Haruko Hatoyama

Haruko Hatoyama (鳩山 春子, Hatoyama Haruko^?, March 23, 1861 – July 12, 1938) was a Japanese educator of the Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa periods, and the matriarchal head of the prominent Japanese Hatoyama political family which has been called "Japan's Kennedy family." She was a co-founder of what is today Kyoritsu Women's University. Her husband was politician Kazuo Hatoyama.

Haruko Hatoyama was born in Matsumoto, the youngest of seven children (five girls and two boys). Her father, Tsumu, was a samurai. He changed the family name from Watanabe to Taga after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Her education began at home with her mother, and was supplemented by the lessons from local teachers of Chinese classics. Her education was different from her sisters because she was allowed to pursue the same curriculum as a boy. She was among the first students to enroll when a small, all-girls school opened in Matsumoto in 1873. However, her knowledge was so advanced that her father decided to pull her out of the small school and take her to Tokyo to be educated.

She attended the Takebashi Girls' School, which had been opened by the government in 1872 for the purpose of training female teachers. Her lessons were held both in her native Japanese dialect and in American English. After the government closed the school in 1877, the Education Ministry transferred her and her classmates to a newly established English section within the Tokyo Women's Normal School. She graduated in 1878.

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