Great figures who went through “Learning again as an adult”

Figures who went through this

• Hirooka Asako — The Woman Who Never Leaned on Anyone

  At about twelve, she was forbidden to read. She held up the house she married into, went down into a coal mine, and joined the people building a university for women. On Christmas Day at sixty-two, she asked to be placed among the children being baptized.

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

  "I submitted my application again, and again it was turned down." Four times, a woman was refused a place in the exam for doctors, only because she was a woman. When the door finally opened, she would one day walk out of it on her own. The earnest, hard-to-sum-up life of the first woman in Japan to pass the exam and become a doctor.

• Tsuda Umeko — Her Own Country's Language

  My hands and feet are tied. I cannot hear, and I cannot speak. A seventeen-year-old girl wrote this from inside her own family's house, in the country where she was born. The life of the woman now on Japan's new 5,000-yen bill, who kept searching for a place to belong.