Sarah Curtis Home, Tokyo, c. 1910. American Baptist Mission Society.

See also:
Duncan Academy, Tokyo, c. 1910

“Viscount Mori Arinori (1847-1889) was a Meiji period Japanese statesman, diplomat, and founder of Japan’s modern education system. He was Japan’s first ambassador to the United States, and was an advocate of freedom of religion, secular education, and the abandonment of the Japanese language in favor of English.

“… In 1875, two years after the first Baptist church in Japan was organized, Mori rented to the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society a house in the Surugadai neighborhood of Tokyo that became the Sarah A. Curtis Home for Girls, the first school in Japan to be opened by a foreign church mission.”

— A History of Christianity in Japan, Otis Cary, 1909.