Yoshioka Yayoi



Yoshioka Yayoi (吉岡彌生); (1871-1959) was a physician and women's rights activist, who founded the Tokyo Women's Medical University (東京女子医科大学) in 1900, as the first medical school for women in Japan. She was also known as Washiyama Yayoi.

She was born in Kakegawa, Shizuoka prefecture, where her father, a physician, advocated primary education for the village children. Yayoi grew up in the 19th century when women's education was frowned upon. She graduated from the Saisei-Gakusha school of medicine, and received the 12th medical license granted to a woman in Japan. Realizing the difficulty of this career path for women in Japan, she resolved to start her own school of medicine, which she did before she was 30 years old.

The graduates of the Tokyo Women's Medical School (renamed the Tokyo Women's Medical University in 1998) were not allowed to practice medicine until 1912, when the Japanese government permitted women to enroll in the national medical examination. By 1930, almost a thousand women had gone through Yoshioka's school.

Yayoi was politically active through her life. With many of her colleagues, she advocated sex education. In the 1930s, Yayoi was involved in the Japanese women's suffrage movement and the "Clean Elections" movement in Japan. In 1938, the Japanese government appointed Yayoi and ten other female leaders to the "Emergency Council to Improve the Nation's Ways of Living," a pre-war mobilization effort.

The Yoshioka Memorial Prize was established to honor Yoshioka's successors. The Japan Medical Women's Association has named its two awards after Yoshioka Yayoi and Ogino Ginko (the first woman to be licensed as a physician in Japan).

Yayoi was depicted on an 80-yen Japanese postage stamp, on 20 September 2000 together with Naruse Jinzo and Tsuda Umeko. A memorial museum dedicated to Yayoi exists in Kakegawa, Shizuoka.