Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

I’m putting these two O-Kiku together because they were both karayuki-san (Japanese women forced into sex work abroad) who made a name for themselves, as well as being close in age (but they are definitely two different people).
Degami Kiku was born in 1877 in Yamaguchi, in a shipbuilding village with frequent interactions with Korea and the continent beyond. Orphaned by seventeen, she went to Korea to work in a bar in Incheon, where a sailor who liked her helped smuggle her into Vladivostok. There she went to work in a Japanese-owned brothel, serving Russian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese customers. She followed the Siberian Railway construction to Chita and then Chichihar, saving up to twenty thousand yen (an absurdly huge sum in those days) from the gold dust her miner customers paid her with. Avoiding a Russian-Chinese clash (possibly the alleged Blagoveshchensk massacre of 1900?) she returned to Vladivostok with her earnings and opened a brothel under her own name. She shortly became known as the local Big Sister or Amazon.

After a brief return to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War, she came back to Russia and settled in the gold-mining area of Zeya with a suitcase stuffed with Japanese remedies, which sold immediately; once she had cash in hand, she set up an even larger brothel, with twenty women and ten chefs.

Kiku earned military medals along with the nickname of Siberia O-Kiku for her collaboration with the Japanese Army upon their Siberian invasion in 1918, trading on her Korean and Chinese connections to work as a successful spy in conditions of great danger. She became partly paralyzed afterward, settling in Harbin with her friend O-Tsuma to sell Russian sweets and live quietly. She died in 1924 at the age of forty-seven.

Yamamoto Kikuko was born in 1884 in Kumamoto; her poverty-stricken family sold her to a restaurant/brothel in Seoul when she was seven. By 1916, having wandered through Korea, China, and Siberia, she too had ended up in Blagoveshchensk, where she ran a bar called the Aurora Palace. There (at least according to one account, which seems a little too dramatic to be true, but who knows) she fell in love with Sun Huating, a sworn brother of Zhang Zuolin. Hearing that he was about to be executed by the Kantogun, she summoned his underlings and rushed the place of execution along with them on horseback, brandishing a dagger. This dramatic rescue saw her established as a bandit chief in her own right (Sun Huating felt she was better suited to leadership than he was), known as Manchuria O-Kiku, with a hundred underlings; the safe-conduct passes she issued for her territory were considered the gold standard. She died in 1923 at the age of thirty-nine.

Sources
https://comic.k-manga.jp/title/2069/pv (Japanese) Manga about Manchuria O-Kiku (click the orange rectangle to see inside)

Furuya Kiyoko was born in Kumamoto in 1875; her maiden name was Ihoshi. She was two years old when the Satsuma Rebellion broke out in Kyushu, a civil war which left Kumamoto Prefecture devastated. Relying on the Japan-Hawaii Immigration Convention of 1886, her family left Japan when she was eleven to work as laborers on the Hawaii sugar cane plantations.

The conditions there were appalling, with Japanese laborers living in camps and frequently beaten while working out their indentures. Kiyoko’s family stayed on after their contracts expired, unable to earn enough money to go home as inflation rose in Japan. It was there that she met Furuya Komahei, a shopboy for a white-owned liquor store who spoke fluent English and was also a black belt in judo. She was probably twenty or in her late teens when they married, opening a general goods store on Honolulu’s bustling King Street; she did the accounting and kept the store solvent. Over the next few years, Hawaii’s sovereignty was to fall in a coup d’etat followed by annexation to the United States; Kiyoko’s personal life was also upset when Komahei was arrested in 1896 for involvement in opium smuggling, caught up with the maverick Japanese missionary and coffee planter Hoshina Ken’ichiro.

As Hawaii became an ever more unfavorable environment for the Japanese, Kiyoko and Komahei picked up and went. First they returned to Japan, where they procured a large quantity of Japanese goods and headed for Cape Town in South Africa, arriving there in 1897 after a six-month journey via Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bombay.

