ABSTRACT
Kobe Girls’ School, which enjoyed fame as the only school for girls in Hyogo prefecture offering advanced secondary education, plunged into an era of turmoil between 1883 and 1909. Japan was in a post-Restoration chaos and historian Carol Gluck saw that “the late 1880s marked an upsurge in ideological activity.” Japanese were seeking what “the sense of nation” and a “complicated society” meant and in process of fabricating the ideology, they were in contention.1 Amidst such difficult years, the women missionaries sought ways of survival and the development of the school. For them the greatest concerns were to keep the school under mission control to sustain a Christianizing effort and to develop the college department to train Japanese women educators.
