Hideko Maehata was the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic medal and four years later she was the first to win a gold medal.  It took 36 years more before Mayumi Aoki won the second gold medal (100m fly in 1972) by a Japanese woman.  Hideko's swimming was all the more remarkable because she was a lone ranger during an era when Japanese women were not expected to compete, much less win.  Scoring a silver medal in the Japanese dominant 1932 Games at Los Angeles, Hideko came back to win her specialty, the 200m breaststroke in the Berlin Olympics in 1936.  In between, she set three world records and held on to them for a remarkable four years.  She used a perfect traditional surface stroke in the period when breaststroke was undergoing evolution and broken records were common as more and more breath control artists swam most of it underwater and the butterfly arm stroke was coming into fashion on top.  Hideko took three full seconds from the record of Denmark's Else Jacobsen in what had always been a European event.  Ironically, the one other non-European woman who held the Olympic record was Australian Clare Dennis who had beaten Hideko to win the Olympic gold medal in 1932 when Hideko had to settle for the silver.