Celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month
From the Presbyterian Historical Society Archives: 1956 NCC Luncheon to Honor Asian Women Educators
In observance of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI), we took a deep dive into the PHS archives to celebrate the achievements of nine educators who, in early January of 1956, attended a luncheon thrown in their honor in New York City.
The extraordinary group included a departmental head of education, a faculty member, two principals, two deans of students, two professors and a librarian — all women, all Christian, and all “leading ... educators from Asia.” Invited on behalf of the National Council of Churches’ Division of Foreign Missions, the group had spent the last couple of months traveling around the U.S., visiting different collegiate institutions and speaking on their experiences studying at and working in Christian educational institutions overseas. The luncheon marked the culmination of this two-and-a-half-month trip, the women addressing “an overflow audience of close to 1,000 educators and church leaders at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel,” we learn from a press release published about the event.
The luncheon, and the ladies’ trip itself, was hosted by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC), a religious organization founded in 1950 when 27 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations and eight ecumenical agencies joined together. All nine honored attendees were graduates of women’s colleges established in Asia by church mission groups. Pictured here is Miss Yuko Eguchi of Tokyo Woman’s Christian College, sandwiched between Mrs. Douglas Horton to her left, a vice president of the NCC, and Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, a prominent Presbyterian and president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, to her right. The other eight women in attendance were:
- Dr. Lajwanti Bhanot, dean of students at Ludhiana Christian College, India
- Dr. Liza Chakko, professor of anatomy at Vellore Christian College, India
- Miss Renuka Mukerji, principal-elect at Women’s Christian College, Madras, India
- Miss P. Mangat Rai, principal at Kinnaird College, Pakistan
- Miss Unsook Saw, dean of students at Ewha Woman’s University, Korea
- Miss Margaret Stokes, professor of mathematics at St. Christopher’s Training College, Madras, India
- Miss Tane Takahashi, acting library at Japan International Christian University
Miss Doris Wilson, head of the department of education at Isabella Thoburn College, India.
Image
Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. Image courtesy of TWCU.
The Religious News Service covered the event, of course. It quotes Van Dusen as having “hailed the Christian college for women as the most significant force in man’s quest for learning.” Eguchi’s alma mater, Tokyo Woman’s Christian College, continues its work today as the Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. Founded in 1918, in a time when higher education was not readily available to women in Japan, more than 60,000 students have graduated from the university since it first opened its doors.
Japan International Christian University — where Takahashi was employed — was founded in 1953 with the support of 14 Protestant agencies in the U.S. Efforts to raise funds for the establishment of a new international university began in 1949, with the hopes that the school would open its doors to students in 1951. The Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, president of the NCC for much of the 1950s, visited the institution during a three-week trip to the Far East in 1955.
At the luncheon that January day in 1956, the institutions were honored along with their alumni. "Fearless thinking has been bred in these institutions,” Van Dusen said, going on to laud the nine women as “the advance guard” of their company. They influenced the lives of countless students through their work, providing young girls, in particular, a strong foundation in that they were living examples of perseverance and passion.
May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI). Asian Americans and Pacific Islander includes all the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island). The month of May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. Most of the workers who laid the tracks were Chinese immigrants.
We are honored to share the legacies of these nine extraordinary women, and to ensure that their names are repeated and remembered — this month and beyond.
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.
