Sybil Ruthena Courtice (May 2, 1884 – February 1980) was a Canadian missionary and music educator in Japan from 1910 to 1942. She was elected president of the Canadian Association of Tokyo and Yokohama in 1935.
Courtice gave piano recitals,[5][6] taught music and was a church organist as a young woman. She was a missionary in Japan beginning in 1910,[7] under the auspices of the Canadian Methodist Women's Missionary Society. She taught at theToyo Eiwa Jogakko in theAzabu section of Tokyo,[8] and was the school's music director and principal.[9] She also taught atShizuoka Eiwa Girls' School.[10] She had a prolonged furlough in Canada from 1913 to 1917, because of illness.[11] She was in Canada again on furlough in 1932[12] and from 1939 to 1940.[13][14] She was a contributor to theJapan Christian Quarterly.[15]
As war loomed in the 1930s, she wrote that "we do not love war, but we do love the Japanese people."[11] She was secretary-treasurer of the Women's Missionary Society in Japan in the late 1930s.[11] In 1935, she was elected president of the Canadian Association of Tokyo and Yokohama.[9][16] DuringWorld War II Courtice was held in an internment camp with other Western women,[17] including about twenty French-Canadian nuns,[18] and was assigned as the camp commandant's interpreter, because his wife and daughter had been her students.[11]
She was repatriated to Canada in 1943. For the rest of the war she worked with Italian and Japanese residents of Montreal, and lectured about her experiences.[19] She returned to Japan in 1946, to help rebuild the Toyo Eiwa Jogakko school.[20] She wrote a report,The United Church Re-enters Japan, and retired in 1949. In retirement in Canada, she lectured about her work and about Japan.[21][22][23]
Courtice lived with her sister Hattie in their later years; Hattie died in 1972,[24] and Courtice died in 1980, at the age of 95, at a nursing home in Clinton, Ontario.[25] The United Church of Canada Archives has holdings related to Courtice, including photographs and articles.[26]
^Ion, Andrew Hamish. "To Build a New Japan: Canadian Missionaries in Occupied Japan 1946-1948."明治学院大学キリスト教研究所紀要= The bulletin of Institute For Christian studies Meiji Gakuin University 47 (2015): 153-192.
