and also featured the stories of four male scientists who had encouraged or mentored women in various fields of scientific research. All of the women in the survey spoke highly of specific male teachers and professors, but they also made clear that Japanese male biases stood in the way of launching and advancing in professional careers. This 2001 compilation was aided by donations from Her Majesty Empress Michiko of Japan, born in 1934 into a wealthy business family and eleven years old when Japan surrendered. She was a girl and young women during the Occupation period and later, 1957, a graduate of the University of the Sacred Heart, which had been upgraded into a four year institution in 1948 as a result of Occupation reforms. Perhaps, in this gesture as empress, she had in part been inspired by her uncles—one had been a professor of geology and the other a professor of physics. That same year, 2001, another publication appeared to acquaint English language readers with achievements by Japanese women in science: My Life: Twenty Japanese Women Scientists. Neither of these two publication enjoyed wide circulation, and both are difficult to turn up in libraries.