Kiyoko Makino (1903-1905)
Biologist, educator, and the first woman international student at MIT
Introduction
Born in 1875, Kiyoko Makino has the distinction of being both the first Japanese woman and the first woman international student to enroll at MIT, where she studied from 1903 to 1905 as a special student in Course VII (Biology). After starting her teaching career at St. Margaret’s, a women’s high school in Tokyo, she traveled to Massachusetts in 1899 for further studies. After her time at MIT, Makino resumed her work as an educator at several women’s schools in Japan, including St. Margaret’s. In 1908, she also published a 306-page long textbook on women’s physiology and hygiene.
1906 Technique yearbook with Makino, Kiyo (Miss) listed
Discovering Makino in the Distinctive Collections
Unlike Honma and Dan, Kiyoko Makino is not a well-known figure in Japan or the United States. In fact, her very existence may not have come to light had it not been for the archivists of the Distinctive Collections, who were likely the first to identify her in recent years within a handful of historical documents in the Collections. Entries on Makino appear in the 1904-1904 and the 1904-1905 editions of MIT’s Annual Catalog, both of which identify her as a “Special Student” in Course VII (Biology) from Tokyo, Japan. The 1906 issue of the Technique lists Makino’s name as Makino Kiyo (Miss).
In general, special students were students who enrolled at MIT but were already professionals in various fields. As such, they were differentiated from regular, undergraduate degree-candidates. As was initially the case for Ellen Swallow Richards (SB 1873; MIT’s first woman graduate and faculty member), however, this designation also allowed some of MIT’s first women students to enroll at the Institute. In fact, it was likely not a coincidence that Makino followed in the footsteps of the two other women who followed Swallow Richards as the second and third women to earn the Bachelor of Science degree at MIT, Marcella O’Grady (SB 1885) and Caroline Woodman (SB 1889), both of whom majored in Course VII.
We learn significantly more about Makino in the Ten Year Book of the Class of 1905 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was published in 1917. In it we learn Makino’s birth date, her occupation (“High School Teacher”), as well as her residence at that time (St. Maragaret’s School, Tokyo). Most importantly, the entry also includes a paragraph written by Makino, which gives us some intriguing details about her life as a teacher as well as her continued activity as a researcher (including the publication of a 306-page long book on “Physiology of Women”).
There is, however, one other document within the Distinctive Collections that gives us some further sense of the texture of Makino’s post-MIT life. In 1916, the Registration Committee of the MIT Women’s Association sent out a survey to “all women who have studied at Tech, whether for a long or a short term,” on the occasion of the inauguration of MIT’s new campus in Cambridge in the same year. Makino’s response to this survey tells us that she was a graduate of the Tokyo Women’s Higher Normal School (an national institution that trained educators) and that she was also a member of an “educational society in Japan” as well as a member of “Women’s Temperance Movement Society."
Kiyoko Makino's entry in the Ten Year Book, Class of 1905
Makino's response to a 1916 MIT survey of alumnae