(//_-) ← emo bang

Kuroda Chika was born in 1994 in Saga, one of the seven children of parents determined to educate their daughters as well as their sons. Chika attended normal schools for the modern-day equivalent of high school, college, and graduate school; when choosing between science and the humanities, she opted for the former because she could read on her own but needed the school’s facilities to do scientific experiments. Studying and teaching science at progressively higher levels, she became an assistant professor at the Tokyo Women’s Higher Normal School [now Ochanomizu University] in 1909 (she also demonstrated an experiment there on the occasion of Empress Haruko’s visit).

Four years later, when Tohoku [Imperial] University opened its doors to women, she entered its Faculty of Science along with the agricultural scientist Tange Ume and the mathematician Makita Raku (August 21, the day their acceptances were officially announced, is now “Women College Student Day” in Japan). Chika and Ume, who was already in her forties, were two out of only eleven students to pass the entrance exam for the chemistry department. There she studied organic chemistry, focusing on organic pigments, and in 1916 became the first woman in Japan to receive a Bachelor of Science.

Upon her graduation she became an assistant professor at the same university [I’d love to know how the male students received her], and in 1918 a professor back at the Tokyo Women’s Higher Normal School. She presented her research on the purple pigment shikonin at the Chemical Society of Japan, the first woman to do so, and resolved never ever to give another public lecture after the explosion of media attention that occurred on the spot).

Chika took leave to study at Oxford from 1921 to 1923, on government funding; a newspaper of the time, reported that “Miss Chika Kuroda, one of only three lady scientists in Japan, told us brusquely ‘I haven’t anything to say,’ flushed with shyness. Having recovered herself, she announced that she would be leaving Yokohama on the Saga Maru on March 18, and began to talk softly. ‘This is my first time studying abroad and I’m terribly nervous.’” In fact she was apparently considerably more bold and optimistic than suggested by the newspaper, enjoying her study-abroad “without even time to feel homesick.” She was later to publish papers in the British Journal of the Chemical Society.

In 1929 Chika earned her doctorate in chemistry, only the second woman in Japan to receive one, after Yasui Kono (with whom she later founded a scholarship for women studying science). She spent the rest of her life researching and teaching, receiving honors from the Japanese government, which she found less interesting than the excitement of success in her experiments. In 1953, a medication for high blood pressure based on her discoveries with onion pigments was released. She became the first chair of the Society of Japanese Women Scientists in 1958. In 1964, a children’s drama based on her life was broadcast, called The Onion Lady. Chika died in 1968 at the age of eighty-four.

Sources
https://www.tohoku.ac.jp/tohokuuni_women/chapter9/ (Japanese) A handful of photos of Chika at various ages, as well as some ephemera related to her research