Japanese Woman Professor Studies Far Eastern History at University

Social Sciences 111, commonly known as "rice paddies," has a reputation for attracting students who are already specialists in Far Eastern affairs. Two years ago the New York Herald Tribune's Chinese correspondent took the course, History of Far Eastern Civilization.

One of the members of this year's class is Mrs. Tatsuro Yamamoto, a professor of Far Eastern history from Tsuda Women's College in Tokyo.

Mrs. Yamamoto is learning the "American approach" by auditing Social Science 111 and several courses in Far Eastern culture, while her husband, a Far Eastern history professor at the University of Tokyo, studies here on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship. She left her three children with her mother-in-law at home near Tokyo.

Discussing the status of women in Japan, Mrs. Yamamoto said that before the war most women there left school after the eighth grade. She recalls that there were five women and 15,000 men at Waseda University when she was a freshman in 1940.

"That was the first year they allowed women to go at all." But things have changed since the war, Mrs. Yamamoto adds. "Now there are about 100 women at Wasoda; there are women's colleges, and most women attend high school."