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Mary Parke Thompson and her husband David Thompson served as missionaries to Japan for over five decades. In this third excerpt from Mary’s diaries, beginning after she had been in Japan approximately three weeks and just met her future husband, she describes her frustrations with learning Japanese—a problem that faces many new missionaries but was especially vexing for a woman in 1870s Japan.[1]

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May 12 [1873, Yedo, now Tokyo]: By chance, I might say, I secured a Japanese teacher today. God is very mindful of...

Mary Parke Thompson and her husband David Thompson served as missionaries to Japan for over five decades—from the 1860s into the 1920s. The Presbyterian Historical Society received their personal papers in 2011, a collection that contains a wealth of information about Presbyterian mission work in Japan, including Mary’s seven handwritten diaries. PHS volunteer Sue Althouse, herself a retired missionary to Japan, has been processing the Thompson Papers, and she has chosen excerpts from Mary’s diaries to share with our readers.

Mary Calhoun Parke was born...