Yoshioka Yayoi
Japanese activist and physician (1871–1959)
Yoshioka Yayoi (吉岡 彌生; April 29, 1871 – May 22, 1959) was a Japanese physician, educator, and women's rights activist. She founded the Tokyo Women's Medical University in 1900, as the first medical school for women in Japan. She was also known as Washiyama Yayoi.
Biography
Yoshioka was born in what is now part of Kakegawa 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 the Saisei-Gakusha school of medicine, and received the 27th medical 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 the Tokyo 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.
“Yoshioka Yayoi” enters the record as japanese activist and physician (1871–1959). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yoshioka, Yayoi and Japanese can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3138424. VIAF identifies the subject as 36016597. The Library of Congress control number is n88216710. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1871, 1959, 1900 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yoshioka Yayoi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.