Since the Yogakusha, a foreign language school, was founded in Yonezawa in 1871, Charles Henry Dallas and five other foreign masters taught successively at the Yonezawa Middle School till March in 1880.
During the 1880's when Westernism was overwhelming throughout the country, the Yonezawa Middle School was taking a leading role in the spread of new progressive Western ideas among the people of Yonezawa, a rural town in the Tohoku districts, and among the graduates and students of this school were many devotees of democratic rights.
It was in 1887 that a church of Methodist communion was founded for the first time in Yonezawa and J. C. Cleaveland was sent there as a missionary. He complied with the request to teach English at the Yonezawa Middle School as well, which started working in accordance with the new ordinance concerning middle schools promulgated the previous year by the Government.
On the other hand, Mrs. Cleaveland, with the assistance of her interpreter, opened the class of the English language and knitting for women at the parsonage. This class was up-to-date and so attractive that it was not long before it gained much popularity among young women and girls there.
In the same year, Julius Soper, the missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Tokyo, visited Yonezawa, and lectured on the necessity of woman's education and insisted upon the need of foundation of a girls' school. It was true that his lecture left a deep impression on the minds of audience, but there were no reactions among the native men of importance to build one immediately.
The Woman's Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Japan sent Miss R. J. Watson in order to investigate whether the foundation of a girls' school there would be within the bounds of possibility. Miss Watson, knowing the popularity of Mrs. Cleaveland's class of the English language and knitting, started the invitation for the new school.
The opening ceremony of the Yonezawa Eiwa Girls' School took place in the Assembly Hall of Commerce and Industry in January, 1889, with many guests and men of importance there in attendance.
The number of pupils was favorably increasing and the school was well under way, and Miss R. J. Watson, Miss Mary E. Atkinson, Miss G. Baucas and Miss A. M. Otto were appointed in succession to principal of this school, and Miss M. B. Griffiths, Miss L. Imhof and Miss B. J. Allen cooperated with them in evangelistic work. Nevertheless this school was to be closed in 1895, only seven years after its opening.
In this paper I want to consider the details of this school, chiefly through the minutes of the Woman's Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Japan, in which the reports of each principal and missionary in charge of evangelistic work were recorded, and to inquire into the unavoidable circumstances that must have obliged them to close the school in such a short period of time.
