Mieko Kamiya

Mieko Kamiya was born as the second child and the first daughter of five children of Tamon Maeda and Fusako Maeda. Tamon, a son of an Osaka merchant, was the prewar Japanese ambassador to the International Labour Organization and postwar Minister of Education. He became a Christian under the influence of Kanzo Uchimura.

Fusako, a daughter of a raw silk trader in Gunma, received a scholarship for the five years at the girls' high school of Friends School (Japan) in Tokyo that had been established by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Fusako had an English and Christian education there. Fusako was introduced to Tamon by Inazo Nitobe and was married to him in 1910.[1]

The family moved to Nagasaki and in 1920, Tamon became a deputy mayor of Tokyo. In 1921 he was appointed the Japanese representative to the International Labour Organization (ILO) at Geneva, Switzerland, where Inazo Nitobe worked as one of the Under-Secretaries General of the League of Nations. Kamiya had started to study English in the second grade at Sacred Heart School in Tokyo from 1921. The family could speak English when they arrived in Geneva.

Kamiya was educated at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute (in French: Académie De Genève or Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau),　when Jean Piaget, a developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children, was the principal. From 1932, she studied at the junior high school of the International School of Geneva (in French: Ecole Internationale de Genève). She later wrote that in reading and writing, French was most easy.

In 1926, the family returned to Tokyo. Kamiya entered the Juyu Gakuen, but changed her school within a few months to the Girls' High School of Seijo Gakuen (it now has a higher education department; Seijo University).[2]

In 1932, Kamiya entered the Tsuda College. In 1934, she happened to visit Tama Zenshoen Sanatorium as an organist accompanying a missionary. She was deeply impressed with leprosy patients there and felt that she should someday work for them. At that time, leprosy was an incurable disease, and all the people around her were against her becoming a physician. In 1935, she entered the College of the same school. She contracted tuberculosis, and while she was under treatment for the disease, she studied by herself classical literature in many languages, including Italian, French, German, and Greek. Her favorite was Marcus Aurelius's book which she translated into Japanese later. Her tuberculosis cleared with pneumothorax therapy.

In 1938, in view of the worsening US-Japan relations, Japan set up a Japan Culture Center in New York, and her father, who was one of the editorial writers of the Newspaper Asahi Shimbun, was appointed as its head and the family moved to New York, except her elder brother, Yoichi Maeda, who lived in Paris. Kamiya began to study Greek literature at the Graduate School of Columbia University and lived with her family in Scarsdale, New York. After her health condition improved, Kamiya studied at Bryn Mawr College from February to the end of June 1939. She met Masa Uraguchi, who was a graduate student of botany at Philadelphia University and who became her lifetime best friend. She also met Wilhelm Sollmann, who was a German journalist, politician, and Interior Minister of the Weimar Republic. Kamiya had a close relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Sollmann until June 16, 1939. Kamiya also had a close relationship with Caroline C. Graveson, an English psychologist. When Graveson was leaving the United States, she said to Kamiya, "I predict your future. You'll be an author after you graduate from three M　(Medicine, Marriage and Motherhood)."[3]

In 1940, Kamiya began to study medicine with the approval of her father, at the premedical course of Columbia University. In fear of the coming war, in 1941, she returned to Japan and entered Tokyo Women's Medical University. Her father returned to Japan after the beginning of the US-Japan war in an exchange ship. In October 1942, she visited Masao Oota or Mokutaro Kinoshita who was an authority on leprosy research at Tokyo University and visited Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium and spent 12 days there. She met Kensuke Mitsuda and other staff and reconfirmed her interest in leprosy patients.

In the fall of 1944, she graduated from the medical school and entered the department of psychiatry of Tokyo University She was interested in psychiatry because one of her friends developed schizophrenia. In May 1945, her house burned down and she had to stay in the University treating patients.

After Japan's defeat in World War II, her father was appointed Minister of Education, and Kamiya was asked to become a secretary. She could speak fluent English and translated many papers. Her work continued after her father resigned in January 1946.　In May, she returned to Tokyo University and helped to examine Shūmei Ōkawa who was a prisoner of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

In May 1946, she married Noburoh Kamiya, an instructor in botanical research at Tokyo University. In 1949, he was appointed Professor at Osaka University and their family moved to Osaka. She translated Marcus Aurelius Antoninus's book, which was published. Her husband was invited to teach at the University of Pennsylvania where he had studied, but she and their two children remained in Osaka. She earned money for living expenses for their children, who had contracted tuberculosis, by teaching French.

In 1951, her family moved to Ashiya. In 1957, she started her studies in psychiatry at Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium. She earned her Ph.D. in 1960. In the same year, she became a professor at Kobe College and in 1963, also a professor at her alma mater Tsuda College. She taught not only psychiatry but also French literature. In 1965, she became chief psychiatrist at Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium. Her unique studies included a visit to Virginia Woolf's husband and also to Michel Foucault in 1966. She published a book, "On the Meaning of Life ("Ikigai Ni Tsuite")".[4]

Kamiya died on October 12, 1979, from heart disease at age 65.[5]