On September 19, 1901, Hisaya Iwasaka, the third president of Mitsubishi, and his wife Shizuko welcomed into this world their new baby girl, Miki. At Miki’s christening ceremony, she was held by a famous sumo wrestler for luck. It was an appropriate choice, as Miki grew to become a very strong-willed child. She spurned the toys and activities meant for Japanese girls, preferring the company and rough activities of the boys. At one point, she was challenged to a fighting match by a cousin 3 years her senior. She defeated him easily and then several times again in view of a large number of relatives. She was said to be “unruly, rebellious, and something of a showoff”.

From the beginning, Miki was her grandmother Kise’s favorite grandchild, and spent her first 22 years sleeping in her grandmother’s room where she got to hear many stories about her ancestry and the founding of the Mitsubishi company. She was immersed in the traditional Japanese mindset of reverence for and obligation to her ancestors. In fact, Miki was brought up in an environment that was a mixture of Shinto and Buddhism. Shinto venerates ancestors as deities.

When Miki came down with the whooping cough, she was sent to the family villa in Oiso, Japan under the company of a nurse. When the lady thought that Miki was asleep, she would read out loud from a book. Once, Miki overheard her clearly, but pretended to still be asleep. She heard the nurse read the phrase – “love your neighbor”, and it stuck in her mind. Later she heard the lady reading about a rebellious son that had run off from home and squandered his inheritance. At some point, the wastrel returned and his father ran out to welcome him back and forgave him. Miki was struck at the contrast between the book her nurse was reading from and the books Miki’s mother had given her to read – one in which a father becomes a Buddhist monk and abandons his wife and son, and another book in which a mother brings up her son with the sole focus of him avenging his father’s death. After pressing the timid nurse about the book she had overheard her reading from, Miki learned that it was the Christian Bible. The experience engendered in her a strong desire to learn about Christianity, which horrified Miki’s family.

When she was a late teenager, Miki’s family worked hard to find a husband for her. But she was unimpressed with them as well as with the men that her cousins had married.  She considered them to be rude to their teachers to others they considered beneath themselves. After one of Miki's suitors was particularly insistent and followed Miki around at a garden party to the point of annoyance, she sucked in the filling of a cream puff and blew it all over him. Her mother took her home and they rode in the car together in a “frozen silence”.

Eventually, it was arranged for Miki to meet Renzo Sawada, a young officer in the diplomatic core. Because he was of some stature in society, he was acceptable to the family, and because he was a Christian, Miki was apparently open to the arrangement, although her father basically made the decision for her. They were married on July 1, 1922 in a Christian chapel.

Renzo was soon assigned to the Japanese embassy in Bueno Aires and the Sawadas lived near the presidential residence there. Miki made friends with President de Alvear’s wife, who was an opera singer from Vienna.  Miki's first child, a son they named Shin’ichi, was born in Argentina.

In 1924, Renzo was assigned to Peking, and along the way Miki stopped in Japan and remained there to have her second boy Hisao. After joining her husband in China, she had another son, Akira. In Peking, Miki joined a group of Christian women who met for worship meetings in a Japanese restaurant. They would try to talk and sing over all of the boisterous, if not, profane noise their husbands were making in adjoining rooms. Miki would address the ladies at the top of her lungs. Once, one of the workers heard something Miki said, leading her to decide to become a Christian. This prompted one of the Japanese men to warn the others not to let their women go near Miki or she would convert them to Christianity.

In 1931, Renzo was assigned to England. While living in London, Miki was very active in amateur drama as well as in church. At first, she attended a Methodist church, but to save money on gasoline, made the decision to go to the Anglican church that the family’s governess had been taking the children to. One Sunday after church, for some reason, the rector introduced Miki to a lady in the congregation. The lady invited her to go on a road trip to the countryside. “If you’re a golf widow today, why not come with me? I’d like to show you a beautiful part of England.” After about a 3-hour ride, they arrived at a settlement consisting of a large building surrounded by many cottages. It was one of many orphanages that had been set up all over England by Dr. Thomas Barnardo in the previous century after a large number of children had been orphaned by cholera, many of them ending up on the street.

Miki toured the facility extensively, and being impressed with the operation, offered to volunteer there once a week. She later wrote, contrasting this experience with her privileged life to that point: “Until then, I lived in a happiness given to me by others, but now I realized that I was far happier in giving something rather than in always receiving.” 

Less than 3 years after arriving in England, the Sawadas were transferred to Paris. Once again, Miki was very active socially, and spent a lot of time taking painting classes. She also attended live shows, and doing so, met the entertainer Josephine Baker, daughter of a Spanish father and African-American mother. Josephine was immediately popular in France, and in addition to her notoriety, she showed kindness and generosity to the workers. Late at night, she would tour the slums and distribute candy to the children. Miki would go with her and see the love with which Josephine was regarded by the poor people of Paris.

After 15 months, the Sawadas were transferred to New York where Renzo became the consul general. Miki enjoyed the frankness of Americans, being very frank herself and freely expressed her thoughts and opinions. She also participated in amateur drama. Having gotten involved in the Episcopal church, Miki was invited to speak in many churches throughout the country.