They settled down to found the Mikado Shokai trading house. Although trouble seemed to follow them, with the Boer War breaking out in 1898, orders placed by the English military helped keep their new business afloat. They also served as brokers for the British Museum when it purchased East Asian antiques. Eventually they were employing over a dozen people, two thirds of them white. Kiyoko, almost the only Japanese woman in Africa [citation needed, sorry, I don’t know how to go about researching this] at this point in time, served as a big sister and mother to the young Japanese men working there, while taking an active part in running the store and traveling back and forth to Japan to procure goods.

By the age of forty, in 1915, she was homesick enough to settle in Japan for good. Komahei joined her permanently eight years later as British prejudice against the Japanese worsened; he built them a mansion in fashionable Hakone and continued to do business under the Mikado name, until the Great Kanto Earthquake killed him and his employees at work in Yokohama in September 1923. Kiyoko moved in with Komahei’s niece and her husband, who had worked with them in Cape Town, and adopted one of their children. Decorated by the government for her charitable donations (including the elementary school in Komahei’s home village as well as temples and shrines), she died in 1929 at the age of fifty-four.

Sources
https://www.ndl.go.jp/kaleido/e/entry/14/1.html (English) There are not a lot of sources which mention Kiyoko or even Komahei that I could find online; this touches only briefly on Komahei’s life but offers a lot of interesting background and does include a picture of both of them and Komahei’s niece Kimiko.

Sonobe Hideo was born in 1870 up north in Sendai; her birth name was Kusaka Tarita (a first name meaning “enough,” possibly in the sense of “enough daughters already,” as she was number six). Her father was a stablemaster for the local lord, and she spent her early youth riding around on his horses and driving everyone to distraction. In 1886, the Jikishin Kage-ryu swordmaster Satake Kanryusai came to town with his wife Shigeo, a master of the naginata (polearm), to give a demonstration of their martial arts, fascinating Tarita, who joined him as a student (in spite of violent opposition from her family).

She helped out behind the scenes while learning the naginata from Kanryusai and Shigeo, becoming a certified master in 1888 at the age of eighteen. Kanryusai gave her the name Hideo in commemoration, which she used for the rest of her life (written with the characters 秀, excellent, and 雄, male, it is usually a man’s name, but was apparently intended to mean “superior to the men”; the “o” may also have been in honor of the same character in Shigeo’s name).

In 1891 Hideo married Yoshioka Gosaburo, a fellow swordmaster, but found herself widowed within only a few years. She fostered out her young daughter and continued her work as a traveling swordmaster. In 1896 the Satakes made her the head of the Jikishin Kage-ryu Naginata school, and in the same year she married Sonobe Masatoshi, a swordmaster in a related school, using his family name thereafter. While looking after the home and taking care of his mother and his children from a previous marriage, she continued to practice the naginata, defeating her husband every time they met in the dojo.

In 1899 she was the only woman to participate in the 4th All-Japan Kendo Tournament, handily defeating several formidable opponents, most of them close to a foot taller than she was. Thereafter, she taught naginata at her husband’s martial arts school in Kobe, the Kobukan, while also offering classes at regional women’s normal schools and private lessons to the nobility. “Keep the naginata in mind all the time, whether you’re sweeping the floor or walking down the street,” she advised. She continued to rack up an impressive record of tournament wins and teaching experience; in 1930 she took part in a woman’s match at the Imperial Palace against her student Yamauchi Sachiko (the former princess who ended up not marrying the Taisho Emperor, in favor of Kujo Sadako), which—amazingly—can be seen on video here.

Hideo founded her own naginata dojo, the Shutokukan, in 1936. Said to have lost only two matches throughout her life, she died in 1963 at the age of ninety-three. Training in her school of naginata is still an active concern.

