MADAME SHIMODA
MadameShimoda is one of those rare beings, who have the singular fortune to have not only fame, but what is far more to be coveted, a place, in the hearts of thousands of her countrymen and women.
Hardly any one in Tokyo, who reads at all, but could guide you to the little wooden house, on the hill, one of a million homes of her city, where this virile and delicate woman lives, surrounded by the care of relatives and friends, who it is easy to see give her, not only care, but love.
Born in a feudal castle in the picturesque country of the Japan mountain region, with the country spirit still in her, which the life for many years in the palace of Tokyo could not destroy, that spirit you feel in the touch of her diminutive hand, in the glance of her powerful eyes, where dwells unquenched the freshness of free spaces.
Before she was twenty she was a reader to Her Majesty the Empress and began the severe training of court etiquette, with its demands, more than those of a soldier for self-control, yet even after years of such experience and the still more severe drill as a teacher of young ladies she has as charming a naturalness as a girl, so great is the gift of the “kind old Nurse” Nature.
These men and women of Japan, who have crossed the half century line, are all of them, more or less, the inheritors of the chivalry of the ages gone by, and of all those ideas which Japan once held as absolutely necessary to the makingof a lady or a gentleman.
They tell us with a soft resigned sigh, that those ideals are passing away before the inroads of western civilization, and who can not regret it?
A volume of this little lady’s work with her round, generous hand-writing, is one of my treasures, as she stands first among the “singing birds” among the women of her land.
Her tastes are as varied as her life, with always that passionate love of nature in the foreground.
The heroic, as is natural in a Japanese woman, comes next, and the late war comes often into the short simple lines, where self-poise is again so marked.
Her fondness for youth and the sentiments of youth come into play on every other page.
I had spent a number of hours in the school which is her greatest monument, the “Peeress school,” where the daughters of the nobility are educated, and found there a duplicate of a first class European institution, from the kindergarten to the graduating class.
I had listened to the eloquence of the teachers as they spoke of the French Revolution, and watched the faces of the English class, as they went over the ever imperial verses of Tennyson.
In those pretty, demure eyes, there was just the passion for the “good, the true and beautiful,” which all fine youth has, the same we know so well, before the Dawn has left them.
We passed a group in the hall and there was the daughter of the greatest admiral of modern times, Miss Togo!
We saw them in the cooking school and heard their burstsof laughter as they made the interesting and doubtless indigestible dishes they were soon to partake of.
From the Auditorium to the garden, where the children play and make those queer shapes and forms in the sand which latter are enlarged in the vaster designs of manhood and womanhood, we found everywhere the mark of this woman, her care and her genius.
On one Sunday, we were invited to her house, and a very bright Yokohama girl, who spoke Japanese fluently, was our enthusiastic companion to the home of the first teacher and first poetess of the land.
I was amused as we sat and she talked for an hour in the quiet soft toned parlor of the higher education of the women of her land, to see how her glance would wander from my pencil to the face of the young girl, and of how she would interrupt her most serious remarks of history, which she has at her finger tips, of philosophy, bred in her bones, of the highest ethics of life, when she would cast one of those bewitching smiles on the girl as she pressed her to take more sweets. Life is ever the master passion of all such souls and they live only in to-day. Higher education is not new, but like all great movements, this of Japan began long, long ago, and once women held the place of almost the equal of their lords, but the strange story of reaction and retrogression, which marks the advance of the East, came in to disfigure the wonderful march of the thought life of women.
Madame Shimoda is a pioneer in her work, and to-day thousands of modern Japanese women rise up to call her blessed.
She was left a widow after a very brief married life andthen all her pent up love and devotion went out to her sex.
She has travelled extensively in Europe and America, and with that master power that all Japanese seem to have, she has taken much of the good, and left the bad of the West.
The great need of physical culture for the future mothers of Japan was what appealed to her most strongly and this has been the first note in her educational scheme.
We had sought for the motto which gives the keynote to the social life of a Japanese home, and in the house of Viscount Kaneko we had found it to be: “Wealth and rank are but a fleeting show, the merit is the man.” Here it was, as we might have known: “Duty First.”
What would one expect of a woman who had spent her middle life in educating the upper classes of her people, that she would want to rest? Oh, no! for the remaining years she is to devote herself just as earnestly to the educating of middle and lower class Japanese women.
This frail but purposeful woman had fire in her eyes as she spoke of the future, a future which to such as she must only mean vaster and vaster horizons and more radiant conquests.