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Grandmother's background as a nurse in Japan

My grandmother was born in 1888. And she went to nurse's training school and graduated, I believe, in 1903. I have a photograph of her in her graduating class. And then immediately following that, she was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Navy as a Red Cross Nurse. And because of her nurse's training, and so on, it was logical that that would happen. But she was sent on assignment to the Japan-Russian War, which was sort of at its peak, and was sent to the famous Battle of Port Arthur which was the decisive battle of the Japan-Russian War. And she was on a Red Cross ship along with a lot of other Red Cross nurses. And they were servicing those men that were being injured in the Battle of the Baltic Sea.

And my grandmother wrote a story about that that has been published in several sources. But the story was about how they were expected to lose that battle against the Russian fleet, and she writes about how she was anticipating that suicide bills were going to -- pills were going to be passed out to all the nurses. And so they all cleaned their rooms in preparation to die, to save some honor in defeat. And then she talked about how she saw the bodies of soldiers washing in from the Baltic Sea and how they would count how many were Russians and how many were Japanese. And, but then as it turns out, the Japanese fleet defeated the Russian fleet and victory was theirs. And she described how they stood and screamed their banzais (cheers) and so on.


nurses Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905

Date: March 18 & 20, 2003

Location: Washington, US

Interviewer: Alice Ito and Mayumi Tsutakawa

Contributed by: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.

Interviewee Bio

Roger Shimomura's paintings, prints, and theater pieces address sociopolitical issues of Asian America. Many of his works are inspired by the diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother for fifty-six years. Shimomura has had more than 100 solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints, and has presented his experimental theater pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Widely honored as an educator, he was designated a University Distinguished Professor by the University of Kansas. In 2001 the College Art Association presented him with the Artist Award for Most Distinguished Body of Work in recognition of his four-year, twelve-museum national tour of the painting exhibition An American Diary. He retired from teaching in 2004.

Shimomura's personal papers are being collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. He is represented by galleries in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, Miami, and Seattle.

*The full interview is available Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.

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