Sarah Agnes Wintemute Coates
Sarah Agnes Wintemute Coates | |
|---|---|
| Born | Sarah Agnes Wintemute September 9, 1864 Port Stanley, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | 1945 (aged 80–81) Tokyo, Japan |
| Occupations | Educator, nutrition consultant |
| Children | 6, including Wells Coates |
Sarah Agnes Wintemute Coates (September 9, 1864 – 1945) was a Canadian educator, nutritional researcher, and writer, based in Japan.
Early life and education
Wintemute was born in Port Stanley, Ontario, the daughter of Benjamin Wintemute and Esther Anne Willson Wintemute. She graduated from Alma College.[1]
Career
After college, Wintemute became a missionary in Japan under the auspices of the Women's Missionary Society of the Methodist Church.[2][3] She arrived in Tokyo in 1886, and taught with Eliza Spencer Large at a girls' mission school, Toyo Eiwa Jogakko.[4] In 1889, she became the first principal at Yamanashi Eiwa Girls’ School in Kofu.[5] She returned to Canada on furlough from 1892 to 1893, and spoke to women's church groups about her work.[6]
After she married, Coates taught Sunday School classes, taught her own six children, and assisted her husband's work. While they lived in Hamamatsu, she experimented with peanuts as a protein-rich dietary supplement. She made peanut-based dishes a feature of the menus at Kobe's Canadian Academy while she was matron there. In time, she helped establish a peanut butter manufacturing plant, and consulted on child nutrition for the city of Nagoya.[7] In 1903, she and other missionary wives including Eleanor Frothingham Haworth established the Tokyo School for Foreign Children, mainly serving missionary and diplomatic families.[8]
She lived in Canada with her younger children from 1913 to 1917, and again from 1921 to 1926.[9] As a widow after 1934, Coates did nutritional research in Tokyo with Tadasu Saiki at the Imperial Government Institute for Nutrition. Coates moved away from traditional Christianity and explored alternatives including theosophy, Bahá'í, and New Thought.[4] She wrote articles for a Japanese women's magazine, taught at a girls' school run by journalist Hani Motoko, and sent pro-Japan letters to Canadian newspapers and friends during the 1930s.[7] In 1936 she spent time in a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan.[10] In 1939 she was an honored guest at the fiftieth anniversary celebrations at Yamanashi Eiwa Girls' School.[5] Against her grown children's pleas and Japanese wartime orders, she refused to leave Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.[7]
Publications
- The Sure Road to Health, or What Can Be Learned From the Nutrition Laboratory (1931)
Personal life
Wintemute married fellow Canadian Methodist teacher Harper Havelock Coates in Vancouver in 1893.[11] They had six children.[12] Their elder son Wells Coates became a noted architect.[13] Their younger son Willson H. Coates was a Rhodes Scholar, and a history professor in the United States.[14] Her husband died in 1934,[15] and she died in at a temporary hospital in the Surugadai district of Tokyo in 1945, at the age of 81.[16]
References
- ^ Gagan, Rosemary R. (1989-10-01). "More than "A Lure to the Gilded Bower of Matrimony": The Education of Methodist Women Missionaries, 1881–1925". Historical Studies in Education / Revue d'histoire de l'éducation: 239–259. doi:10.32316/hse/rhe.v1i2.1227. ISSN 1911-9674.
- ^ Gagan, Rosemary R. (1992). Sensitive Independence: Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-7735-0896-5.
- ^ Ion, Hamish. "Soul Searchers and Soft Power: The Canadian Protestant Missionary Movement in Japan, 1873-1951" in Greg Donaghy and Patricia E. Roy, eds., Contradictory Impulses: Canada and Japan in the Twentieth Century (UBC Press 2008): 23, 261.
- ^ a b Sippel, Patricia (2011). "Toyo Eiwa Jogakko as a Site of International Exchange: The Experiences of Three Canadian Methodist Women". 東洋英和大学院紀要. 7: 1–20.
- ^ a b Fukasawa, Mieko (January 16, 2014). "Yamanashi Eiwa's Founding: First Principal, Sarah Wintemute, and Other Young Pioneers | 日本基督教団公式サイト" (in Japanese). Retrieved 2025-11-04.
- ^ "Mission Work in Japan: An Address by Miss Wintemute to the Methodist Women's Missionary Society". The Montreal Star. 1893-02-25. p. 2. Retrieved 2025-11-04 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ a b c Hornyak, Tim (2019-02-07). "The Peanut Preacher: How a Canadian woman spread Jesus and peanut butter in Japan". The Canadian. Retrieved 2025-11-04.
- ^ "Tokyo School For Foreign Children". ASIJ Stories. Retrieved 2025-11-04.
- ^ "Chinese Must Be Recognized; Treaties Bound to Go, States Missionary". The Vancouver Sun. 1925-08-15. p. 8. Retrieved 2025-11-04 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ "At the Sanitarium". Battle Creek Enquirer. 1936-07-23. p. 5. Retrieved 2025-11-04 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ "Coates-Wintemute". Vancouver Weekly World. 1893-09-14. p. 3. Retrieved 2025-11-04 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ Ridout, Katherine (June 1990). "A Woman of Mission: The Religious and Cultural Odyssey of Agnes Wintemute Coates". Canadian Historical Review. 71 (2): 208–244. doi:10.3138/CHR-071-02-03. ISSN 0008-3755.
- ^ Basham, Anna. "Wells Coates (1895-1958): Modernist Japonisme" in Hugh Cortazzi, ed., Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, Vol. VII (Brill 2010). ISBN 9789004218031
- ^ "Willson H. Coates, a Professor At U. of Rochester, Is Dead at 77". The New York Times. 1976-09-24. p. 93. Retrieved 2025-11-04.
- ^ "Canadian Missionary Succumbs in Japan". The Standard-Freeholder. 1934-10-24. p. 13. Retrieved 2025-11-04 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ "Agnes Coates seated with members of the Japanese Imperial Family", photograph in the Coates Family fonds, United Church of Canada Archives.