Tomo Inouye (born 1870) was a Japanese medical doctor trained at the University of Michigan Medical School. She was the founder of the Japanese Medical Women's Society.

Inouye was born in Fukuoka. Inouye attended a Methodist girls' school in Nagasaki, Japan.

Inouye began to study homeopathic medicine with an American doctor, Mary A. Gault, who was married to a Japanese man and who ran a clinic at Nagasaki.^[1] She is said to have chosen medicine because she was too short to qualify for nurses' training.^[2]

In 1898, Inouye graduated from the Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College.^[1] She was the only woman in a group of eight Japanese students enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1900.^[3] She earned her medical degree there in 1901 and received her Japanese medical license in 1903.^[4]

Inouye was a delegate to the fourth world conference of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Toronto in 1897.^[5] She returned to Japan after medical school^[6] and was a practicing physician in Tokyo. She was also appointed a medical inspector for school girls in Tokyo and taught hygiene and health classes. She was active with the YWCA of Japan.^[7]

In 1920, she revisited her alma mater with Ida Kahn, the school's first Chinese woman graduate.^[8] Both women were in the United States to attend the International Conference of Women Physicians in New York City in 1919.^[9]

Tomo Inouye founded the Japanese Medical Women's Society, and was a founding member and at-large board member of the Medical Women's International Society (MWIA) in 1919.^[10] In 1923, she headed a relief project of women physicians responding to the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake.^[11][12]

Inouye lived through World War II, though her home and belongings were destroyed: "All my pictures, books, instruments, specimens, and everything were burned to the ground through that terrible bomb," she wrote to Michigan friends in 1948. "Therefore I have nothing remained, no keepsake, and made homeless, no relative to look after me, separated from all my friends."^[13]