Sources
https://koryu.com/library/wwj4/ (English) Article on Hideo and her martial arts practice
https://www.myday.com.tw/a_myday/product_view.php?apiname=api_japan_yahoo&itemcode=e1088243017 (Chinese) Sorry for the weird site link; this painting seems to show Satake Shigeo (on the left) fighting with naginata

Fuchizawa Noe was born in 1850 in Iwate, where her father was a farmer and teacher. Unlucky enough to be born the same year as a major fire, along with ongoing poor harvests, she was fostered out as a baby; her foster parents, the Hamadas, were affectionate, but her foster father died when she was six, after which her foster mother Karu raised her alone, having her educated to the extent possible in the village. At thirteen Noe was indentured to a local shoe store, remaining there until her marriage to the owner’s son at twenty-three. It went badly and she was soon divorced, returning to her birth family to live with a brother. Like Sono Teruko, she took up reading Fukuzawa Yukichi’s work and discovered an urge to study in America.

In 1879, her chance came by way of working as a maid with the family of the engineer Gervaise Purcell, who was returning to America. She spent a year with the Purcells and then went to live with the Prince family in San Francisco, studying English while she worked. She was baptized in 1882.

In the same year, she gave in to her foster mother’s pleas to return to Japan; at thirty-two, she entered Doshisha Girls’ School, leaving three years later when she could no longer afford the fees. She became a teacher first at Toyo Eiwa Girls’ School and then at Hitotsubashi Higher Girls’ School, interpreting for her former employer Miss Prince. After teaching at a series of girls’ schools in the south, building lifelong connections with some of her students, she kept a stationery store for some time in Tokyo, until 1904 when her foster mother Karu died.

In 1905, Noe visited Korea at the invitation of Viscount Okabe Nagamoto and his wife Okako, whom she had met on the boat home from America. She was appalled by the situation of Korean women, whom she found to be shut up inside their homes and required to submit blindly to their menfolk. Making a decision to devote the rest of her life to Korean girls’ education, she founded the Japan-Korea Women’s Association in early 1906, with the support of various eminent Koreans. In May she opened Meishin Girls’ School (later Sookmyung Girls’ School). Lee Jeong-sook, its first principal, thus became the first woman principal in Korea, while Noe served as dean (they were said to rely on each other to the point of telepathy). The school started out unpromisingly with five students, thanks to its stringent rule of taking only the purest of noble blood and to general disinterest in girls’ education. Subjects included Japanese, morals, sewing, and arithmetic among others. They resorted to a student dormitory because girls of high birth couldn’t be seen walking in the streets, requiring a carriage or a veil; when the school eventually outgrew the dormitory, they settled for confusing the eyes of passersby by having the students wear uniform. The language gap was a struggle. However, by 1936 the student body was to have grown to over 500.

Carefully selected and educated as they were, the Sookmyong students were by no means resigned to their colonial suzerains, taking part in the March First liberation movement of 1919 and holding a four-month strike against Japanese teachers and Japanizing education in 1927. Although she did not sympathize with the students’ views, Noe did her best to protect them according to her own lights, juggling connections with the Korean Governor-General and the local churches and women’s associations, having arrested students released on her own recognizance and allowing them to graduate without a stain on their records. She was dedicated to the peaceful “merging” of Japan and Korea, representing at best the “benevolent” side of colonialism while still committed to doing what she saw as the right thing, and in her own way contributing to women’s education in Korea.

Noe met in 1921 with Yajima Kajiko and Kubushiro Ochimi upon their visit to Korea to found a Korean branch of the WCTU, of which she promptly became chair. Known in her old age for spending the winters wearing hats knitted by her students, she died in 1936 at the age of eighty-six. Her funeral was held at her school and she was buried in Seoul (although after the Korean War her remains were moved to a temple in her Iwate home town). Sookmyung Women’s University remains a thriving concern in South Korea; its website names Lee Jeong-sook and the Korean royal family as participants in its founding, but does not refer by name to Noe.

Sources
https://nagoyawsrg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/essays2008.pdf (English) Essay going into more detail about Japan’s colonial history in Korea as it relates to Noe.

