Fuku Matsuoka collection of Retailing Curriculum

Fuku Matsuoka, from Yokohama, Japan attended classes at Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute (RAMI) from 1933-1935. While at RAMI she studied Retailing Distribution. As a student, she participated in golf, swimming, the Glee Club and the Art League.

She was the youngest child born into a Samurai knight family. She realized early on that she did not want to folllow the traditional path for typical Japanese girls at that time. Her parents encouraged her to study flower arrangement or tea ceremony for her future. Fuku enjoyed singing and music, drawing and painting. To appease her parents, she took lessons in "court manner," which she describes as being more phsical training than tea ceremony. Although Fuku's family was Buddhist, they sent her to a Christian school where she said she found the "soul of religion" and that Christianity is optimistic while Buddhism is pessimistic. Miss Matsuoka's education in the U.S. was sponsored by an American doctor and his wife, whom she met through membership in the Yokohama YWCA. In 1938 she returned to Japan where she gave private home instruction in English and interior decoration. In June 1969, Miss Matsuoka returned to RIT for the first time since her graduation. She was very emporessed with the new Henrietta campus and felt that the simple, modern architecture reminded her of Japanese styling.


A senior photograph of Fuku Matsuoka can be found in the 1935 Techmila yearbook, and a short article appears in the Fall 1984 issue of RIT Alumni News.