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With Yone, Misaki Shimazu founded Haha No Kai (Mother’s Home) in 1913 to supervise and take care of children. The home also served as the Shimazu’s own residence.1 One of the reasons they opened the home was that Yone herself became a mother; around 1913 the childless Shimazu couple adopted and began raising two Japanese children, a boy and a girl. When adopted, the girl, Fumiko, born in 1909 in New York, was four, and her brother, Yoshio, born in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri, was six.
The story of the two Shimazu children goes something like this: their moth…