Item #6115 [Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan]. Edith F. Wilcox, compiler.
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].
[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].

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Wilcox, Edith F., compiler.

[Photo album of an American missionary woman teaching in Japan].

Himeji, Japan: [ca. 1909–1928]. Oblong 4to (11” x 14”) photo album, patterned brown cloth over boards. 309 silver print photographs, color and b&w collotype postcards, ranging in size from 8” x 10.5” to 1.5" x 3.75”, the majority spread through the middle range.

A substantial collection of over 300 photos and postcards documenting life during the early-20th century at the Hinomoto Girls School and other such Baptist Foreign Mission Society high schools in Japan. Numerous images present formal group-portraits of students and teachers; multiple-student activities; and individual portraits.

This album was compiled by Edith F. Wilcox (1872–1947)—a tall, willowy, bespectacled woman, who appears in many of these images as headteacher of various groups of Japanese adolescents. As evidenced by a number of portraits of the Japanese girls with their parents, these young women came from middle-to-upper class Japanese families. Evidently a teacher in Japan for several decades (or at least a good part of the 1900s and 1910s), Wilcox is recorded as having served as principal at the Hinomoto Girls School in Himeji, Japan, and is identified with other such schools in various Baptist Annuals and Yearbooks. In 1905, she was listed as working at a mission in Yokohama, Japan and earning a“field salary” of $416. Wilcox is quoted in a 1917 publication saying that they need more “pure, sweet Christians here if Japan is ever to be regenerated.” The album documents Wilcox’s relationships with many of her students; the verso of one image is inscribed, “For Miss Wilcox, a snapshot by Jessie, one afternoon lately.” Other teachers are pictured throughout the album.

Wilcox is known to have also served as principal of a girls school in Tokyo. In the following passage from 1914, the Tokyo school is evocatively described as well as Wilcox’s role in it:

a new dormitory for student girls in Tokyo was completed and dedicated by our mission. For a time it was in charge of Miss Edith Wilcox, until she was called to the boarding school in Himeji, when Miss Gertrude Ryder became the permanent house-mother. There were 10,000 girls in this great city who had come from the provinces to complete their education. Not half of them could be accommodated in the University and Normal school dormitories, but were compelled to live in cheap boarding-houses, exposed to temptations and thrown into conditions where western mothers would not allow their well-trained, self-reliant daughters to remain for a single day. To meet the need the Y.W.C.A. had already opened two homes. Our dormitory would provide for forty students, and Miss Wilcox secured the sympathetic help of Mrs. Nitobe, a graduate of an American college and wife of a Japanese educator, in choosing her girls. An English Bible class was held every Sunday P.M. for girls in the neighborhood. One of them, of high caste, became a Christian, and brought to Miss Wilcox a tiny, round mirror, like those in all Shinto temples, saying, “I have carried this in my bosom fourteen years, praying that I might be pure and true like it, but now I have taken Jesus into my heart and do not need the mirror.”—The Golden Jubilee (1914)

Included here is an image of the ship “Fukuin Maru” with sailors at the bow, holding a life ring that refers to the “Good News” Gospel Ship captained by L.W. Bickel, a fellow missionary. The gravestone of Capt. Luke Washington Bickel is also pictured, who died in Japan in 1917. Captioned collotype postcards feature the following subjects: Ainu Customs [indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and Kurii], Hot Springs, Noboribetsu, Mt. Komagatake, Silver Black Fox Ranch, and Kogetsu Bridge of Onuma Lake.

REFERENCES: Grose, Howard, Ed. Missions: American Baptist International Magazine, Vol. 7 (Boston, 1916), p. 319; Grose, Howard B., Ed., Missions: American Baptist International Magazine, Vol. 8 (Boston, 1917); Safford, Henry. The Golden Jubilee (New York: Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 1914); American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (New York, 1934), p. 208.

CONDITION: Very good, strong tonality generally, some fading on silver print snapshots. Album rubbed on front top edge.

Item #6115

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