Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Kawasaki Natsu was born in 1889 in Nara, the daughter of a watchmaker. She lost her mother shortly after her birth, skipped grades in elementary school and entered the Nara Girls’ Higher Normal School at thirteen (having apparently fudged her birth records to appear two years older). After graduation, she taught for three years at her hometown elementary school and at nineteen went to Tokyo to enter the Tokyo Girls’ Higher Normal School. There she discovered Hiratsuka Raicho’s Bluestocking and the poetry of Yosano Akiko, volunteered at Noguchi Yuka’s Futaba Kindergarten, scandalized her professors by writing essays in the style of spoken rather than literary Japanese, and only just avoided expulsion as a dangerous element.

Natsu graduated in 1912 and went to teach at a girls’ high school in Hokkaido, where she encouraged her students (she was in charge of essay-writing for all 500 girls) to write freely and with imagination, about themselves as well as the texts they read. She returned to Tokyo in 1916 for graduate study on the psychology of creativity, at the same time teaching writing at her alma mater the Girls’ Higher Normal School, and later at Tokyo Women’s University upon its founding.

In 1921, the well-to-do architect Nishimura Isaku asked her to recommend a school for his daughter Aya, but she couldn’t think of one that would do. The Yosanos, who happened to be there, suggested that they start one, and so Natsu found herself in charge of the newly established Bunka Gakuin (Culture Academy), the only professional educator among teachers who also included Nishimura himself, the Yosanos, and the composer Yamada Kosaku (Tsuneko Gauntlett’s little brother) among other notable figures. The school, like theJiyu Gakuin started in the same year by Hani Motoko, focused on individual creativity and freedom; students wore their own clothes (Western-style clothing was recommended, giving the school a name for high fashion), and girls and boys were educated together for the first time in Japan’s history. It was to produce a long line of accomplished alumni, largely in the arts and humanities. [I haven’t found much in English about Nishimura himself, but he was a pioneering architect and iconoclast and had nine children, of whom Aya, the reason the school was founded, was the oldest; she eventually succeeded her father as principal of the school herself. I also came across a fascinating obituary for Aya’s sister Sono.]

Natsu’s classes were popular; she would begin a geography class by asking her students to imagine themselves on a train headed north from Ueno Station, following the map to Nasu where they would encounter a nine-tailed fox spirit or to Nakoso where they would fight a historical battle alongside warlords. Eating oysters and admiring horses, they would take ship (in imagination) to Hokkaido, at which point Natsu would pause to promise her students she would take them to Hokkaido for real some day and they could all go skiing. She also taught them about feminism and the proletarian revolution, and argued that the goddess Amaterasu was a human being like the rest of them, all topics which at the time could have been grounds for jailing.

In 1943 the school was closed down for sedition. In response Natsu devoted herself to the support of her friends who were down on their luck or imprisoned for their left-wing sensibilities, giving houseroom to fugitives hiding from the authorities, as well as continuing to work for women’s rights and women’s suffrage. (Biographies of more prominent activists tend with clockwork regularity to include lines like “…and Kawasaki Natsu brought her food and clothing when she was in prison” or “…Kawasaki Natsu on the left in the photo of the covert gathering.”) After the war she became a Diet member representing the Socialist Party, remaining in office for six years; she also taught intermittently (at schools now run by her own former students), demonstrated in the Anpo Riots, and worked to bring together the Japan Mothers’ Union as a force for social change. She died in 1966 at the age of seventy-seven.

Sources
Mori 1996

Kamichika Ichiko was born in 1888 in Nagasaki, where her father was a doctor of Chinese medicine; the baby of five children, she grew up in poverty after the deaths of her father and oldest brother. She finished higher elementary school in 1904 and started working as a teacher’s aide, leaving her job in only three days to go back to school herself. She was eventually able to graduate from the Tsuda Eigaku Juku girls’ school in Tokyo (housekeeping for the painter Takehisa Yumeji and proofreading for literary magazines to make ends meet meanwhile). Tsuda Umeko herself reminded Ichiko that she wouldn’t learn to speak English from books alone, and had her move in with one of the American English teachers, which did wonders for Ichiko’s English-speaking abilities.

While still a student she became involved with Hiratsuka Raicho’s Bluestockings, publishing translations in the magazine; although employed as a teacher at a girls’ school up north in Hirosaki, she lost her job when her association with the Bluestockings was discovered. Returning to Tokyo, she worked with Otake Kokichi and others to found a new women's literary journal called Saffron.

