ABSTRACT
In the 1910s, the western mode of nursing had already taken root in Japanese society, and the profession had been modernized enough to join an international body of nurses. Nursing professionalism in Japan, supposedly established by following western examples, experienced the encounter with a western-initiated professional body as problematic. The Japanese nurses’ relationship with the International Council of Nurses (ICN) in the early twentieth century indicated a gap between western-inspired nursing in Japan and nursing in the original western context: a considerable contrast existed between developments in western nursing, which often correlated with and was even one of the driving forces in changing western notions of women’s social position, and the Japanese counterpart, which was struggling to gain an exceptional social position within the conventional perception of respectable women.
