Chapin was an editorial assistant at a publishing house in Philadelphia after college. She was working at the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts when she became interested in East Asian cultures. She went to work at the American consulate in Shanghai in 1924, and traveled around China by bicycle. She moved to Tokyo to work at the 1926 Pan-Pacific Congress. She became more interested in Buddhism, and lived in the
Yakushi-ji Temple in
Nara for several months. A 1927 publication dubbed her "the first bobbed Buddhist nun in Japan". Chapin also traveled in Korea, Ceylon and India, visiting sites important to Buddhism, and spent months studying and cataloguing holdings of the
British Museum. From 1929 to 1932, she returned to Japan and China on a research fellowship from
Swarthmore College, and was granted access to the
Shōsōin temple's storehouse of eighth-century artifacts. In 1932, Chapin was temporary head of the Japanese collection at
Columbia University, and worked for the Japanese Society of New York. She was art librarian at Mills College in the mid-1930s. During
World War II, she worked in the
United States Department of Justice as a research analyst, and after the war went to Korea with the
United States Army as a
monuments specialist. ==Publications==