[Here we go back in chronological order for several weeks, on account of I found a list including several interesting people I hadn’t come across before]

Kusunose Kita was born in 1836 in Kochi, a rice merchant’s daughter; her maiden name was Kesamaru (or else she may not have had a maiden name [I never understand how things before 1868 worked]). At twenty-one she married Kusunose Minoru, a local samurai, who taught her kendo and other martial arts. They had no children, so Kita became head of the family upon Minoru’s death in 1874.

Although as family head Kita was required to pay taxes, being a woman she was not allowed to vote in the 1878 district election. In protest she withheld her taxes until a warning letter arrived; in response, she sent the prefectural government a letter stating that rights and duties should run in tandem, and if they wouldn’t let her vote she wasn’t going to pay her taxes either. The matter went all the way up to the Home Ministry. When a law permitting local district assemblies to set their own election rules was passed in 1880, Kita’s district was the first in Japan to recognize women’s suffrage (although restricted to women heads of households).

While the law was overturned again in 1884, Kita used her protest experience to support the Risshisha freedom and civil rights movement as well as the women’s rights movement, giving speeches around Shikoku and offering houseroom to visiting activists, including Kishida Toshiko. She took the platform herself for debates, ribbing a Western-learned opponent with “He may speak in English, but I’m going to speak in Japanese.” In her old age she took a Buddhist nun’s tonsure and helped run several charity ventures, including a school for the blind and deaf. Known as “Granny Civil Rights,” she died in 1920 at the age of eighty-four.

Sources
https://note.com/yoshizuka/n/nb002464d1f11 (Japanese/English) Photograph, memorial, manga excerpt etc.

Mikajima Yoshiko was born in 1886 in Saitama, in a village that shared her family name, where her father was the elementary school principal. She went to the prefectural Normal School for Girls, where she began to write poems, but dropped out due to illness (because of the money needed for her care, her two younger half-brothers went into indenture after finishing elementary school; one was much later to be discovered by Kurosawa Akira and become the actor Hidari Bokuzen).

Upon her recovery, in 1908, she became an elementary school teacher and started submitting her poetry to the Women’s Literature magazine [edited by Kawai Suimei, whose wife Shimamoto Hisae is one of the sources regularly drawn on here], where her work drew the eye of Yosano Akiko, the leading woman poet of the time, who invited her to join the Shinshisha poets’ group. Yoshiko was teaching in a remote village at the time, but the magazine and correspondence with its other readers were among her lifelines, along with books and newspaper clippings sent by her brothers (working at a bookstore and a newspaper publisher’s respectively).

In 1911, Hiratsuka Raicho founded Seito [Bluestocking] and Yoshiko, drawn by the magazine’s rhetoric, became its 53rd group member. Bluestocking first carried her poems in March 1912, and would do so frequently thereafter. In 1914, she took the bold step of moving in with the poet Kurakata Kan’ichi, an affair reflected in the proliferation of love poems in her work at the time. She was quickly disillusioned, however, by the mundanity of his demands—“do my laundry, mend my suit” and so on. He began to hit her; she had a baby; she kept writing.

In 1921 she joined the Araragi poets’ group. When one of its other members, the married physicist Ishiwara Jun, caused a scandal through an affair with the poet Hara Asao, Yoshiko defended her friend Asao in print and was ejected from Araragi membership (while Asao and Ishiwara ended up settling down together). Later, Yoshiko’s partner Kurakata, who had spent time in Osaka for work, came back to Tokyo with a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, who lived with the family for two years. [Refreshingly, almost the only traces of Kurakata online now are in service to articles about Yoshiko. So there.]

Yoshiko died in 1927 at the age of forty, leaving a thirteen-year-old daughter, Minami, and about six thousand poems. Minami was later instrumental in having her mother’s writing published and memorialized.

