This article focuses on Kasuya Yoshi's comparative text, "A Comparative Study of the Secondary Education of Girls in England, Germany and the United States, With a Consideration of the Secondary Education of Girls in Japan," published by Teachers College, Columbia in 1933. The article explores the gendered construction of comparative education and adopts a transnational approach to make women visible as non-state actors constructing educational knowledge, founding institutions and practicing as educationists. The preface to "Secondary Education of Girls" is used to explore a transnational circulatory regime supporting Kasuya's travel and study in the USA. Modes of managing meaning used to mediate actions and ideals oriented to both the universal and the particular in the model of modern Japanese womanhood Kasuya scripted in her text, and the elements of the education she prescribed to achieve her ideals, are analysed through notions of vernacular cosmopolitanisms.