Basic Education to 1945. From the early 20th century to the 1930s, the Japanese educational system consisted of six years of free compulsory co-education at the primary level. Compliance was very high for both boys and girls, and a new goal of eight years was set in the 1930s. Nevertheless, after the elementary years, female education lagged behind. Although each prefecture was under orders from the Ministry of Education to establish middle schools for girls, education at this level was far more extensive for boys and young men than for girls and young women in the years leading to the Asia/Pacific War. Higher middle schools, the famous kōtōgakkō, served primarily as prep schools for young men. Publicly funded higher education in Japan was almost exclusively male. The prestigious Imperial Tokyo and Imperial Kyoto Universities were training grounds for young men who aspired to enter public life, the professions, or engineering and the sciences. Only a few women were admitted to the new imperial national universities founded in major cities after 1900—Fukuoka, Sendai, Sapporo, Yokohama and elsewhere. The best-known private academies, Keiō and Waseda, both of which were located in Tokyo and upgraded to university status following World War I, also catered to male students, especially those interested in journalism or business.

Pre-War Higher Education for Women. In the mid-1880s, a branch of the new all-male Peers School (Gakushūin) was created to educate young women of elite or aristocratic families. Prospects for advanced female education were much better at private institutions. Before and after 1900, Christian missionaries and Japanese converts to Christianity were foremost among the founders of private academies and junior colleges for girls and young women. Among them was Tsuda Umeko, who set up a female academy in 1900 to teach not only the English language but also subjects which were considered beneficial in helping young women become financially independent. One of the first Japanese women to go overseas for an education, she had graduated from a preparatory school in Georgetown in the early 1880s and returned to the United States to earn a bachelor's degree in biology in 1892 at the recently founded women's college, Bryn Mawr. One of her best friends was the first Japanese graduate of Vassar College, Yamakawa Sutematsu (1860-1919), class of 1882.

Japan's female academies were in the category of special schools or semmon gakkō. At best, they were junior colleges and did not attain university status. The average age of the graduates was nineteen, a good age for marriage. Although the curriculum was geared to homemakers, young women who were desirous of higher learning or wished a taste of the liberal arts and sciences had little choice but to attend these institutions. High on the list was Japan Women's Academy (usually referred to as Japan Women's College, though the term is misleading), founded in Tokyo, 1901, by a prominent Japanese male Christian educator, Naruse Jinzō, who had once been an overseas student. Its purpose, he said, was to educate young women as human beings. The school attracted such famous future activists as Hiratsuka Raichō and Oku Mumeo. Future luminaries Kamichika Ichiko and Yamakawa Kikue were contemporaries at the Tsuda English Academy. Government sponsored normal schools admitted women for training as primary school teachers, and vocational schools educated nurses. However, the Women's Medical College which opened in 1900 was a private institution—the creation of one of Japan's first licensed women physicians, Dr. Yoshioka Yayoi. There was little opportunity for the study of law. In an unusual venture, pioneer woman journalist Hani Motoko set up a progressive high school on the outskirts of Tokyo in 1921 with backing from her husband. Called the Jiyū Gakuen or the Freedom School, its goal was to educate students to be creative, independent, and responsible individuals. The architect for the original building was American Frank Lloyd Wright. Although the school was ostensibly co-ed, even here students were segregated into separate classrooms for young men and women. In spite of small gains, by the 1930s, only a few women had gained admission to Japan's national universities as undergraduates and none to Tokyo or Kyoto Imperial Universities.

Overseas Higher Education. Before the outbreak of the Asia/Pacific War, Japanese women who wanted a full-fledged university education—and who could afford it—had to enroll in institutions in Europe or in the United States. Although U.S. immigration laws were strict in excluding Japanese after 1923, they applied to wage labor and picture brides and not to education, business, or travel. Japanese women gained entry to private women's colleges, including Wellesley and Vassar, but also experienced co-education at large state universities like the University of Michigan or small private institutions, among them Grinnell and Oberlin. Several earned doctorates. Those wishing to take higher degrees in mathematics or the sciences tended to head for institutions in France or Britain. In these years, Japanese women educators holding advanced degrees taught at private women's academies, not at leading Japanese universities. And, since higher education in Japan was the primary gateway to success in the professions or business, few Japanese men ventured overseas for undergraduate degrees.

