Tomiko Satō was the eldest of eight children in the family of a Japanese Protestant minister in the
Ōhira village,
Kurokawa District,
Miyagi Prefecture (north-eastern
Honshū). In her teens she studied at a
Baptist boarding school in
Sendai, the capital of the prefecture. At 21, rebelling against the prospect of an arranged marriage, she left her home prefecture and went to
Tokyo, where she found a job with
St Luke's Hospital as a student nurse. happened to be treated for tuberculosis at St Luke's Hospital. Guo, who had just completed his first year of study in Japan, visited his sick friend in the hospital on his trip to Tokyo, but the patient died soon. After the death of his friend, Guo met her when visiting the hospital to request the dead friend's
X-ray records. Satō was sharing Guo's grief over the death of his friend, and once Guo returned to
Okayama, they started regularly exchange letters. By December, Guo Moruo convinced Satō to leave Tokyo and join him in Okayama. Satō and Guo had their first child, a son, in December 1917. When interviewed in 1980 by , who was to write her biography, Satō summarized her life story as follows: "I am a stray dog all my life, but whatever bitterness can be said about this bitter life, that was because of my own foolishness". She died in 1995, aged 101.
Children All her children achieved successful lives in China. • Eldest son Guo HeFu 郭和夫 (1917–1994), Member of Academica Sinica in Chemistry. She lived with him in Dalian. • Guo Bo 郭博 (1920-), architect, cinematographer and member of various professional and Shanghai institutions including the Soong Ching Ling Foundation
宋庆龄基金会理事. • Guo FuSheng 郭复生 (亦叫佛生, 1923-), Chinese Academy of Science. • Daughter Guo ShuZhen 郭淑瑀 (1925-). She married Lin AiSin 林爱信 and had a daughter Lin Cong 林丛 who studied in Japan. She became a Japanese citizen and now teaches in Japan as Rina Fujita 藤田梨那. • Youngest son Guo ZhiHong 郭志鸿 (1932-2024), Visiting professor at Central Conservatory of Music
中央音乐学院客座教授. ==Bibliography==