Sources
Mori 2008
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157734/three-tanka (English) Poems by Yoshiko, translated by James Garza

Horiai Setsuko was born in 1886 in Morioka, north Japan, the daughter of a regional bureaucrat. In her first year at Morioka Girls’ School, early in her teens, she met Ishikawa Hajime, a year ahead of her at the regional high school and the son of a local priest. They were drawn to each other immediately—he was apparently attracted by Setsuko’s cuteness and her violin playing. After her graduation in 1902, she became an elementary school teacher. She had a number of offers for marriage, but had eyes for no one but Hajime. Her parents were not thrilled about this—he wasn’t strong, he was intent on the risky venture of making his name as a poet, he had quit high school before graduation—but she insisted, telling her father she was pregnant with Hajime’s child (she wasn’t) in order to gain his permission to marry.

Their engagement dragged on for some time as Hajime, now calling himself Takuboku, wandered around Tokyo and Iwate trying to publish a book of poetry; he had become an admirer of the Myojo group led by Yosano Akiko and her husband Tekkan. Setsuko refused to change her mind; they were finally married in 1905 (Takuboku, traveling in Sendai, missed his own wedding), and after a brief period in Morioka, when he published a poetry magazine and she wrote for it, settled in nearby Shibutami Village. There, their daughter Kyoko was born and Takuboku tried to pay the rent as an elementary school teacher. He liked the work, but was fired after a year when he led a strike against the principal.

They were to be poor and struggling for the rest of their lives; Takuboku worked in Hokkaido as a wandering reporter for a year or two and then moved to Tokyo, where he got a job as proofreader for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, but all his salary went on movie tickets or prostitutes or whatever else caught his eye. He borrowed, notably from his lifelong friend Kindaichi Kyosuke, to pay the rent; people put up with him for some reason, apparently not alone the excellence of his poetry.

Setsuko worked as a teacher in Hokkaido for a while, supporting her mother-in-law without pleasure on either part and cursing her husband for sending no money to support the family. They all moved to Tokyo in 1909, where Setsuko had two more children, Shin’ichi, who died as a baby, and Fusae (who was born after her father’s death). Takuboku died of TB in 1912 and Setsuko a year later, at the age of twenty-seven, leaving her husband’s diaries to a literary friend rather than burning them as he had instructed. Her father brought up their daughters.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.tohokukanko.jp/en/attractions/detail_1551.html (English) Beautiful house in Morioka where Setsuko and Takuboku lived very briefly after their marriage
https://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2013/10/dark-wings-of-night-four-tanka-by.html (English) Poems by Setsuko in translation

Yanagiwara Byakuren was born in 1885 in Tokyo, originally named Akiko, the child of Count Yanagiwara Sakimitsu and his concubine Okutsu Ryo. Her aunt Naruko was a concubine of the Meiji Emperor and the mother of his heir. In 1900 Akiko was pulled out of school to marry Viscount Kitakoji Suketake, but she found him both cruel and childish, and five years later, divorced at the age of twenty and leaving her son Isamitsu with her ex-husband’s family, she returned home.

She began to attend the Toyo Eiwa Girls’ School, where she became friends with Muraoka Hanako, as well as studying waka poetry with Sasaki Nobutsuna and his group, encountering luminaries like Ishikawa Takuboku and Yosano Akiko.

As a nobleman’s daughter and one of the famed “Three Beauties” of the period (along with Kujo Takeko, later a close friend of hers, and Hayashi Kimuko), Akiko was a desirable quantity even as a bluestocking divorceé. In 1917 she was married again to Ito Den’emon, a Kyushu coal miner turned self-made mine owner twenty-five years older than she, who paid her family a colossal bride-price. She found herself living with a collection of his and his relatives’ children as well as his mistresses in various guises, doing her best to have her stepdaughter Shizuko educated at her alma mater, but finding life there very difficult. Isolated, lonely, abused and bored in Ito’s luxurious residence in the Chikushi coal fields, Akiko threw herself into her poetry, adopting the pen name Byakuren or “white lotus.” Her first collection, Fumie (the name of the icons Japanese Christians were forced to tread on to prove they had given up the faith) had been published in 1915; by 1919 she had published two more collections and a play.

