Takeda Kiyoko

Takeda Kiyoko (Cho Kiyoko, June 20, 1917 - ）is a Japanese scholar of the History of Ideas. In the 1950s she contributed to the people-to-people diplomacy that was hurt by the World War II, aimed at restoring human relations and understanding among Asian people, including Chinese, the Filipino, Indian and other Asian countries. She was the founder for the Social Studies Institute at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Takeda Kiyoko is a professor emiritus at ICU with a PhD in Literature from the University of Tokyo in 1961.

Takeda Kiyoko was born in Hyogo Prefecture, and after graduating from the Department of English Studies at the Kobe College, she went to the United States in 1939 and studied at Olivet College as an exchange student. When she finished Olivet, she extended her study abroad at Columbia University for two years, transferred to Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York Graduate School. Takeda's chance to move from Olivet University in Michigan to New York was that her teaching adviser M. Holmes Hartshorne, a scholar and translator for works by Kierkegaard and Immanuel Kant. Hartshorne introduced her to his own mentor Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, and Takeda was invited to New York. Dr. and Mrs. Niebuhr took care of her as guardians when Japan and the United States opened up the war so that she could stay in the United States for further studies. Takeda was one of those students who were deported to Japan on a Swedish vessel on personnel exchange treaty.

During the World War II in Japan, Takeda tried to communicate with the military officers in charge of a factory she was a chaperon, how those Japanese high school and college students volunteer at the facilities were malnourished, by presenting the data of their weight she had listed. Although students nicknamed her after a fable character "Urashima Taro" or a person completely lost coming back from abroad. While pretending to obey the military official and national propaganda that Japan would win the War, Takeda found relief to know that those students disbelieved in the propaganda or they whispered among them the signs of defeat.

It was during the Christian Youth Convention in Amsterdam in 1939 which she joined as an undergraduate at the Kobe College, and she started her thought about Japan and her relationship to other countries with lasting impact that she was unwelcome as a young woman coming from Japan. As she tried to acquaint with a Chinese woman student who lead the student protest activities in China, that person replied Takeda needed to persuade the Japanese forces to leave her nation before becoming a friend of hers.

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