Yasuzo Shimizu Papers, 1918-2005 (span) | Oberlin College Archives

Yasuzo Shimizu (1891-1988) was a Japanese educator and Christian missionary in China.  He received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan in 1916.  Japan sent Shimizu to China as its first missionary in 1917, under the auspices of the Japan Kumiai (Congregationalist) Church.  In Shenyang he founded a church for Japanese residents.  He sought reassignment to Peking (Beijing), where he could study the Chinese language.  He married his first wife, Miho Yokota while in Shenyang.  They worked in famine relief in 1920, and in May of that year they founded the Sutei Gakuen grade school outside he East Gate of Peking for poor Chinese and Korean girls.

In 1924 Shimizu and his wife went to Oberlin College and enrolled in the Graduate School of Theology.  Shimizu graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1926.  Yasuzo’s first wife, Miho Shimizu, did not graduate.  Two years after Miho died in 1933, Yasuzo married a 1927 graduate of Oberlin’s theology program, Ikuko Koizumi.

After Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II, the Chinese government confiscated the Sutei Gakuen school, and Shimizu was forced to return to Japan.  In 1946 he founded Obirin Gakuen, named in honor of John Frederick Oberlin, Oberlin College’s namesake, in the western suburbs of Tokyo.  To this was added a high school in 1948, a two-year junior college in 1950, and four-year university in 1966.  In 1968, Oberlin College awarded Shimizu an honorary Doctorate of Divinity degree.

After Yasuzo Shimizu’s death in 1988, a graduate school was opened at the university in 1993.  In 2005, Obirin awarded an honorary doctorate to Oberlin College’s president, Nancy S. Dye, who traveled there to accept it.  As a tribute to the educator whose ideas had such great meaning for Shimizu, in 2006 the official English name of the school was changed from Obirin Gakuen to J. F. Oberlin University and Affiliated Schools.

Sources Consulted

Yasuzo Shimizu Papers, Oberlin College Archives

            Roland M. Baumann, “Reconstructing Memory and Place: Yasuzo Shimizu and

                        Oberlin, 1924-1926,” in Yasuzo and Ikuko Shimizu in the History of the

                        Japan-U.S. Cultural Exchange (Tokyo: Obirin University, 2005).

“Obirin and Oberlin Tighten Ties,” Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Summer

            2005), accessed online on 7 Feburary 2018 at

            http://www2.oberlin.edu/alummag/summer2005/ats.html.

J. F. Oberlin University web site, “History,” https://www.obirin.ac.jp/en/about/history/,

            accessed 7 February 2018.