It was through her play’s serialization in the magazine Kaiho [Liberation] that she met its editor Miyazaki Ryusuke. Seven years younger than she, the son of the philosopher and social activist Miyazaki Toten, Ryusuke took after his father’s socialist tendencies. In 1921, Byakuren traveled with her husband Ito for a visit to Tokyo. Ito returned first to Kyushu; after seeing him off, Byakuren disappeared—but not before writing him a Dear John letter and having it published in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. (“This is the last letter I shall write to you as your wife… I have chosen this path through the dictates of the best of my rationality and bravery.” Outlining her efforts to make her marriage work and her misery in Ito’s household, she went on “Fortunately, I have been granted someone who loves me, and through that love I am trying to recover myself now… With all my strength I now bid farewell to you, ignorer of women’s personal dignity, and leave you in order to protect and develop my individual freedom and honor. PS: I am sending my jewels back to you by registered mail.”) She and Ryusuke had eloped. Sensational in all its aspects, the event became known as the “Byakuren Incident.”

Her birth family tracked them down and kept her prisoner in their home for some time, during which her (and Ryusuke’s) son Kaori was born. In 1923 she and Den’emon were officially divorced; she and Ryusuke promptly married. He was ill for some years with tuberculosis, during which time Byakuren kept the family afloat with her writing while her mother-in-law Tsuchi saw to the house and the children (Tsuchi, who had more or less eloped with her husband Toten and seen their family through the ups and downs incurred by his passionate activism, was an old hand at all this). After Ryusuke’s recovery, he returned to political activism while Byakuren continued to write and publish poetry and short stories, starting a poetry magazine in 1934. Their daughter Fuki was born in 1925; she and Byakuren’s son with her first husband, Kitakoji Isamitsu, both became poets in adulthood (Isamitsu, whose feelings about his mother remained complicated to the last, spent some of his adolescence living with her new family).

In 1945, four days before the end of World War II, Kaori was killed on the battlefield. In response, Byakuren formed a bereaved mothers’ association which developed an international reach in its work toward peace and international understanding. She died in 1967 at the age of eighty-two, tended in her old age by Ryusuke and Fuki. (The former Ito residence was opened to the public in 2007, featuring a ceremony in which Ito Den’emon’s grandson Dennosuke, Shizuko’s son, shook hands with Akiko’s grandson Koseki.)

Sources
Mori 1996
Nakae
https://www.fujingaho.jp/culture/archives/g33452089/fujingaho115-culture-200731/ (Japanese) Photos and materials from the time

Makiko Vories was born in 1884 in Hyogo. Her maiden name was Hitotsuyanagi and her father was a member of the House of Peers; her mother Eiko worked with Yajima Kajiko and the WCTU to promote monogamy. After studying music during high school in Kobe, Makiko moved in as a kind of au pair with her brother Keizo and his wife Kameko, the daughter of Hirooka Asako; Keizo had taken her name and inherited Asako’s businesses.

In 1909 she left for the US to attend Bryn Mawr College, Tsuda Umeko’s alma mater, which offered a scholarship for women from Asia. While there, she worked in educational practice with Alice Bacon and was baptized as a Presbyterian.

In 1919, after Makiko’s return to Japan, Keizo hired the American architect William Merrill Vories to build him a house (Vories, who had come to Japan as an English teacher and been fired for his missionary work, then had virtually no actual experience in architecture). Makiko served as the architect’s interpreter, and then as his wife (society disapproved of the daughter of a nobleman marrying one of those foreigners, but Asako spoke up for them). He officially took her name and became Hitotsuyanagi Merrell (Mereru) on paper. They moved to Omi-Hachiman on Lake Biwa in west Japan, where they were to spend the rest of their lives. In addition to Vories’ highly successful architect’s office, they worked as missionaries and founded the Omi Brotherhood School, originally the Seiyuen Kindergarten aimed at small children with working parents, which still exists today as Vories Gakuen (mostly famous for baseball).

Vories took Japanese citizenship during the war. He died in 1964 and Makiko five years later, at the age of eighty-five.

