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Show 1873! That was the very year that Miss Talcott and Miss Dudley went, the one from her Connecticut home, and the other from Rock-ford, 111., to Kobe. 1873! It was that year that the anti-Christian posters were ordered down. ''So long as the sun shall warm the earth let no Christian be so bold as to come to Japan, and let all know that the King of Spain himself, or the Christian's God, or the great God himself, if he dare violate this command, shall pay for it with his head.'' Into the very heart of Japan, into the religious capital, Kyoto, Joseph Neesima pushed his way in 1876. It is a marvellous story of which one never tires, the way in which Mr. Neesima as a youth followed the gleam, made himself an exile that he might find the light, found a Christian home, and college, and the education he sought, impressed himself and his message upon the American Board, returned in 1874 with means to start a college, and insisted it should be in the old capital from which the recent removal of royalty made less difficult the almost impossible task of securing a holding. Mr. Neesima recognized from the outset that the women of Japan must be educated. As he afterwards said, "Among the reasons why there are so few great men among us, why national morality is so low, I believe the greatest to be the existing inequality in the rights of men and women. In matters of social reform woman's influence is greater than man's. Her power is indeed great." So he himself became principal of the school organized for girls in one of the missionary residences in 1877. Miss Alice Jeanette Starkweather from Hartford had been with them but a few months, and to her fell the happy task of shaping the first work for girls in that center of art and religion and education for Japan. As our Board had assumed her support, we became one of the sponsors for the school, and the charming young teacher kept us in very close touch for seven years before her health gave out and caused her retirement. At the end of three years, ninety-five girls had been in the school. They had three courses of study: an elementary preparatory one in Japanese, consisting of [ 53 ] |