Occupiers Take Stock. In the opening months of the Occupation, American officials quickly sought out Japanese women who had attended college in the United States or who had close ties with American women, viewing them as potential sympathizers or allies in the democratization of Japan. Among them were educators and activists who had agitated for equal educational opportunities and access to Japan's universities. The Ministry of Education (Monbushō), apparently taking heed of General MacArthur's dictum in early October to emancipate Japanese women, drew up a sketchy plan for female education in December. By then, Allied and American officers in the Education Division of the Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E), General Headquarters, had begun the enormous task of compiling their own reports and making initial recommendations for basic educational reform. Although they, in general, recognized the problem of gender inequality at the middle and higher levels of Japanese schools, they did not produce an overall plan focusing on female education. At that stage, there were no women serving in the Education Division. Soon, a few were recruited, including a WAC captain, Eileen Donovan, for general advice and a civilian educator, Dr. Lulu H. Holmes, for women's higher education. Donovan had been a junior high school teacher in Boston. Holmes, a woman's college dean, held a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1934-35, she had spent a year at Kobe Jogakuin, a junior college for girls founded by Presbyterians and headed by an American woman born in Japan.

The first U. S. Education Mission, which had arrived in March 1946 to advise General MacArthur on a range of educational reforms, included four women, two of whom headed prestigious private women's colleges back home—Virginia C. Gildersleeve of Barnard and Mildred McAfee Horton of Wellesley. The Mission, in turn, interacted with a group of distinguished Japanese educators who had been appointed by the government to the Japan Education Reform Committee (JERC). The head of JERC was Dr. Nambara Shigeru, a Christian and president of Tokyo Imperial University. Although only two of the Japanese members were women, each headed a women's junior college. The Mission's survey lasted less than a month, and its final report included many recommendations to promote a well-educated and democratic citizenry. At its heart was the message of individualism. “A system of education,” said the report, “should be so organized as to encourage the fullest development of which each individual—boy or girl, man or women—is capable as an intelligent, responsible and cooperating member of society.” The report questioned the separation of the sexes after primary schooling and also stressed the need to expand higher education. Five members from the original U.S. Mission, including one of the women—Pearl Wanamaker, Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction—returned to Japan with the Second Education Mission in 1950 for a review of the reforms.

As indicated above, rather than singling out girls and women to any great extent or as a subject of special concern, U.S. official reports tended to make general statements about the importance of democratizing education and of providing equal opportunities for the Japanese people. Nevertheless, they provided a strong impetus for improved female education. The approach of Donovan and Holmes, for example, in conversations with Japanese educators was to stress an equal curriculum for boys and girls, plus electives. Holmes was told by a male informant during her first field trip in Japan, 1946, that, in fact, girls were separated from boys at the end of the third year of primary schooling and put into different classrooms or even different buildings with less able teachers. Why? Inferior teachers for inferior minds. Holmes, in other trips, came to accept the rationale for homemaking courses in women's schools. Instead of removal or de-emphasis, she suggested improvement by adding scientific content. Her other activities were to support the creation of a Japanese Association of University Women to lobby for improvements in higher education and to encourage the establishment of an independent college accreditation system. The basic criterion used by educators for upgrading women's colleges was the extent of liberal arts in their curriculum. Holmes' successor 1948, Dr. Helen Hosp, an active member of the Association of American University Women and a former dean at the University of Nebraska, pressed for training of Japanese women to become deans and administrators.

The New Education. Under the Constitution of 1947, all people had “the right to an equal education correspondent to their ability, as provided by law.” Compulsory education was to be free. The Fundament Education Law of March 1947, the result of discourse generated by American and Allied personnel serving in CI&E, the U.S. Education Mission, and prominent Japanese educators, promised equality of educational opportunity for all Japanese and equality of the sexes. Companion legislation enacted at the same time, the School Education Law, reorganized the Japanese school system on the American pattern of six years of elementary school, three of junior high school, and three of senior high school, and prescribed nine years of free, compulsory education. Universities were expected to follow the American model of four years. Under these laws, elite prep schools for boys, the kōtōgakkō, were done away with. Of crucial importance for girls and boys was the introduction of co-education in government supported junior high schools and high schools—in the same classrooms. Whether mutually agreed upon or mandated by the Occupation, this reform remains in place to the present, but conservative educators and many parents were skeptical or opposed at the time. Polls indicated that girls, more so than boys, welcomed this particular change. Many private schools, however, continued to operate as same-sex schools. Ironically, years later in the United States, support for same-sex schools at lower and college levels continues to find a voice in educational circles.

