Yoshioka Yayoi
Yoshioka Yayoi
Born	(1871-04-29)April 29, 1871 Kakegawa, Shizuoka,Japan
Died	May 22, 1959(1959-05-22) (aged 88) Tokyo, Japan
Other names	Washiyama Yayoi
Occupation(s)	Physician,educator,women's rights activist

Yoshioka Yayoi (吉岡 彌生; April 29, 1871 – May 22, 1959) was aJapanesephysician,educator, andwomen's rights activist. She founded theTokyo Women's Medical University in 1900, as the first medical school forwomen in Japan.^[1][2] She was also known asWashiyama Yayoi.

Yoshioka was born in what is now part ofKakegawa city,Shizuoka prefecture, where her father, a physician, advocated primary education for the village children. Yoshioka grew up in the 19th century when women's education was frowned upon. She graduated from theSaisei-Gakusha school of medicine, and received the 27thmedical license granted to a woman in Japan. Realizing the difficulty of this career path for women in Japan, she resolved to start her own school of medicine, which she did before she was 30 years old.

The graduates of the Tokyo Women's Medical School (renamed theTokyo Women's Medical University in 1998) were not allowed to practice medicine until 1912, when the Japanese government permitted women to enroll in the national medical examination. By 1930, almost a thousand women had gone through Yoshioka's school.

Yoshioka was politically active through her life. With many of her colleagues, she advocatedsex education.^[3] In the 1930s, Yoshioka was involved in the Japanesewomen's suffrage movement and the "Clean Elections" movement in Japan. In 1938, the Japanese government appointed Yoshioka and ten other female leaders to the "Emergency Council to Improve the Nation's Ways of Living," a pre-war mobilization effort. She was a leading figure in various wartime patriotic women's associations and youth associations. After the end of the war, she turned again to organizations promoting the education of women.

Yoshioka was awarded theOrder of the Precious Crown in 1955, and theOrder of the Sacred Treasure posthumously in 1959.

The Yoshioka Memorial Prize was established to honor Yoshioka's successors. The Japan Medical Women's Association has named its two awards after Yoshioka Yayoi andOgino Ginko (the first woman to be licensed as a physician in Japan).

Yoshioka was depicted on an 80-yen Japanesecommemorative postage stamp, on September 20, 2000, together withNaruse Jinzo andTsuda Umeko. A memorial museum dedicated to Yoshioka exists inKakegawa, Shizuoka.

Lynn Windsor, Laura (2002).Women in medicine : an encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, Calif. : ABC-CLIO.OCLC 52451817.

• Sally A. Hastings, "Yoshioka Yayoi", inDoctors, Nurses and Medical Practitioners: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. by Lois N. Magner (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 315–319.
• Yoshioka Yayoi,Yoshioka Yayoi den (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center, 1998); reprint from 1941 first edition.
• Yoshioka's papers are collected at the University Archives, Tokyo Women's Medical University
• Mara Patessio and Mariko Ogawa, 'To become a woman doctor in early Meiji Japan (1868-1890): women's struggles and ambitions', Historia scientiarum 15.2, 2005: 159-176

• Yayoi Yoshioka,excerpt from "My Vision in Establishing a Women's Medical University and the Significance of Its Existence" (1958)

• 1871 births
• 1959 deaths
• Japanese feminists
• Japanese women's rights activists
• Order of the Precious Crown members
• People from Kakegawa, Shizuoka
• People of the Meiji era
• Women founders
• 19th-century Japanese physicians
• 20th-century Japanese physicians
• 20th-century women physicians
• University and college founders
• 19th-century Japanese women educators
• 19th-century Japanese educators
• 20th-century Japanese women educators
• 20th-century Japanese educators
• 20th-century Japanese women physicians
• 19th-century Japanese women physicians
• Scientists from Shizuoka Prefecture

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