In 1914 Ichiko became a reporter for a Tokyo newspaper (her English skills meant that she was assigned to foreign policy issues, rather than the usual women’s beat), which led to her involvement with the leading socialists of the time. She began a relationship with the anarchist Osugi Sakae (who seems, for good or ill, to have been one of those men who just has something going on regardless of all the good reasons not to get involved with him). “Oh, was that you?” he said at their first meeting. “The Eigaku Juku girl nibbling a roast sweet potato with her head buried in Modern Thought—" Osugi, a believer in free love who was already married to the long-suffering Hori Yasuko, did not keep secrets from Ichiko when he also became involved with the younger writer Ito Noe. “Independence, living separately, freedom!” he said. “If you’re not comfortable with it, it’s because your ideology is still immature.” Ichiko held out until 1916, when she tracked Osugi and Noe down at the Hikagejaya Inn and stabbed him, in what became the famous Hikagejaya Incident. She was sentenced to two years in prison for attempted murder (Osugi survived, to be murdered along with Noe by state terrorism in 1923).

After her release in 1919, she married (a man called Suzuki Atsushi about whom not much seems to be known), had three children, and concentrated on writing, founding a women’s literary magazine with Suzuki and taking part in Hasegawa Shigure’s Nyonin Geijutsu and the left-wing Tane maku hito. She and Suzuki divorced in 1936.

After the war, Ichiko worked in various organizations for women’s rights and democracy. In 1953 she was elected to the National Diet as a Socialist Party representative, remaining in office on and off until 1969 and helping to pass the 1957 Anti-Prostitution Act while there [from Tanaka among my sources, whose book was published in early 1957: “even the most fond among us could hardly believe that the human-flesh capitalism continuing since the Tokugawa period will give way without a fight, and at this important moment in time it is encouraging to have Kamichika Ichiko holding down her seat as a lone woman in the Diet”].

In 1970 she sued to prevent the showing of a movie about the Hikagejaya Incident, and lost on the grounds that the events were “common knowledge." In the same year, she received the national Order of the Sacred Treasure Second Class. She died in 1981 at the age of ninety-three.

Sources
Tanaka
Mori 1996
https://ameblo.jp/yama-chan1/entry-12764066012.html (Japanese) Contains a character map from a drama about the Hikagejaya Incident, showing just how complicated it was, as well as photos of Ichiko at various ages

Makita Raku was born in 1888 in Kyoto, where her family ran a kimono shop. Gifted in mathematics from an early age, her teacher at the Kyoto Girls’ Higher School recommended that she attend the Women’s Higher Normal School in Tokyo, then the highest educational level possible for a girl, and convinced her reluctant father to let her go. She entered its science department in 1907, where she worked with the mathematician Hayashi Tsuruichi. Graduating in 1911, she went on to the graduate department, until 1913 when Tohoku Imperial University became the first university in Japan to open its doors to women (the university-level schools for women at that time did not bear the name). [Tohoku University made the decision all on its own, and received a notice from the Ministry of Education along the lines of “Who gave you permission to do any such thing,” which the president at the time, Sawayanagi Masataro, ignored.]

Encouraged by her teachers, Raku passed the entrance exam and, along with the chemists Kuroda Chika and Tange Ume, became one of the first women in Japan officially to attend a university. There, studying math with Hayashi, she “slept with a math textbook in [her] arms, and walked around the campus by day solving problems in [her] head, passing by people without even noticing them.” She loved it. Although some of the male students protested the “intrusion” of women, and the new women students had been told “not to make their male classmates aware of them as women” by the college president upon entrance, Raku remembered being on good terms with her classmates, who became like brothers to her. She published several research papers (including “The squares in a regular polygon” and “The convex quadrilateral in which an infinite number of squares may be inscribed,” for readers who unlike me actually have a head for math), and upon her graduation in 1916 became, along with Kuroda Chika, the first woman Bachelor of Science in Japan. Interviewed at the time by a newspaper, she stated her intention to balance family life with research.

