Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

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

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.