Qualla: Elizabeth Saunders Home: The Mother of Two Thousand Children

Elizabeth Saunders Home: The Mother of Two Thousand Children: Introduction

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Suikotei, CC BY-SA 4.0. On a train in Gifu Prefecture in early 1947, the dead body of a Black infant wrapped in layers of newspaper and cloth fell from an overhead compartment onto the lap of Miki Sawada. She was the granddaughter of Iwasaki Yataro, the founder of the Mitsubishi empire -- the oldest daughter of a man once called the richest in Japan. She had traveled the world as a diplomat's wife, volunteered at Dr. Barnardo's orphanages in England, and moved through the highest circles of prewar Japanese society. None of that had prepared her for what landed in her arms on that train. Within months, Sawada had begun gathering biracial children -- infants born to Japanese mothers and American occupation soldiers, abandoned by both parents and ostracized by a society that had no place for them. She sold her jewels, her kimono, her personal possessions. She bought back the confiscated Iwasaki family estate in the seaside town of Oiso, Kanagawa Prefecture, for four million yen. She opened an orphanage. Nearly two thousand children would pass through its doors.

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Image: Suikotei | CC BY-SA 4.0

Elizabeth Saunders Home: The Mother of Two Thousand Children: The Children Nobody Wanted

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Suikotei, CC BY-SA 4.0. The end of World War II left Japan occupied by hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Relationships between GIs and Japanese women produced children -- known as konketsuji, or mixed-blood children -- who fit nowhere in the rigid social order of postwar Japan. Many were aband...

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Image: Suikotei | CC BY-SA 4.0

Elizabeth Saunders Home: The Mother of Two Thousand Children: An Englishwoman's Bequest

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nesnad, CC BY 4.0. The orphanage nearly failed before it truly began. Sawada had spent everything on the land, and running a home for growing numbers of children required steady income she did not have. Then came word, through the intermediary Lewis Bush and Anglican bishops acting as executors, of...

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Image: Nesnad | CC BY 4.0

Elizabeth Saunders Home: The Mother of Two Thousand Children: Controversy Across the Pacific

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Sawada's work was never comfortable for anyone. In her autobiography, titled "Black Skin, White Soul," she wrote frankly about race in ways that drew both criticism and praise from both sides of the Pacific. As scholar Yukiko Koshiro described in "Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U....

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Elizabeth Saunders Home: The Mother of Two Thousand Children: A School Named for a Lost Son

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abasaa, Public domain. In 1953, Sawada opened St. Stephan's School on the orphanage grounds so the children would not have to attend local schools where they faced bullying and exclusion. The name carried personal grief: Stephan was the Christian name of her third son, who had died during a naval battl...

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Image: Abasaa | Public domain