Raku went back to the Women’s Higher Normal School to teach, until her marriage to the painter Kanayama Heizo, five years older than she and like her from West Japan, in 1919. “I’ve found that I can only do one thing at a time,” she told the media. “School and home at once are too much.” While giving up teaching, she indicated that she meant to continue with her own research, “since you can do math at home.” In 1933 she published (under her married name) a “Bibliography on the theory of linkages” containing 306 works, which was later cited by the Austrian mathematician Anton Mayer (and continues to appear in citations inside and outside Japan today): “I’ve never been so happy,” Raku wrote to her husband, who was away sketching.

Although that was her last publication, she continued to attend high-level math lectures and read on her own time, while supporting Kanayama’s work as a barely earning artist (his paintings were well regarded but didn’t earn him a living; she sometimes joined him on sketching trips, as well as studying Japanese dance together). After his death in 1964, she spent her last years working to make sure his paintings were preserved and visible in museums. Asked if she regretted giving up her career, she said “I chose a path I enjoyed. My husband’s work was fulfilling for me, and I have no regrets whatsoever.” She died in 1977 at the age of eighty-eight.

Sources
https://web.tohoku.ac.jp/manabi/past-innovation/makita/ (Japanese) Pictures of Raku in university and later with her husband

Marian Irwin was born in 1888 in Tokyo, where her father Robert Irwin was an American diplomat and her mother, Takechi Iki, a samurai’s daughter; their marriage is said to have been the first legal marriage between Japanese and American nationals. Irwin, fascinated by Japan from youth, also became close friends with the leading politician Inoue Kaoru through his work, and as their families are said to have been close, Iki presumably knew Kaoru’s wife Takeko. Marian, the second of six children, left Japan after high school to attend Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe Colleges in the United States, earning a Ph.D. in biology in 1919.

In 1921, she served as aide to Inoue Hideko (no relation), then president of the Women’s Peace Organization of Japan, in attendance at a national conference on disarmament. She became a distinguished biologist, working at the Rockefeller Institute and Woods Hole for many years; her field was cell permeability. (Marian was the only one of her siblings to settle outside Japan; her brothers were businessmen and her older sister Bella founded a Froebel-style kindergarten in Tokyo.) In 1933 she married her colleague Winthrop Osterhout. She died in 1973 at the age of eighty-five.

Sources
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2020/10/11/robert-irwin-1/ (English) Interesting article, largely about Marian’s father Robert and his granddaughter Yukiko.

Hara Asao was born in 1888 in Miyagi. Her family was well-to-do, and although her father (a Westernized, Christian salt merchant with high-collar tastes) died when she was twelve, he directed her mother to spend all the family’s assets on Asao’s needs, and she was able to go on to high school. Illness forced her to drop out after two years, and she spent her recovery reading all the classics, Japanese and foreign, that she could get her hands on.

In 1904 she and her mother moved to Tokyo, where she entered the Japan Women’s School of Art. There she studied poetry as well as becoming close to her English literature teacher, Ohara Yoitsu. When the married Ohara got her pregnant, possibly through rape, she switched schools due to the scandal. Asao refused to listen to his demands that she abort the child; their son Chiaki was born in 1907 and they were perfunctorily married the following year, but the marriage dissolved very quickly and Asao threw herself into writing poetry while teaching at a girls’ school near her hometown. In 1909 her poems caught the eye of Yosano Akiko, and from there on she was published in various leading literary journals of the time, including Subaru and Hiratsuka Raicho’s Bluestocking. Her first volume of poetry, Tearstains, appeared in 1913.

She married the aspiring painter Shoji Isami (an old classmate’s brother who had helped her start school in Tokyo) in 1914 and divorced him in 1919, when the stress of his playboy tendencies and disregard for her and her children had begun to affect her health; in the interim their son Yasumi had been born in 1915, and her second volume of poetry published in 1916.

In 1920 she moved to Sendai in her home region and met the poet Ishiwara Jun, who was also a physics professor at Tohoku University who had introduced the theory of relativity to Japan. Ishiwara, who had a wife and five children, fell hard for the beautiful Asao; she fled to Tokyo to stay with her close friend Mikajima Yoshiko, pleading with Ishiwara’s wife “Don’t let him come after me!” He did, though, and she eventually gave in. Reports of their love affair in the newspapers cost Ishiwara his job; Asao and Yoshiko were both expelled from the influential Araragi poets’ group, although Ishiwara was permitted to remain a member (blame the woman). He and Asao moved together to rural Chiba where they lived quietly, Asao writing poetry—her third volume was published in 1921—and painting while Ishiwara worked as a science journalist. They also started their own poetry journal in 1924, along with various non-Araragi poet friends including Kitahara Hakushu (Eguchi Ayako’s ex-husband).

