After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Imperial Japan’s declaration of surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, brought an end to World War II. It also marked the beginning of the rebirth of Japan as a democratic country.
In December 1945, the country’s General Election Law was amended to include women's suffrage, and the 1947 Constitution of Japan enshrined, among other democratic reforms, equal rights for men and women.
Ethel B. Weed, a lieutenant working for U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArhur at the Allied Occupation headquarters in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward, had been tasked with furthering the interests of women’s rights in Japan. To this end, Weed put together a brain trust of Japanese women with liberal ideals. Most of them had been in jail during the war because of their progressive ideologies, and Weed's assistant, Nobuko Takahashi, later became the first Japanese female ambassador to Denmark.
Despite occasional pushbacks from Japanese bureaucrats and men in the Allied Occupation, Weed and her Japanese colleagues remained united in creating a more equal society. Their collaborative efforts eventually bore fruit — one of which is the College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ), a Tokyo-based multinational organization established in 1949 and dedicated to advancing educational opportunities for female graduate students studying in Japan and abroad as well as visually impaired students of all genders.
From the late 19th century, an alumni club for both Japanese and American graduates of two Massachusetts colleges (Mount Holyoke and later Wellesley) was established in Tokyo. When the war ended, ties between these members were renewed, and the alumni club became a fundraising body sanctioned by the Allied Occupation to raise funds to send Japanese students overseas. In the immediate postwar years, the only way to travel from Japan to the United States was by foreign ships, and passengers could only purchase tickets in U.S. dollars — and at a fixed conversion rate of ¥360 to $1.
Celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, CWAJ’s mission remains straightforward yet ambitious: Women supporting women.
“CWAJ ran seminars to educate and prepare people who wanted to study overseas,” says current president Heidi Zukoski Sweetnam, who explains that scholarships for both men and women were offered until 1972. “The members noticed that they were attended predominantly by men. We wanted women to have an equal opportunity to attend graduate studies abroad.”
The voices of scholarship recipients from the 1950s reflect some of the challenges modern Japanese women still face today, such as the difficulty in self-assertion in a culture that emphasizes accommodating others.
“In Japan, I had only attended girl’s schools where I had been taught that accommodating oneself to others was a virtue,” says Michiko Asano, a CWAJ scholarship recipient in 1952. “However, in the U.S., self-assertion was encouraged, which was a bit difficult for me.”
While the aim of the CWAJ was never to exclude men, Sweetnam explains that despite advances in postwar Japanese society, the organization saw they could do more good by supporting Japanese women.
“Although there was an opportunity for women to be educated, there were more barriers and stigma to having higher education and being a working woman,” Sweetnam says. “Women had inferior jobs, part-time jobs and low-wage jobs with no job security. Even into the 1980s, women were expected to quit after getting married.”
CWAJ's vision soon expanded beyond supporting women alone. In 1978, the organization extended its scholarship program to individuals with visual impairments regardless of gender.
"Visually impaired people in Japan have extra barriers to being educated, and we want to help ambitious visually impaired people achieve their goals,” Sweetnam says. “And we believe in improving the world and helping people in need.”
Today, CWAJ says that it costs ¥3.5 million (about $24,000) to partially fund a Japanese woman to study at a graduate program abroad and ¥2 million (about $14,000) for one within the country. For the visually impaired, ¥2 million funds overseas graduate students, and ¥1 million (about $7,000) goes to domestic undergraduates.
In more recent years, CWAJ also began to provide crisis response scholarships — from 2012 to 2020 for nurses from the Fukushima Medical School in response to the March 11, 2011 Tohoku triple disaster, and from 2021 to 2023 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for nurses from the Kanto and Fukushima regions.
Since 1949, CWAJ has awarded scholarships to over 750 women from 43 different countries, with many recipients going on to successful careers: the aforementioned Ambassador Takahashi; Masako Egawa, Seikei Gakuen chancellor and board director at Mitsui & Co; Kentaro Fukuchi, a disability advocate working for greater opportunities for the disabled in Sudan; and Eri Tayama, an associate program officer at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.
In total, all that has meant just over ¥1 billion (about $6.8 million) in grants.
CWAJ’s successful 75-year operation can be attributed to a few key factors. First and foremost, it is the tenacity and diversity of its 400 members from over 30 countries. CWAJ pairs its Japanese members with non-Japanese counterparts to co-chair most positions, fostering innovative and culturally diverse ideas.
Second, CWAJ is one of the rare organizations encompassing a wide range of activities, such as administering scholarships, teaching English to orphanages and visually impaired learners, and running a cultural program for international students. The annual CWAJ Print Show, which started in 1956 to introduce Japanese artists to the world (the next iteration takes place Oct. 16 to 20), remains a distinctive fundraising tool, with a team of approximately 50 volunteers.
Alongside its share of successes over the last 75 years, the organization faces its fair share of challenges. One of the primary concerns is the ongoing need to maintain and expand its funding (CWAJ is funded entirely from proceeds from events like its Print Show and tax-free donations), which has become increasingly difficult due to COVID-19 and global instability. Additionally, while the increasing number of working women in Japan is a welcome development, it poses a challenge to the organization in the form of a lack of volunteers, as CWAJ requires 13 board members and 40 positions.
Moreover, the most significant challenge is Japan’s slow pace of change toward gender equality. According to the World Economic Forum, Japan ranks 118th out of 156 countries, the lowest in the G7, when it comes to gender parity. As of 2023, only 10.3% of Japanese parliament members are women (compared to 29% in the U.S.), and only 32.6% of graduate school students are women, whereas in the U.S., more women obtain master’s degrees and PhDs than men.
“Although CWAJ has been supporting women for the past 75 years, there is still a large and distinct gender gap in Japan,” Sweetnam says. “The work of CWAJ is not complete.”
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