One night, a gentleman boarded my rickshaw and said “Please take me to a town in Hongō.” This man was the young master from a noble family. As we arrived at the residence, we were met by a policeman accompanying a team of butlers standing in a row by the gate. When the young master disembarked, he asked, “Aren’t you a lady?” The policeman reproved me, “A lady who draws a ricksha… ” He questioned my identity.

When he realized that I was from Sakurai Village in Mikawa, he seemed to be very surprised and stared intently at my face. He finally said, “I know your mother!” This policeman was formerly stationed in Sakurai Village, my hometown, and had visited my house once a month to verify the bookkeeping and inventory for our used clothing trade. This is how he had known me since childhood. “I thought I had met you before,” he remarked, wistfully.

This man was admirable enough to let his wife attend a knitting course at the Women’s School of Fine Arts. He himself worked at a police station, but had been posted as a gate keeper at the house of a baron. He admonished me, “Even in a big city like Tokyo, there has never been a woman rickshaw driver. I am going to ask this family if they would mind offering you a two-mat room near the entrance. I will also ask them if they could make you an attendant here. Please quit the rickshaw job,” he pleaded kindly.

I had determined that if I drove the rickshaw an hour or more every night, I could earn my tuition fee for three years in a single year, but what was I to do?

After that, I was allowed a small two-mat room(approx. 3m²) rent free, and, except for the time I was in school, I did the laundry daily, helped in the kitchen, and provided tailoring at the residence. So I deposited the roughly one hundred yen I had earned as a rickshaw driver with the wife of the policeman and used the other income for living expenses. I was determined not to spend any money except for my monthly tuition. However, I still didn’t have enough to eat, so I would visit a rice shop in Kyōbashi from Saturday till Monday morning, staying there until I’d had my fill.

Life continued like this for three years, until, in April of my fourth year, I rented a house in Misaki-cho, Kanda. I sublet an eight-mat room to a couple, and boarded two students from my alma mater in the remaining six-mat space. Then I started a school for bag-making on Sundays, assembling applicants and dividing them into morning and afternoon sessions. With the income from these lessons, I never had to worry about having enough to make my monthly tuition payments.