By 1928 Asao’s relationship with the controlling and occasionally unfaithful Ishiwara had deteriorated, especially due to her shock at Yoshiko's sudden death and his failure to support her; although he wrote a foreword to her fourth volume of poetry, published in 1928, vowing to do better as a husband, she left him later that year. Later in life she continued to write while supporting herself as a bar madam and occasionally an actress. She returned to her hometown in her late forties, assisted by friends and her two sons, and died in 1969 at the age of eighty-two. (She spent her later years with her younger son’s family; her daughter-in-law Momoko reported that Asao enjoyed housework but was unusually bad at it, knitting exquisite but unwearable socks.) Her sons Chiaki and Yasumi became a movie director and an actor respectively, both using her maiden name of Hara (to judge by the Wikipedia photograph, they both inherited their mother’s beauty and then some). Her poems are now the subject of widespread research, and the yearly Hara Asao Award is given for poetry.

Sources
Nakae
Mori 1996
http://www.haraasao.jp/museum/index.html (Japanese) Site of a museum honoring Asao’s life. Click on any of the list of exhibitions in the left margin for various photographs and reproductions.

Eguchi Ayako was born in Oita in 1888. Her family, a traditional sake brewery, fell into disarray after her father’s attempt at expanding his business failed, with both parents and several siblings dying in short order. Ayako still managed to graduate from high school with top grades; she married a local lawyer at eighteen and lived in comfort, studying traditional music and dance with servants to do the housework. Her husband was unfaithful, however, and in 1915, when he was posted to faraway Tsushima, she divorced him and—with help from Hiratsuka Raicho of Bluestocking magazine—moved to Tokyo on her own.

Through Ikuta Hanayo, another Bluestocking, Ayako met the poet Kitahara Hakushu, who had just divorced his first wife Toshiko. Three years older than she, Hakushu was also a brewer’s child from the south whose family had lost their standing; he and Ayako also shared interests in poetry and in Buddhist practice. He was already a very successful poet who had spent time in prison for adultery with his first wife, although when free to marry their marriage only lasted a year. Ayako moved in with him at a temple outside Tokyo; not surprisingly, they had very little to live on. We scrape together a little money, and yet, she wrote in a poem, your umbrella pitches against the rain and wind. Eventually, after their marriage in 1918, Hakushu’s poems began to sell, and he planned a large Western home for them; at the earth-placating ceremony, however, while he was in the middle of a quarrel with his brother and a friend, Ayako is said to have slipped away with his publisher. She and Hakushu were divorced in 1920 (he married his third wife Kikuko within the year).

Ayako returned to Oita, stayed with Yanagiwara Byakuren for a while, and then went on a pilgrimage in Shikoku. In 1921 she moved to a temple in Kyoto to practice Zen and in 1923 married a priest there, but the marriage lasted only two months; she contemplated becoming a geisha, and for the moment returned again to her hometown, where in 1928 she published a collection of prose poems.

In 1930 she married Nakamura Kaisen, another Kyoto priest, who kept the marriage secret because of his ambitions for promotion within the order; Ayako spent several years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She published a book of poetry in 1934. In 1938 she divorced Kaisen and took the tonsure as a Buddhist nun, living in part on contributions from old friends including Ikuta Hanayo and Hasegawa Shigure.

Ayako died at her childhood home in Oita in 1946, at the age of fifty-eight.

Sources
Mori 2008

Kimura Komako was born in 1887 in Kumamoto, where her family sold fire extinguishers; her maiden name was Kurose. Her grandmother was a singer and she studied shamisen, dance, and theater from early childhood, performing in “children’s kabuki” as well, in part as a way to help support the family: she was eight when the family was bankrupted and her father went to work in Taiwan. She went to needlework school but found it unsatisfying, also studying the Chinese classics and visiting a local church to learn English. After working as a switchboard operator, she had her tuition paid by a family friend at the Kumamoto Girls’ School, where the principal was Yajima Kajiko’s older sister Junko and the school aimed to produce “new women” rather than just the traditional “good wives and wise mothers.” She graduated in 1906.

