Background
Yayoi Yoshioka was born on 29 April 1871 in Shizuoka. She was the second daughter of Washiyama Yosai, a doctor of Chinese style medicine.
吉岡 彌生
Yayoi Yoshioka was born on 29 April 1871 in Shizuoka. She was the second daughter of Washiyama Yosai, a doctor of Chinese style medicine.
At the age of seventeen she determined to make a career of medicine and went to Tokyo to enter a school called the Saisei Gakusha. In 1892 she passed the national examination for medical practitioners and returned to Shizuoka to set up her own practice. In 1895 she went to Tokyo once more and opened a practice in Hongo.
As a head of the National Federation of Women’s Educators, she worked to set up a system of women’s colleges and in 1937 became the first woman member of the Educational Council. In 1946 she became an advisor to the Welfare Ministry. In 1947, as a result of the purge law promulgated by the Occupation Forces, she was banned from public and educational activities, but the ban was lifted in 1951, and the following year she became head of the Tokyo Women’s Medical College.
In 1900 she was given one room in the Shisei Hospital in Iida-machi, which she used for medical education, founding the Tokyo Women’s Medical School and embarking on her project to provide medical education for women. Amid opposition from the government and society at large, she worked vigorously to raise the status of the school to that of a regular medical college. In time she set up the Tokyo Women’s Medical College, which in 1920 received full accreditation and established its position as the headquarters for women’s medical education in Japan. While continuing to operate the school and the hospital attached to it, she served as chairman of the Tokyo Federation of Women’s Societies and held a number of other important positions of leadership in various women’s organizations. In 1928 she represented Japan at the First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Hawaii, and in 1939 made an inspection tour of Europe and America.
She married Yoshioka Arata (the marriage was not registered until 1908).
