Blowing in the Wind | Yoko Sato (Dean, Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care)
2006.07.20
Some fifty-odd years ago, the future that a young girl from the countryside, who was enjoying a carefree childhood, would vaguely imagine for herself was to be a lovely bride or a schoolteacher. This was a time when Japan was still striving to recover from the devastation of war. Many people were poor, yet I remember them as being cheerful and lighthearted. Society would later undergo rapid changes, but even as I grew up, I retained that same disposition. I drifted into nursing and spent about ten years in clinical practice. Then one day, I had an awakening that I couldn't go on like this, so I quit my job and enrolled in a school. Even though I say I had an "awakening," it wasn't as if I had a clear purpose. It was more like I was still half-asleep... The school I entered was one that trained nursing instructors. And so, I became an instructor at a nursing school.
The next turning point came while I was working at my own pace as an instructor at a junior college. I suddenly noticed that my friends around me were starting to go to graduate school one after another. This was because a trend had emerged for nursing education to move toward university-level programs. Word got around that although there was a desire to establish nursing universities, it was difficult to do so due to a shortage of qualified instructors. For many nursing professionals up to that point, it had been a strong desire to have nursing education conducted in four-year universities under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, rather than in vocational schools under the (then) Ministry of Health and Welfare. The winds of change were finally blowing toward university-level nursing education, and if a shortage of instructors was holding it back, I thought I should do my part. With that spirit, I resigned from my job and entered graduate school. At the time, there were not many graduate schools for nursing. It was an interesting group of people with diverse backgrounds and ages: people like me, and young people who had "normally" graduated from university and "normally" entered graduate school, just like their peers in other academic fields. In my field of study, the three students in my cohort were each ten years apart in age. Naturally, I was the eldest and was treated as such. In other words, "We have no choice but to be lenient with her; she's older, after all." Having my peers give up on me so early on in this way, I completed my master's program and became a university faculty member.
For more than a decade since then, I have been working as a university faculty member. The number of nursing universities has increased rapidly, and the shortage of instructors continues to this day.
(Date of publication: 2006/07/20)