In the meantime, elementary and high school textbooks dating from the wartime period were at first censored and then revised to exclude ultra-nationalism and undemocratic thought. Compulsory courses and textbooks on shōshin, a Japanized form of Confucian ethics which had been taught in modern schools since the 1880s, were permanently banned. History textbooks, viewed as hopelessly militaristic by CI&E, were confiscated in early 1946 and either pulped or otherwise destroyed to make way for brand new works written by Japanese educators under American guidance. Ultra-nationalistic educators, mainly male teachers and principles, were purged.

More emphasis than before was given to social studies or civics in the curriculum, but, as in the United States, classroom materials remained highly gendered in representing the proper roles of boys and girls. Boys did not cook or do laundry; girls were not office managers or scientists and engineers. This was not surprising since men wrote the textbooks and controlled the policies, but women seem not to have objected. Sex differentiation prevailed as girls and boys were brought up to conform to older standards of femininity and masculinity. Also, from an early age, girls were still taught to use more deferential speech than boys or to use different words and phrases, in essence to speak a “women's language.” Along with talk of individualism, schools continued to socialize Japanese children in how to act and interact in groups. Here, too, it was difficult to break free from sex-norms and cultural attitudes which accorded leadership to boys. Even in calling student rolls, the practice was to name boys first instead of creating mixed registers. In adult education, Allied and American men and women who served at local levels with Civil Affairs Teams in Occupied Japan encouraged Japanese women to take more initiative in creating and running their own organizations instead of following male leadership. They learned that their clients were already quite experienced in group interaction, though unschooled in democratic procedure, and accustomed to separate women's auxiliaries in cooperatives, unions, and political parties.

In 1948, the Imperial Rescript on Education (1891) was formally rescinded. Even earlier, the emperor's portrait had ceased to occupy a hallowed spot in the schools or to be venerated on school holidays. However, also in 1948, Japanese authorities were permitted to retain controls over textbooks; teachers could choose classroom materials but only from an official authorized list. Attempts by American Occupation authorities to impose the ideal of decentralization upon the administration of the Japanese pre-collegiate system were a failure, even though PTAs were established and taken seriously by parents, especially mothers. School lunch programs were introduced, and increased use of audio visual equipment to enhance learning was promoted. The Freedom School tapped the young foreign crowd in Japan to teach English; an American woman was recruited to tutor the Crown Prince and his classmates. But, as the Occupation ended, school buildings and equipment remained inadequate, in need of repair, or outmoded. The exam system or “exam hell,” the greatest hurdle to entering the best universities and even the best high schools and junior high schools, stayed intact.

Higher Education for Women. The need to improve nursing education and pre-collegiate teacher training was recognized. However, to the dismay of Japanese critics, junior colleges, whether of high quality or not, were upgraded over the next few years to four-year university status, including several for women. Tokyo Imperial University was renamed the University of Tokyo, forced to expand undergraduate training from three years to four, and required to allow women to take entrance examinations. The first open exams were held in April 1946 when over 100 women out of a total of 4,719 applicants tried their luck; 8 women won admission to the Literature Department (as reported by the Nippon Times; other sources say 4 women). By the end of the Occupation, more women had managed to pass the entrance exams for Tokyo and Kyoto Universities but were hardly a deluge. A survey in 1949, for example, reported that only 417 women compared with 86,617 men had entered government operated men's universities: 124 at the University of Tokyo; 83 at Kyoto University; 16 at Kyushu University and smaller numbers at Osaka and Nagoya Universities. This was in part attributed to the differences in curricula between women's preparatory schooling and men's (see Shiraishi Tsugi in Nippon Times; January 14, 1949). None of the professors at these prestigious institutions were female.