The friend who had paid her way had a nephew, Kimura Hideo, on whom Komako had a crush. Hopeful of following him to study in America, she entered the Fukuoka Eiwa Girls’ School to improve her English (and apparently picked up a girlfriend in passing), and then went on to study further at the Aoyama Girls’ School in Tokyo. Hideo got Komako pregnant almost immediately upon his return to Japan: their son Shoji (spelled 生死 or “life and death”) was born in 1907. The following year she applied to the Imperial Theatre School for Actresses when it opened and was accepted without an exam, but either prevented from attending by her husband or rejected once the school learned she had had a child before marriage (accounts differ).

In 1909 the Kimuras moved to Tokyo, which they used as a base to travel around promoting Hideo’s kanjizai practice, which lay somewhere among psychotherapy, Buddhism, and spiritualism/woo, based in part on his study with the maverick yoga teacher Pierre Bernard. Komako dressed as the quasi-Buddhist deity Daikokuten to bring in the customers, but they were not especially successful. In 1913 she became one of the founding members of the New Real Women group, along with Nishikawa Fumiko and Miyazaki Mitsuko; they published a journal and offered lectures on women’s rights, working toward women’s suffrage. With Fumiko taking over most of the work, however, Komako went back to acting, becoming a well-paid star at a theater in the Asakusa entertainment district (she also took voice lessons with Miura Tamaki). It may have been at this point that she ran her own theater in Tokyo, performing political protest plays as well as more standard fare.

In 1917 the family traveled to the United States, where Komako performed at Carnegie Hall, met with Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, and marched with American suffragettes. After their return in 1925, she worked as a dance teacher, hoping at one point to start an arts college. Hideo died in 1935; Komako lived until the age of ninety-two, dying in 1980. They had two children; Akari, born in 1911, died in babyhood, while Shoji became a journalist and the publisher of Japan’s first science fiction magazine. His daughter Fujiko followed in her grandmother’s footsteps to become an actress.

Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komako_Kimura (English) Citing the English Wikipedia article because its content, notably different from the Japanese article, seems to be derived largely from contemporary newspaper articles in English; the links in the citations are interesting.
https://unseen-japan.com/kimura-komako/ (English) Long biographical article with photos

Kujo Takeko was born in 1887 in Kyoto, where her father was the abbot of Nishi-Honganji, one of the largest Buddhist temples, and her mother was a concubine (she grew up calling his legitimate wife “Mother”); her maiden name was Otani (a family name still instantly identifiable with the senior Buddhist hierarchy). Intending to make her independent as well as beautiful, her father had her taught poetry and French from her early teens on.

In 1909 she married Baron Kujo Yoshimune [or Yoshitomo or Yoshimasa], a half-brother of then-Imperial Princess Sadako, who proved to be gloomy and unmotivated. They spent the first year of their marriage, along with Takeko’s older brother Kozui (an art collector and possibly a spy) and his wife Kazuko , traveling through Europe to observe the religious practices there; Takeko discovered not only Christianity but the prevalence of community good works. She returned to Japan while Yoshimune stayed in England to study at Cambridge; his original stay, planned for three years, lasted a decade with no signs of his coming home (and only two letters). Meanwhile, Takeko and Kazuko (who was both her brother’s wife and her husband’s sister) had been planning a new women’s project (which eventually merged with an existing school to become Kyoto Women’s University) until Kazuko’s untimely death in 1911.

Takeko continued to work for her Buddhist Women’s Association and to write poetry, which she studied with Sasaki Nobutsuna along with the rebellious fellow poet Yanagiwara Byakuren, who became a close friend. She made herself known in the provinces for her good works (“they say you can cure headaches by scratching your head with the chopsticks I used!” she told Byakuren mischievously). She published a collection of waka poems in 1920, which was also the year Yoshimune finally came home (transformed, apparently, into a good-natured, gentlemanly husband). Their happy married life, living in a temple in Tokyo while Yoshimune worked for a Yokohama bank, was disrupted when the temple burned in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Seeing the efforts made to support the displaced, Takeko resolved to commit herself further to helping the poor. In 1925, she used the royalties from an essay collection to open a free clinic as well as a rehabilitation center for delinquent girls.

She died in 1928 at the age of forty-two, with a play and two more volumes of poetry published posthumously.

