Anna H. Kidder and Shuntai Eiwa Jogakko

Abstract

Anna H. Kidder, one of the first two single women missionaries sent to Japan by the Woman's Baptist Foreign Missionary Society, landed in Yokohama on November 1, 1875. While Clara A. Sands was stationed in Yokohama to help Nathan Brown and devoted herself chiefly to evangelistic work in the city and the surrounding country districts, Anna Kidder went up to Tokyo to work with James Hope Arthur, who had just started a girls' school on the premises of Arinori Mori at No. 22 Surugadai Suzuki-cho. She took over this school, and as the principal made it a good Christian school, but it was closed in 1921, eight years after her death.Most mission schools were founded in the foreign settlement then located by the treaty port or in the open city, but Anna Kidder, as well as James Arthur, preferred to live outside the Tsukiji Settlement, so that she might have more contact with Japanese. As a result, she had to run the school technically (according to the papers submitted to the local office) under seven different Japanese employers until the revision of the treaty in 1899.