Talk by Prof Rui Kohiyama on American Women Missionaries and Romantic Love in Meiji Japan

Please join us in welcoming Professor Rui Kohiyama (American and Gender Studies, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University) to UCSB. Professor Kohiyama will give a talk on “American Woman Missionaries, Christian Homes, and Romantic Love in Meiji Japan.” American women missionaries are well known for their educational and reformatory intervention in various mission fields in Asia. Although their initiatives in criticizing child marriage and widowhood in india and foot-binding in China are famous, those in Japan are vague: all we have been told is that they introduced “modern education for women” in Japan. This presentation will clarify the relationship between “modern education for women” and the missionary aim of creating Christian homes, and point out the unexpected outcome of  missionary education: nurturing “romantic love” in mission schools.

Professor Rui Kohiyama is author of As Our god Along Will Lead Us: The Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Foreign Missionary Enterprise and its Encounter with Meiji Japan (in Japanese, 1992) and co-editor/co-author of Introduction to the History of Gender in the United States (in Japanese, 2010).