Iyo Araki
Japanese Nurse Leader, Author, & Educator
Iyo Araki was born in Japan in 1877. She attended one of the first nurse training programs in Japan in 1896, which only accepted graduated from Christian mission schools. She went on to work in a hospital in Kobe, where she met an American medical missionary, Dr. Rudolf Teusler. Documents show that in 1900 he supported her travel to study nursing education at Old Dominion Hospital in Richmond Virginia for two years and an additional three months of training at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
Returning to Tokyo in 1903, she became the superintendent of nurses and head of the nurses’ training program at St. Luke’s International Hospital. The three year program was the only nursing program in Japan to require students graduate from high school before entering the program. A fourth year was offered for nurses interested to specialize in public health, public school hygiene, or administration. She proudly boasted a total of 800 applicants of which they accepted 47 students, “selected by personal or competitive examination.” The curriculum was similar to her American training experience and the recommendations of the National League of Nursing.
Iyo presented at the Six International Congress on Tuberculosis in 1908 and worked with the American Red Cross from 1918–1919 in providing medical aid to the Czecho-Slovak Army by leading the Japanese nursing unit at Russian Island Hospital in Siberia. She resigned from teaching in 1920, but she stayed as a superintendent at St. Luke’s. Her leadership at the hospital during Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, led her to be described as a Japanese heroine:
“The hospital had 110 patients and had just built its concrete foundation…It was wrecked by the tremors and razed by fire. Miss Araki took charge of the rescue…she [with nurses and able-bodied men] removed every patient to the new foundations, where they were laid out on cots and stretchers along concrete walls…[she then instructed] to soak their quilts in near-by pools of rain water. These wet quilts were then used as tents over the patients to protect them from the intense heat and flying embers. Not one patient in the hospital died.” — NY Times
From 1927–1928, with support from a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Iyo made an “observation trip” to the United States along with Japanese nurses K. Arai, M. Yumaki, and M. Ando (seen below).
She documented her experience in the context of the emerging Japanese nursing profession in a 1928 article in the American Journal of Nursing (below). Perceived as a “menial occupation,” Iyo wrote that the early decades of the profession “failed to attract women of the better type,” which she felt could be remedied when nursing education was treated more as a college and less a training school to serve the interests of the hospital. She also described the growth of nursing in Japan by the 1920s — citing over 40,000 licensed nurses and over 2,000 midwives in Tokyo.
Iyo’s contributions are representative of the first generation of professional Japanese nurses. She died in 1969, at the age of 92.
Sources
We sourced information for Iyo’s bio from American Journal of Nursing, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and the Staunton Spectator of Virginia.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
Support & Advocate
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
Help us paint the internet with nursing’s diverse origin stories. Follow this Medium publication, NursesYouShouldKnow on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, or @KnowNurses on Twitter to share and re-post our articles far and wide.