Sources
Nakae; Mori 1996
https://www.fujingaho.jp/culture/archives/g33801797/fujingaho115-culture-200831/ (Japanese) Various contemporary photographs of Takeko

Hiratsuka Raicho was born in 1886 in Tokyo, the daughter of a well-to-do senior government official who had studied in Europe; her birth name was Haruko. She graduated from Japan Women’s College (developing a lifelong interest in Zen meditation while a student) in 1906. The next few years were spent studying English and Japanese literature at various schools (including the Eigakujuku founded by Tsuda Umeko), where she studied writing with Ikuta Choko and Morita Sohei. In 1908 Haruko and Morita plunged into a rapidly developing love affair, culminating in an attempt at a love-suicide which it turned out neither of them could bring themselves to go through with. This created an enormous scandal (causing Haruko’s father to lose his job and estranging them until her children were born years later), especially when Morita wrote a novel about it.

In 1911, upon Ikuta’s suggestion that she found a literary magazine run entirely by women, she consulted with her sister’s friend Yasumori Yoshiko and formed an initial editorial board of herself, Yoshiko, Nakano Hatsuko, Kiuchi Teiko, and Mozume Kazuko. The funding for their first issue came from what would have been Haruko’s dowry, handed over by her resigned but supportive mother Tsuya. The magazine was christened Seito [Bluestocking], and Naganuma Chieko drew the illustration for the cover of the inaugural issue, which included a poem by Yosano Akiko and Haruko’s own essay on the theme of “In the beginning, woman was the Sun,” which became a classic of Japanese feminist literature on the spot. The essay called for women’s genius to be released from the strictures of a patriarchal society. It was at this time that she began using the penname Raicho, “thunderbird” or rock ptarmigan.

Other supporters included Hasegawa Shigure, Okada Yachiyo, Mori Shige, and Koganei Kimiko; contributors and assistants included Tamura Toshiko, Nogami Yaeko, Mizuno Senko, Otake Kokichi, Senuma Kayo, Kamichika Ichiko, Ito Noe, Mikajima Yoshiko, and Okamoto Kanoko. Raicho was the moving force, organizing an edition dedicated to discussion of Ibsen’s Nora and her ramifications as well as lecture series and other events. The Bluestocking women became notorious not only for their literary and activist work but also for the “Five-Colored Alcohol Incident” (in which Kokichi went out to a fashionable bar and drank fancy cocktails) and for their in-person observation of the Yoshiwara red-light district (where Raicho chatted with a woman who had attended the same elementary school), identifying them as “decadents,” modern feminists, New Women, distinct from traditional good girls. This era apparently saw a record number of “Noras,” daughters and young wives leaving home with no warning. Raicho took up the gauntlet without hesitation, adding translations of texts by Ellen Key and Emma Goldman to her magazine. Articles by the activist Fukuda Hideko and by Raicho herself earned publication bans from the government.

Raicho spent 1911 and 1912 in a relationship with the “boyish” Kokichi, who liked to affect masculine dress (there is relatively little to be found about this in histories of Raicho, especially in Japanese). In 1914 she moved in with the artist Okumura Hiroshi, nicknamed the “little swallow” because he was (gasp, shock, horror) three years younger than she was. She continued to insist on a common-law marriage until 1941, when wartime asperities made it more convenient to marry officially. In her eyes the relationship was a part of her refusal to engage in the “good wife, wise mother” style of marriage which restricted women’s freedom, but many of the older women in her vicinity, Akiko included, saw it as a feckless young artist leeching off the older and (somewhat) more together Raicho.

Distracted by pregnancy and Okumura’s illness, Raicho passed on editorship of Bluestocking to Ito Noe in 1915; the magazine lasted another year and a bit. Raicho herself later worked as a critic, raised two children (Akemi, born in 1915, and Atsufumi in 1917, both on Raicho’s family register rather than Okumura’s), and engaged in debates on motherhood with Akiko, Yamakawa Kikue, and Yamada Waka. In 1920, she founded the New Women’s Association along with Ichikawa Fusae and Oku Mumeo, fighting for women’s suffrage and greater support for mothers, specifically for an amendment to Article 5 of the Peace Police Law, which prohibited women’s political participation, and a law restricting marriage for men with venereal disease. The former demand was realized two years later (although the latter never came about). With the support of well-known male writers including Sakai Toshihiko, Mori Ogai, and Arishima Takeo, the new Association thrived and Raicho resorted to Western dress to save time amid lecture tours and articles. Three years later she cut her hair (or rather had Okumura cut it for her), becoming the image of the short-bobbed Modern Girl (although her original purpose was to cure her chronic headaches).

