Aged 15 she ran away from home to avoid marriage to a farmer; after returning, she departed the following year to study painting in Tokyo.

That December, at the instigation of Ivan Dimitrovich Kasatkin, she left Yokohama by ship for Russia, to train as an icon painter.

Arriving in Saint Petersburg in March, she entered the Novodevichy Convent, noting in her diary her sadness at her hosts' preference for Greek rather than Italianate painting; she described this as "Obake-e".

Yamashita subsequently took up residence and formed a workshop in a seminary in Surugadai in Tokyo, on lands belonging to the Holy Resurrection Cathedral, then under construction.

In 1918 Yamashita left Tokyo and returned home to Kasama, where she lived in retirement for the next thirty years off her savings and the forty yen she received from the Church each June and December.