MARIE STOPES'S CONNECTION with Japan has been overshadowed by the drama of her later life. The fame and notoriety she acquired as the pioneer of birth control in England, as the crusader for married bliss and wise sex education for women, as the writer of Married Love, Enduring Passion and Radiant Motherhood, which dealt in flondly romantic yet acceptable language with subjects hitherto ‘unmentionable’, as the fierce opponent of the Roman Catholic Church and Gandhi, as the author of a play banned by the Lord Chamberlain — have obscured almost entirely the ‘Japan’ penod of her earlier life. Few people now read her Journal from Japan (1910). Fewer still have even heard of her Plays of Old Japan: the Nō (1913). And fewest of all are aware of the determining drive which first directed her tojapan, her extraordinary love affairwith aprofessor of botany in Tokyo University.

It is arguable, however, that without these earlier ‘Japanese’ events, her attention might never have turned to the field of birth control. A palaeobotanist she might have remained all her life, and the debt of gratitude which every woman in this country ultimately owes to her, might be directed instead to some other less interesting, less courageous, less intransigent and less exasperating pioneer.

Mane Stopes went to Japan in 1907 with a grant from the Royal Society to study the cretaceous fossil plants to be found in the rocks and coal-seams there. Her family was evangelical and intellectual; her father was an authonty on prehistoric flint implements and her mother an enthusiast for women's suffrage and rational dress. Her upbringing was stnct. But she showed early promise of a supenor intellect and an almost incredible capacity for prolonged hard work. She took her BSc at University College London in geology and botany, in only two years, and in 1903 left for Munich to study for a doctor's degree in palaeobotauy under the renowned Professor K. Goebel. She was the first woman to work at his Institute, the regulations being changed at her insistence to admit her, and after a year of ferociously hard work presented a thesis on fossilized cycads which won her the degree of Doktor, magna cum laude.