starlings overhead

Suzuki Hideru was born in 1888 in Aichi; her father, a salt merchant and part-time inventor, was intent on getting his children the education he had not been granted himself. After graduating from a local girls’ high school in 1906, Hideru entered Japan Women’s University (the first graduate of her school to go on to college) and graduated in 1910. She continued to attend chemistry classes there even after her graduation, because, as she said later “there weren’t any suitable jobs, and I didn’t want to get married.”

There she served as assistant to Nagai Nagayoshi, the eminent pharmaceutical scholar (whose wife Therese was a professor of German at the same university) for classes and experiments. Handling everything from teaching to clerical work for minimal pay, she was so busy she ate her meals standing up. Certified as a chemistry teacher in 1912, she began teaching at the university’s affiliated high school the following year, taking over the chemistry course from Tange Ume when the latter began graduate school. Hideru went on to qualify as a pharmacist (possibly choosing a deliberately different path from the leading women scientists Yasui Kono and Kuroda Chika, according to her sister) in 1918, mostly self-taught; she wrote the names of pharmaceutical ingredients on her ceiling and lay staring at them before she fell asleep. She also taught herself German by writing all her notes and papers in German rather than Japanese.

From 1921 on Hideru did graduate work at the University of Tokyo, which did not accept women students at the time; her teacher Nagai convinced another of his former students to make a special exception for her. Devoted to her work even when handling dangerous ingredients, she continued to study there (while still teaching) until 1926, but was never granted a degree. Thereafter she did her own experiments at Japan Women’s University, eventually teaching at the university as well as high school level there and developing a devoted following of students who appreciated her strictness and with whom she talked late into the night. Her younger sister Kayo was among her students, asking her one evening “so what grade did I get on the exam?” “Ask me tomorrow at school, don’t mix public and private,” Hideru scolded.

In 1932 she received a research study to investigate the structure of perillen, a substance originally identified by her professor at Tokyo University. Her assistant Tsuji Kiyo once accidentally destroyed all of her research materials, to be met with an explosion of fury; Kiyo, horrified, vowed to devote her life to Hideru in expiation, and pretty much did so until Hideru’s death, making sure she had healthy versions of the foods she wanted when diagnosed with diabetes. Hideru wrote to Kiyo during the war, when food was scarce, “I keep your snacks in my bag and munch on them as I walk to school.”

In 1937, upon publishing her paper on perillen, she was granted a Ph.D., making her the first woman in Japan to receive a doctorate in pharmaceutical science. Hideru continued thereafter to teach and research; during World War II, when normal school life became impossible, she researched gas masks and grew mushrooms in the bomb shelter. She died of diabetes-related complications in 1944 at the age of fifty-six, having spent her last days caring for the elderly Tange Ume, the senior chemistry colleague she most admired.

Sources
https://www.ge-at-utokyo.org/hideru-suzuki (English) Short summary of Hideru’s life and various photos, including her Ph.D. diploma and her papers in German and Japanese