Ogino Ginko — The Woman Who Opened the Door and Walked Out

Being the One Examined

"I submitted my application again, and again it was turned down."

She had written to ask to be allowed to sit the doctors' exam, and she had sent it in again, and again it was refused. Years later, she described an autumn just after she turned thirty in those words. She had never been so stuck, she said, in all her life.

Because she was a woman, her applications had already been thrown back many times.

Why did she want so badly to become a doctor? The story goes back about ten years, to a hospital room.

Ogino Ginko was born the daughter of a village headman, in a village on the banks of the Tone River. In her teens she married into the family of another headman nearby.

Before long she fell seriously ill with a women's disease. Around the age of twenty-one, she was in a hospital in Tokyo for nearly two years. At one point, it is said, her life was in danger.

The ones who examined her in that room were male doctors.

Yoshioka Yayoi, a woman doctor who came after her, wrote about Ginko in those days. To show a man an illness of a woman's body: Ginko learned, deep down, how painful that was. And then, Yoshioka writes, she thought this:

"There must be many others with the same illness, and they must all feel the same worry. If only, at a time like this, there were a woman doctor, and we could open up to her as women do, and be examined by her."

And in the end, it is said, she decided that she herself would become that woman doctor.

It is also said that hearing the voices of other women suffering from the same illness, in the hospital, was part of why she made up her mind.

Around then, Ginko talked it over with her husband, and they parted.

She had been so young when her marriage broke down that it hurt to think of it, and she had seen all there was to see of how little the old customs of the world could be trusted. That is how Yoshioka describes her.

Then she began to study again. She had loved learning since she was a child. At a private school near her village, she studied under Matsumoto Mannen, a scholar of the Chinese classics.

At the Tokyo school of a scholar of ancient Japanese literature, she looked after a girl from Hanno, eight years younger, named Tanaka Kaku, as if Kaku were her little sister. Ginko is said to have called what lay between them a sisterly bond. Thirty-two of the letters and postcards she sent to Kaku still survive today. The friendship lasted to the end of Ginko's life.

In 1875 she was among the first students of a teacher training school for women that had opened in Tokyo. Four years later she graduated with good marks.

If she had simply become a teacher, she would never have had to worry about her living. But the pain of the illness still hidden in her body made her think more and more about the troubles of other women. That is how Yoshioka sees it.

In the year she graduated, a young woman student came to see Ishiguro Tadanori, an army doctor. She carried a letter of introduction from an official of the Ministry of Education.

Ishiguro later wrote about that day. The young woman said she was Ogino Ginko, a graduate of the teacher training school. She was being invited to many places, she said, but she had turned them down. She wanted to study medicine now and become a doctor, and she had come to ask what he thought.

The way to become a teacher had been open in front of her. She had turned it down herself.

Ishiguro thought for a little and then answered. Most women are shy, he said. They especially hate to be examined for women's diseases in front of a man. So it would be a very good thing to have women doctors.

"There is no subject in medicine that a woman cannot study, so I approve of your learning medicine."

It was the same reasoning she had arrived at in that hospital room when she was twenty-one.

Which school would be good, she asked again. Ishiguro said he would talk to the schools, and she went home for that day.

But when he asked two or three medical schools, every one of them answered that they would turn down a woman student.

Only one school agreed to take her: a medical school in Shitaya called Kojuin. If it was her earnest request, they would train her, they told him, Ishiguro wrote. According to Yoshioka, it was a very small school with a name like a temple's.

In September 1879, Ginko entered Kojuin. About seven years had passed since the hospital room.

After three years of study, she would graduate, and then she would only have to take the national exam.

That was how it was supposed to go.

Rejected Again

According to Yoshioka Yayoi's book, Ginko was the only woman student at Kojuin, a school full of men. She was small, with a slim face and sloping shoulders, it says.

She had to earn her school fees and living money herself. She worked as a tutor at the house of Takashima Kaemon, a rich merchant, and at other homes, and she also helped a government official with his letters as a kind of secretary. A friend once found her a place to live. There were no vehicles of any kind then, and she walked about four kilometers (2.5 miles) to school and to the houses where she taught. With such a weak body, it is a wonder she kept it up for three years.

When Ishiguro Tadanori asked how she was doing, Takashina Tsunenori of Kojuin praised her, it is said, as a hard worker with good marks.

In 1882, Ginko graduated from Kojuin. She was thirty-one.

If she passed the government's exam for doctors, she could become a doctor. Ginko sent in an application, asking to be allowed to sit the exam.

The answer that came back was: there is no case of a woman before.

In Yoshioka's words, the officials did not take her seriously at all. What, a woman? That was how they acted.

Twice to the Tokyo prefecture. Once to Saitama prefecture. Once to the Ministry of Home Affairs. Four times she applied, and four times she was turned down.

Ishiguro was at a loss too. Ogino was in trouble, of course, and I was in great trouble myself, he confessed later. He went again and again to the Bureau of Health, he said, where he argued with the officials, the head of the bureau among them, and begged them.

Still the door did not open. Two years passed with nothing moving forward.

According to a collection of doctors' biographies published in 1892, after leaving Kojuin Ginko stayed in the house of a man named Matsumoto Gentan in Isesaki, in Gunma prefecture, and began to practice medicine under his name.

But the name Matsumoto Gentan cannot be found, they say, in the lists of doctors from that time.

If the collection is right, then a woman who kept writing applications to become a doctor in her own name was, all that time, practicing medicine under someone else's name.

Ginko described in detail one autumn evening when her application was refused again, in an account written down about ten years later.

"I submitted my application again, and again it was turned down."

She had never been so stuck in her whole life, and she did not think she ever would be again. That was how she felt that autumn.

Her relatives laughed at her. Her friends laughed at her.

Of all her relatives, the only one who supported her wish to become a doctor was her mother back home, Kayo.

Once she climbed a high hill alone. Looking down, she saw tens of thousands of houses in the city, with smoke rising from every one. And yet there was not a single house that would give her one meal.

It was the season when chrysanthemums bloom, the trees change color, and the cold is sharp enough to put frost on the roof tiles. Her clothes were thin, and she had no one even to complain to about it.

She could not go forward or back. She had no way left to try.

Her body grew thinner and thinner, she says. But her spirit, on the contrary, only burned higher.

She compared herself to a single rock standing in the middle of a river. The waves rage wildly, she said, because the rock is there.

In Yoshioka's book, Ginko at last even thinks of going abroad.

"There is nothing else to be done. I will go abroad, whatever it takes, and come back with a doctor's license."

Anyone who had earned a license abroad was allowed to practice without taking the exam. That was the kind of time it was.

The way opened in the summer of 1884.

On June 20, the Bureau of Health answered a question from Nagasaki prefecture:

"Even a woman, once she has gone through the proper procedure, shall be permitted."

Even a woman, if she follows the proper steps, will be permitted. The answer was sent to Nagasaki prefecture, not to Ginko. But with it, women could now sit the exam.

In September, five women took the first part of the medical exam. Ginko, thirty-three, was one of them.

Of the five, only Ginko passed.

It had not even been two years since that autumn, when her relatives and friends laughed at her and she stood alone on a hill looking down at the city's houses. The door that had been shut in her face four times, Ginko had finally walked through.

Ten years later, Ginko was in the wilds of Hokkaido.