Clara A. Converse and Soshin Jogakko

Abstract

In 1886 Clara A. Sands went home on furlough, leaving seven girls in the care of Mrs. Charlotte W. Brown, the recent widow of the missionary, Dr. Nathan Brown. Mrs. Brown taught the girls in a little house which Dr. Brown had used for a printing house. A year later Amy Comes, later known as Chiyo Yamada, came as an assistant to Mrs. Brown. As the number of girls increased, Mrs. Brown asked the Women's Baptist Foreign Missionary Society for a teacher and money to erect buildings for a girls' school in Yokohama. A fund for the buildings was raised, and Clara A. Converse was sent as a teacher.Clara Converse was born in Grafton, Vermont, on April 18, 1857. After graduating from the Vermont State Normal School at age 16 and working as a public school teacher, she entered the newly established Vermont Academy in 1876. Graduating with the Class of 1879, she was one of Vermont Academy's first female graduates. After receiving a degree from Smith College, she returned to Vermont Academy, where she taught Greek, German, rhetoric, and mathematics from 1884 to 1889.Clara Converse felt compelled to serve the Lord and resigned her post in 1889 to apply for a missionary position with the Women's Baptist Foreign Missionary Society. She began her new responsibilities in January, 1890.Over the next thirty-five years, Clara Converse built this school which adopted the name “Soshin Jogakko, ” meaning Truth-Seeking Girls School into a respected institution of women's education in Japan. Without her efforts, prayer, and faith in God, Soshin Jogakko would not exist.