The International Catholic Hospital (Seibo Byoin), Shinjuku, Tokyo, c. 1930. The Catholic religious order of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary laid the foundation-stone of the large hospital on May 24, 1930. The original structure, above, survived the wartime firebombings of Tokyo and remains integrated within the present-day architecture on the hospital campus.

“We then visited the Seibo Hospital, a fine little hospital in western Tokyo, which we knew had been used by foreign nationals before the war, like the Bluff hospital in Yokohama. It was undamaged.

“The head of the hospital was a British nun who was also a doctor of medicine, and an exceedingly competent one. I decided to re-equip this hospital and, using the foreign national staff who had been released from [Japanese] internment camps, use it again for care of foreign nationals in the Tokyo area.”

– Medic: The Mission of an American Military Doctor in Occupied Japan and Wartorn Korea, by Crawford F. Sams, 1998