At one point, Miki heard that Josephine Baker was coming to the U.S. to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies. While the ship Josephine arrived on was filled with other famous individuals and met by large crowds, only Miki and a Ziegfeld agent was present to greet Josephine. The agent gave a terse greeting and left almost immediately. Miki was left then to provide a ride to Josephine. The awkwardness of the greeting was followed by great difficulty in Josephine finding any place to reside.  At hotel after hotel, Josephine was told that no rooms were available. Finally, Miki asked the building custodian of her apartment if Josephine could stay there. Replying “The official residence of the consul general is under extraterritoriality, and we have no right to say anything about what you may do. But when the other tenants learn that a Negro is living in the same building, they’ll all move out.” Ultimately, Miki obtained the grudging consent of the manager of the studio Miki was renting for her painting, for Josephine to stay there. The approval stipulated that Josephine had to use the back door and the freight elevator.

Josephine was also treated coldly by the other performers in the Ziegfeld Follies. At one point, she overheard some of the ladies suggest they all wear masks so their boyfriends wouldn’t see them dancing with a Negro. Josephine, who had tried to ignore all of the slights until then, snapped back “You want to wear a mask because of your poor dancing!” Josephine eventually broke her contract and returned to France and became a citizen there. She served in the French Resistance and the Red Cross during World War II and was decorated by General Dwight Eisenhower after the war. She finally returned to the US to participate in a massive civil rights demonstration in Washington DC in 1963.

During the war, diplomats were regarded with suspicion by the Japanese police, mainly because they were known to have foreign friends. Under such toxicity, Miki who was in Japan alone, while her husband served overseas, eventually chose to live in the family villa in Oiso. Even so, Miki was often followed, questioned, and accused by the secret police but never got in any real trouble.

After the war, the holdings of Miki’s family were subject by the occupying American force to a 90% tax, and much of the wealth of the family disappeared as a result. The Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP, Douglas MacArthur, confiscated houses for the use of American personnel and Miki and her father moved to a small caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of their Tokyo estate. Her father was also forced to give up all of his business holdings as part of the SCAP effort to dissolve large business interests regarded as having aided the Japanese war machine.

It would seem that a lady born to and raised in privilege, and placed in positions of status and prestige as an adult would find what happened to her family and holdings in post-war Japan to be an overwhelming, hopeless disaster. But Miki was purpose driven, not status driven, and purpose had great plans for her.

On June 28, 1946, not quite a year into the occupation, Miki heard on the early morning news that a child of mixed American and Japanese parentage had been born. The reporter spoke of it in a positive light, but was soon fired over his rosy appraisal of the event. While he had suggested that it symbolized a reconciliation process, the populace in general regarded it as a shameful reminder of defeat. 

But for Miki, “This newscast aroused something that had long been concealed deep in my heart. That something was the evening glow that I had watched in the woods of Dr. Barnardo’s home in England fifteen years before. The reflection of that beautiful glow flamed up and touched off a fire in my heart. I felt strongly that the work to which I should devote myself was right there in this glow.”

Over the next few weeks, abandoned, dead mixed blood babies were beginning to surface in Japan – the progeny of occupying forces and desperately poor Japanese women. A black baby with kinky hair, a white child with its blue eyes half open. Another baby dug up from a ditch. As if there hadn’t been already enough motivation to act, one day on a train, a thin bundle wrapped in a purple cloth fell into her lap from the rack above. As she was trying to put the bundle back on the rack, two policemen came into the car and demanded to know what was in the package. When she opened the bundle for their inspection, she was stunned to find the body of a black baby. As she was trying to explain that the child was not hers, one of the policemen noticed that the book she had been reading was written in English, and accused her of having a foreign boyfriend and implying the baby was the result, and demanding that she get off the train with them at the next stop.

Then, while suddenly disrobing to everyone’s astonishment, she firmly demanded they find a doctor that could examine her and tell them whether or not she could possibly have recently had a baby. As the scene was playing out, an elderly passenger shed his timidity, came forward and told the police that he had remembered seeing a young girl enter the car with the purple bundle earlier. At that assertion, the police took custody of the bundle and let Miki go. But Miki was quickly becoming convinced that the Lord was directing her to “become a mother to many of the babies like him who are all over the country”.

With her children grown and with her relationship with Renzo having become distant, she sought and received his blessing to be free of the responsibilities of a wife and pursue her calling. When she described her plans to her father, tears formed in his eyes. She knew he was supportive of her intentions, but when she asked to use the family villa in Oiso, he had to tell her that it had been turned over to the government in partial payment for taxes. But instead of being discouraged, Miki used the help of several influential American friends to get permission to use the villa as an Orphanage. She then worked feverishly to raise funds from all of the sources she could think of to pay for the property and add needed buildings, writing thousands of letters, appealing to friends, occupation forces, and American churches. She was able to raise some money from these sources as well as from a bequest of a British governess, Elizabeth Saunders, who had lived in Japan and entrusted a befriended British author with applying her lifetime savings to be used “for those who cannot help themselves”. After receiving the modest legacy, Miki named the developing childrens’ home in memory of Elizabeth Saunders.