Young women, especially those from middle and upper middle class families, would benefit from greater opportunities for a college education but preferred to enroll in the upgraded private women's colleges with male and female faculties: Japan Women's College, Tokyo Women's Christian College, Kobe College, or Tsuda College (since upgraded to universities). For wealthy or elite young women, the University of the Sacred Heart, also upgraded to four years, was another place of choice. Its most famous graduate was Shōda Michiko in 1957—the future Empress of Japan. All of these women's institutions had earned an early upgrade to four year colleges because of their strength in the liberal arts. Sophia University, a Jesuit institution founded in Tokyo before the war, also attracted some women students but for many years remained resistant to recruitment of women faculty. International Christian University, which opened in 1953 as a co-ed institution at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, employed a few women professors and teaching assistants. Among them was leading Christian intellectual and pacifist Takeda Kiyoko (1917- ), a lecturer in history and religious studies and a future ICU professor and dean.

Breaking Barriers. Apart from private women's colleges, it would take decades for women to become professors at former all-male Japanese universities. The fortunate few were often well-connected as well as brilliant. The first woman to be appointed to the rank of professor at the University of Tokyo was anthropologist Nakane Chie (1926-) in 1970. She had become internationally famous for her theory of Japan as a vertical society (Japanese Society, 1970). Nakane, who had lived in China in the 1930s, was in the second group of women students to pass the entrance exam and enter the University of Tokyo in 1947 (18 women among 6000 students). She remembers reading books on cultural anthropology at the American Center in Occupied Tokyo. After graduation, she joined the university's Institute of Oriental Culture in 1953 as a research assistant. Her post-graduate life was cosmopolitan, taking her to India, Tibet, the University of Chicago, The University of London, and Cambridge University. Another outstanding woman scholar was Tsurumi Kazuko (1918-2006), a prewar student at Vassar College who in 1968, at the age of fifty, earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University and was subsequently invited to join the international studies faculty at Sophia University and retired as professor emeritus in 1988.

One of the greatest names among the young woman educated in the Occupation years would be Ogata Sadako (1927—), a graduate of the University of the Sacred Heart in 1951, followed by a Master's degree in international relations from Georgetown University in 1953 and a Ph.D. in political science from Berkeley in 1963. She too had lived in China during the 1930s, and her doctoral thesis was a definitive study of the Mukden Incident, 1931, which precipitated Japan's takeover of Manchuria. Her academic career, beginning in 1965 as professor at ICU and later professor and dean of the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Sophia University, was punctuated by government service as Japan's first women Minister Plenipotentiary to the United Nations in the late 1970s and as U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for a decade during the 1990s. As scholar, humanitarian, diplomat, and international civil servant, she has become one of the most eminent Japanese women in world affairs. During her tenure as U.S. Minister, Ogata was the keynote speaker in 1979 at the naming ceremony of the Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland. All three of these women scholars were critical of Japan's 1930s militarism and devoted to the cause of peace and human rights, but they were not highly active in the women's movement in postwar Japan. Ogata (nee Nakamura), who married a Bank of Japan executive, prefers to be called Mrs. Ogata, not Dr. or Prof. Ogata. In 2005, she received the Great Negotiator Award by the Program of Negotiation, Harvard Law School.

Limited Gains. Though new opportunities were opened to girls and young women at higher levels of learning during the Occupation years, the curricula in women's colleges, even if well-taught, remained conventional in offering primarily feminine or women's subjects considered appropriate for future wives and mothers, such as literature and home economics. As in other areas, higher education, including graduate studies, remained elusive for ordinary women or remiss in providing intellectual challenges. With many social barriers still remaining in the mid-1950s, Japanese women made few numerical gains in the professions, sciences, technology, and social sciences. The final word in this period goes to Koyama Takashi. As he observed in his UNESCO report in 1961, The Changing Social Position of Women in Japan:

The pressing problem in Japan today is how best to adjust individuals and groups to these enforced institutional changes. In other words, the question of how to widen the sphere of women's activities in order to improve her position in accordance with the spirit of equality between men and women which is embodied in the new laws and in the new educational programs still remains a crucial problem.

Final word or not, Koyama seems to have overlooked the presence of rebellious women undergraduates in anti-government and anti-American protests against the U.S-Japan Security Treaty, culminating in mass demonstrations in Tokyo, May and June 1960, and leading to the resignation of the Prime Minister. One life was lost in pressures from the crowd—a woman student at the University of Tokyo.