Uryū Shigeko
Baroness (née and formerly ), was a Japanese educator, one of the first two Japanese women to attend a college, and one of the first piano teachers in Japan. Biography was born in Edo on 18 April 1862, one of the four daughters of Masuda Takayoshi, a Sado bugyō. She was the younger sister of Masuda Takashi. When she was six years old, she experienced the Battle of Ueno, part of the Boshin War in which her father and brother supported the losing side of the Tokugawa shogunate. To keep Shige safe from imperial backlash after the war, her brother Takashi asked his friend Nagai Gen'ei, a doctor who was relocating away from Tokyo with other exiled members of the shogun's retinue, to take Shige with him. She was adopted by Nagai Gen'ei or his son Kyūtarō and was known as Nagai Shige. She studied at the temple school in her new village for three years, learning to read and write Japanese. In November 1871 at the age of only 10 years old, Nagai Shige was among the five Japanese girls sent to the United States as part of the Iwakura Mission and was brought to the household of John