Raicho devoted herself after the war to working for world peace through women’s organizations, including opposition to the Vietnam War. She remained the main household breadwinner, albeit with financial support from her birth family. Okumura died in 1964, and Raicho followed him in 1971 at the age of eighty-five.

Sources
Mori 1996; Mori 2008; Tanaka
https://aaww.org/raicho-hiratsuka-beginning-woman-sun/ (English) Brief history of Raicho in comic form
[I can’t find a translation of her fundamental article online, but there is a lot of English material available concerning Raicho via a quick google]

[This got quite long! The Japanese Wikipedia page goes into unbelievable detail.]

Nikaido Tokuyo was born in 1880 in a mountain village in Miyagi. She finished her schooling at fifteen and became an elementary school teacher’s aide in the same year, like many rural girls; her students enjoyed their bouncy young teacher. Deciding to get formal education credentials, she applied first to the Miyagi Normal School, which no longer had a women’s department, and then to the Fukushima Normal School, which told her she had to be a resident of Fukushima; nothing daunted, she got herself adopted (on paper) by the editor of a Fukushima newspaper, started school, and graduated in 1899. At the Normal School she found the old-fashioned gym classes boring, but did well in them as a student teacher, allowed to wear her “sports” outfit (tight sleeves and a hakama) on a daily basis.

Teaching once again, she encountered Naganuma Chieko, the older sister of one of her students; they became lifelong friends. In 1900 she took leave and entered the Women’s Higher Normal School in Tokyo, where she studied pedagogy with Yasui Tetsu as well as gym and poetry. She graduated in 1904 and went to teach at the Ishikawa Girls’ Higher School, where—having expected to teach Japanese—she found herself assigned to gym classes; resentful at first, she found they improved her own health as well as her students’, and began taking gymnastics lessons with Frances Kate Morgan, a local Canadian missionary. Eventually she progressed to coaching local elementary school teachers in gymnastics instruction. A gymnastics demonstration at which students danced the quadrille, with a live band sponsored by the prefectural governor (whose daughter was among the students) was so popular that local high school boys, unable to get tickets, climbed over the fence and caused a minor riot.

Tokuyo was transferred to Kochi in 1907; there she became famous for reading Shakespeare to her students while they rested in the shade between exercises. In 1911 she took up a position at the Women’s Higher Normal School, where she briefly worked with Inokuchi Akuri; the following year, the Ministry of Education sent her to England to study gymnastics. There, under Martina Bergman-Österberg, she was able to study systematically in comparison to the bits-and-pieces, mix-and-match approach she had followed so far (her instructors were surprised at how little she knew about standard gymnastics).

After her return to Japan in 1915, she taught dance, gymnastics, games, and sports (including cricket, the fruit of her study in England) at the Higher Normal School as well as Tokyo Women’s University, publishing several books as well. After some clashes with her colleagues, she resolved to set up her own school. In 1919 she formed the Association of Women Gymnastics Teachers; in 1922 she founded the Nikaido Gymnastics School to research women’s physical education and train women teachers; it was her stance that women should educate women. In addition to Tokuyo herself, instructors included various military doctors and athletes as well as her little brothers, who showed up to teach Japanese, while her mother Kin—once a tough farm girl who hated sewing—ran the dormitory. In 1925, stimulated by the matriculation of the Olympic runner Hitomi Kinue, Tokuyo decided that her school needed to train athletes as well as teachers. The school was approved as the Japan Women’s Vocational School of Physical Education in 1926.

In her later years Tokuyo became increasingly nationalist as Japan slid toward wartime status; she had a perpetual adoration for the military. She died in 1941 at the age of sixty. (In 1943, a newspaper printed her thoughts on the establishment of a women’s physical education exam; the text actually came from her brother, but she was considered better news regardless of the fact that she had already been dead for two years.) Among her students were the dance teacher Tokura Haru, who was instrumental in keeping the school solvent, and the politician Yamashita Harue; Tokuyo’s school remains in existence as the Japan Women’s College of Physical Education. She was said to have had the powerful voice of an opera singer, or rather of the gym teacher she was; she also had a repertoire of insults to rival Captain Haddock, including “jelly on horseback!” “rotten washcloth!” “misshapen rock candy!” and so on.

Sources
https://www.jwcpe.ac.jp/college_info/idea/founder/ (Japanese) Includes a picture of Tokuyo with her students in uniform