The first few years of operation of the Elizabeth Saunders Home involved a constant struggle to bring in enough money, food and medicine, whereas there was never a shortage of needful mixed blood, orphaned, abandoned, discarded infants and children. They were found out in the cold, at the foot of a statue, in front of a train station, restrooms, vegetable markets, and other public places. Or they came from other institutions that did not want to host mixed-blood babies. Mothers and grandmothers would also bring children to Miki, wanting to avoid the shunning of their neighbors. Thirty one children were left surreptitiously over time around the home and grounds, to be found later by Miki and her staff, including one child (left under a bush) that Miki nearly stepped on in the dark one night.

Besides the difficulties of acquiring enough food to feed undernourished children, given food shortages in Japan in general, medicines were also in short supply and the children suffered from worms, scabies, and epidemics. One challenge was the fact that regulations forbade dispensing American medicines to foreign nationals. One American doctor would come late at night, after his duty hours, to care for the children and he and other medics would disregard the regulations and would bring supplies that had been discarded or declared surplus. He was eventually caught by a disapproving superior and transferred away.

One child, sick with double pneumonia, was continually declining and Miki expected that he would soon die. One morning, a package showed up , sent by a Mrs. Joseph C. Grew, wife of the former American ambassador. The package contained food, and most importantly, two vials of penicillin, which ended up saving the child’s life. Mrs. Grew was herself astonished at the news of the penicillin vials. She had had no idea the package she had ordered for Miki contained the most unlikely of medication that could otherwise only be acquired with a doctor’s prescription.

One night after the evening feeding, Miki learned that there would be no more milk to supply the midnight feeding or for the older children at breakfast. At midnight, while she was listening to the hungry howls, not even imagining how she was going to feed a hundred children, she heard a car drive up, stop, and drive away.  The driver had left a big box on the ground with a message reading: “From an admirer”. The box contained four cases of powdered milk.

At the end of one year, Miki was in the process of settling her accounts and paying bills, per Japanese custom. She had tried all December to scrape up enough money to meet her obligations. She had long since sold all of her known valuable belongings to pay bills, but that evening ended up finding a silver vase with an imperial crest on it.  She managed to get a trifling sum for it from a pawnbroker. Even with that, she only had half of the money she needed to pay her debts.

On the way home from the pawnbroker, a gentleman saw her as she was changing trains and called out to her. He explained that he had known her in China and that he had borrowed some money from her and had never paid her back. He handed her the sum, saw his train coming and wished her well as he promptly departed. The additional money was enough to allow her to exactly meet her debts.

Miki had to navigate through a whooping cough epidemic which claimed the lives of seven of her children, and then face cruel criticism in an anonymously written note left on her gate, likening her operation to that of an infamous orphanage in which 120 orphans had died of neglect. Conversely, she also had to endure physical attacks from hoodlums and ruffians, and tirades from others, all of whom had contempt for her effort to care for children whose existence they regarded as loathsome.

But the iron-willed, headstrong, daughter of samurai resolve continued to operate within the will and providence of the Lord. A boy-cousin defeating, suitor dismissing, Buddhism spurning, racism fighting ninja for Christ stayed the course for legions of desperately needful children over three decades. Miki made use of her networking skills, strong international friendships, and great aptitude for communication to rally resources from a vast array of individuals and organizations in a number of countries.

As the economy improved and focus could be drawn away from simple survival, Miki saw to it that her children were educated and received vocational or academic training. She helped those with special abilities in the arts to advance their talents, sometimes even receiving mentoring from famous individuals. She spearheaded the creation of a farm in Brazil where some of her older children would learn agricultural skills, work ethic, and management experience. 

Miki worked feverishly to place children with their American families, when they could be identified and were found to be open to adoption. A specific example was her effort to unite little “Mike” with his father who was serving a sentence in the Ft. Leavenworth prison. Among all of the family members she tracked down in the United States, none was more receptive to and grateful for meeting his child than Mike’s father, after Miki had worked with the prison wardens to arrange the meeting. The first encounter was so emotional and gratifying that the wardens chose to overlook the specified time limitation, allowing Mike and his father to be together for a while longer. In addition, the child’s aunt and grandmother ended up raising him in Little Rock. Years later during a reunion Miki, Mike and his father (by then out of prison and happily married) walked through a park while the father, wiping away tears, told Miki how grateful he was that she had worked to place Mike with his own family instead of another. 

Miki passed away on May 12, 1980 (interestingly on the birthday of Florence Nightingale). She left a family of about two thousand individuals, who through her investment, were able to bring value to the world. The former residents have held many reunions over the years. The Elizabeth Saunders Home still operates in Oiso, Japan, though no longer tasked with any need to look after unwanted mixed-blood children.

Source: “The Least of These – Miki Sawada and Her Children”, by Elizabeth Anne Hemphill, First Edition, 1980.