Sources
https://kajimaya-asako.daido-life.co.jp/column/27.html (Japanese) Photos of Makiko and her husband as well as some of his buildings
http://www.vories.co.jp/work/special.html (Japanese) Selection of Vories’ architectural work

Hayashi Kimuko was born in 1884 in Tokyo; her birth name was Kin. Her father Toyotake Wakunidayu was a joruri reciter, and her mother Takemoto Soko one of his disciples, and later a noted reciter in her own right. At age seven Kimuko was adopted by Uchida Hana, who ran a noted ryotei frequented by the leading politicians of the day, to be trained as her successor. She began studying traditional dance at nine in the Nishikawa-ryu school, along with the koto, the shamisen, the tea ceremony, and flower arrangement. At twelve she began to write waka poetry. By her teens she was considered one of the three great beauties of the period, along with Kujo Takeko and Yanagiwara Byakuren.

In 1901, at seventeen, she was married to the politician Hinata Terutake, who had made good as a broker in Hawaii promoting Japanese immigration; he had come to the ryotei and fallen in love with her at first sight. Although not in love with him, she appreciated his sincerity and gentlemanly manners, and the marriage eventually took place in the face of Kimuko’s adoptive mother’s protests. Kimuko and Hinata, who had been baptized in Hawaii, attended church together, and in 1905 moved into an enormous mansion known after its location as the “Tabata Palace,” where Kimuko held court as mistress of the salon (and learned to like the snakes her husband kept as pets for his amusement; the newspapers claimed she kept snakes up her kimono sleeves and bathed in perfume). They had six children between 1902 and 1913. In between, Kimuko found the time to study languages, art, and theology, as well as to write and publish well-regarded stories, essays, and poetry. In 1913 she became involved in the New Real Women’s group with Nishikawa Fumiko and others, arguing against loveless marriages and marriage with men who did not respect women.

In 1914, Hinata was arrested for alleged involvement with the Oura Incident (a vote-buying scandal involving military expenditures); he became unbalanced in prison and died in 1918 in a psychiatric hospital. Kimuko sold the mansion and focused on her existing sideline, taken up when her husband’s businesses wavered, producing and selling Aurora beauty lotion (she used her already legendary looks to put the product over) in addition to her writing and dancing. Her cosmetic work put her in contact with the pharmacist and poet Hayashi Ryuha, nine years younger than she, whom she called her first love; they married in 1919 and opened their own pharmacy, the brief gap between husbands (as well as Hayashi’s age and Kimuko’s existing children) setting off an enormous scandal. (Her oldest daughter Chie, then seventeen, remembered being told “it’s time for you to stand on your own two feet” at the time.) Kimuko found support in the activist Hiratsuka Raicho; although Raicho’s Bluestocking group had been ideological opponents of Kimuko’s New Real Women, both of them had set out on unconventional marriages with younger men, leading Raicho to sympathize.

In 1924, Kimuko launched her own “Hayashi-ryu” dance school, focusing on creative and folktale-based dance; she produced numerous dances of her own, some drawing on Western concepts and music as well, and promoted dance as a source of physical and mental health for women. She kept her dance lesson fees low and taught her students classical literature on the side; in addition, she and her husband both wrote poetry for the children’s literary magazine Akai Tori [Red Bird]. Kazue, the fourth of her six daughters, eventually inherited the school (of the other children, Chie married a pastor, Nana became a typist, studied in the States, and married a judge, Harumitsu was a sailor and an actor, Kiyomitsu was a cameraman, Saeko wrote for radio, and Momoko and Midori died in their twenties).

In 1945, just as Midori was dying of tuberculosis, Hayashi got another woman pregnant; Kimuko told him that the child would need a father and sent him off, although they never formally divorced. She received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 5th class, in 1966, and died the following year at the age of 82.

Sources
Mori 2014
https://kusanomido.com/study/history/japan/shouwa/97010/ (Japanese) Photos of Kimuko, her mother, her first husband and others.