Sono Teruko was born in 1846 in Edo (later to be Tokyo) in a well-to-do doctor’s household; her two brothers both became doctors as well and her sister Haruko a teacher. In 1865 she married a local samurai; their daughter Toyoko was born in 1868, but as the world changed around them with the Meiji Restoration, Teruko quarreled frequently with her husband over his drinking and his way with money (his samurai-style way of doing business was not profitable). In 1871 she left him and returned to the family home, now in Ibaraki, with her daughter.

After teaching along with Haruko for some time, she left for Tokyo to study the law (leaving Toyoko with her sister as the future inheritor of the household). In 1874, after a short apprenticeship, she became a daigennin or unofficial lawyer, the only woman to do so, and brought her daughter to Tokyo now that she had a means of support. Over the next eleven years she won numerous cases, becoming a celebrity for her elegant and practical clothing and hairstyle as well as her legal skills. It was increasingly difficult to make a living, however (in the hot summer of 1876 she ran a popular but short-lived icehouse as a side hustle), as the legal system became formalized: to be a lawyer you had to pass an exam, and to pass the exam you had to go to law school, and to go to law school you had to be a man. Facing the end of her legal career, Teruko decided to focus on education for women. She consulted the philosopher and supporter of women’s education Fukuzawa Yukichi, who said cynically that since most men studying overseas wasted the money spent on them, she ought to start off with nothing and earn on her own account.

In 1885 she set off for San Francisco, where the first thing that happened was a bank failure that left her penniless. With help from a local church, where she became a Christian and did mission work among Japanese sex workers, she started from scratch, working as a maid while she attended elementary school to master English and eventually graduated at the age of forty-two. She continued her studies in Chicago and New York, meanwhile setting up women’s groups and giving speeches on human rights and welfare for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She also published an autobiography in English.

In 1893 she returned to Japan, pausing to report to Fukuzawa that his snide remark had come true and leaving him speechless. The following year she launched the Komatsu [or Kisho?] Girls’ School, which taught reading, writing, calligraphy, arithmetic, accounting, English, and various household skills; its opening ceremony was attended by Tsuda Umeko among others. The school was funded by the church, however, and eventually closed down after Teruko’s views on education clashed with the official line. She began to drift away from Christianity, becoming a Buddhist nun in 1904 and settling down in a quiet temple, from which she continued charity work supporting education, the Red Cross, and women’s rights. She died in 1925 at the age of seventy-nine.

Sources
https://archive.org/details/telsonojapaneser00sono/page/n7/mode/2up (English) Teruko’s 1890 autobiography