Toné Milne was born in 1860 in Hakodate, Hokkaido, to a family originally without a surname. Her father, a Buddhist priest, doubled as a civil engineer who relieved water shortages in the city with a river redirection project, and later acquired the family name Horikawa (“dug river”) thereby. As a child Toné learned English from the British naturalist Thomas Blakiston, a neighbor of theirs (Hakodate, then as now a trading port, was well supplied with foreigners).

In 1872 she was sent far south to Tokyo to attend the Temporary Pioneer School, the women’s branch of the Sapporo Agricultural College, which was intended to prepare girls to become good wives to Hokkaido pioneers. (Among her classmates, albeit six years older, would have been Hirose O-Tsune.) Cast among daughters of the nobility and the rich upper-middle class, Toné was the only one there without a surname, and found life at school difficult; she also disagreed with its good-wife/wise-mother morals. After the school relocated to Sapporo, she was often sick and, when in school, inattentive; these days the signs would have been more familiar, but at the time she was expelled on the pretext of “a brain disease which prevents her from concentrating on her academics.”

Rumors of “the girl with the brain disease” spread quickly, although her family were supportive and she hoped to open her own English school. She did get a proposal of marriage from the owner of a kimono shop, because he thought she “would look so good in Western clothing.” Toné retorted that she wasn’t a dress-up doll and couldn’t stand men who behaved as if women were their possessions. Her suitor backed off, and the rumors intensified.

In 1878, her father died. On a visit to his grave, Toné encountered Thomas Blakiston on the same errand; he was accompanied by a foreign friend, the British seismologist John Milne. With the aid of Toné’s English skills, she and Milne became quickly close. When he had to leave Hakodate for work, he promised to return and asked her to correspond with him in the meantime, which she did. On his return the following year, she greeted him with “Welcome back to Hakodate,” to which he responded “I haven’t come back to Hakodate, I’ve come back to you.” Toné confessed her history of expulsion and “brain disease” to him; he took it in stride, telling her in turn about facing discrimination in England as a Scotsman. They began life together in Tokyo in 1880 as a common-law couple (religious differences made formal marriage difficult), where Milne helped found the Seismological Society of Japan and Toné served as his assistant, translating Japanese texts and researching the history of earthquakes in Japan.

They were officially married in 1895, after almost fifteen years together. At this point the First Sino-Japanese War was helping turn Japan against foreigners; in addition, a fire destroyed much of their home and work. Milne decided to return home to the UK and take Toné with him, along with Hirota Shinobu, his devoted research partner. There they settled on the Isle of Wight. Although lonely and homesick for Japan, Toné considered her marriage a fulfilling one to a man who treated her like a fellow human being. Milne died in 1913; after waiting out the First World War, Toné returned to Japan in 1920 and died in her hometown of Hakodate in 1925 at the age of sixty-four.

Sources
https://mixedmuseum.org.uk/main-exhibition/1900-john-milne-and-tone-horikawa/ (English) Account of Toné’s marriage, with numerous photographs of their later life