Fukuda Hideko (1865-1927)
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senzenwomenFukuda Hideko was born in 1865 in Okayama, daughter of the minor samurai Kageyama Katashi, who held down various ill-paying jobs and ran a terakoya school to make ends meet, and his wife Ume, who taught Japanese and Chinese classics there. When Hideko was seven, her mother went to teach at the prefectural Girls’ Training School, where she was considered an excellent lecturer who held that all girls should have as much education as possible.
Hideko herself—bookish, energetic, and given to wearing boys’ clothes for comfort and convenience—went back to her own elementary school as a teacher’s aide when she was fifteen. A year later, she turned down a proposal of marriage from a naval lieutenant, on the grounds that she was uninterested in a loveless marriage in which she would gain nothing and lose her independence to the feudal system. At seventeen, she was much moved by hearing Kishida Toshiko speak on the Liberal Party’s Freedom and Rights Movement and women’s rights. The following year, she left the elementary school to teach full-time, along with her mother and older brother, in their newly established Joko Academy, a private school for girls and women of all stripes, including evening classes for working mothers. Only a year later, however, the school was closed down for participation in a Liberal Party event. Hideko, infuriated, set off for Tokyo to become an activist.
There she spent some time studying English at Shinsakae Girls’ School (run by Yajima Kajiko). In 1885, however, she found herself involved in the Osaka Incident, in which Liberal Party leftists Oi Kentaro, Isoyama Seibei, and Kobayashi Kusuo were caught collecting money and weapons to bring down the regime in Korea. Kobayashi and Hideko had become engaged some time previously (the older brother of her friend Masako, he wooed her by lending her a biography of Joan of Arc), and she had been collecting funding for them. She was horrified to find that Kobayashi and his comrades spent this hard-earned money in the pleasure houses, but hung on for the sake of her ideals. Their plans for revolution came to light in November 1885, when they were arrested in Osaka. Hideko fled with explosives in her luggage, eventually captured in Nagasaki.
She was sentenced to a year and nine months in prison (where she was relatively well treated and became aware of the crippling effects of poverty on many women’s lives), fêted upon her release as the “Joan of Arc of the Orient.” She and Oi Kentaro (eventually released for the 1889 amnesty declared to celebrate the new Constitution) became lovers and had a child together, but his unfaithfulness (with the writer Shimizu Shikin among others) eventually drove her away from their revolutionary movement altogether.
In 1892, Hideko married the US-educated journalist and social reformer Fukuda Tomosaku, with whom she had three children before his death in 1900; thereafter she lived for some time with his friend Ishikawa Sanshiro, another left-wing writer. In 1901 she established a vocational school for women in poverty. A neighbor, Sakai Toshihiko (socialist, feminist, writer, and supportive big brother to the whole movement in general), introduced her to socialism and brought her into the circle of the Heiminsha activist group and its socialist newspaper, where she met Kotoku Shusui and his wife Chiyoko; she also studied Christianity with Uchimura Kanzo. She wrote and published an autobiography, Warawa no Hanshogai (My Life So Far), which found considerable success. In 1907 she founded the journal Sekai Fujin (Women of the World), the first socialist women’s newspaper in Japan, with content ranging from essays on women’s rights to household hints to short stories in translation to calls for support for women and the poor (she also went out and fought these campaigns in person). The newspaper was shut down by the government in 1909.
Hideko struggled in middle age, but continued to call for women’s rights, publishing influential articles in Hiratsuka Raicho’s Seito (Bluestocking) journal. She died in 1927 at the age of sixty-one.
Sources
Nakae, Mori 1996, Tanaka
https://isaacmeyer.net/2023/02/episode-471-the-osaka-incident/ (English) Detailed account of the Osaka Incident
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/14749/1/MQ45977.pdf (English) Thesis on Fukuda Hideko and Hiratsuka Raicho and their respective publications
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000057/files/43276_18829.html (Japanese) Hideko’s autobiography (the style is grammatically very old-fashioned and I find it heavy going, but I will happily look up what she has to say about any given incident if requested)
Hideko herself—bookish, energetic, and given to wearing boys’ clothes for comfort and convenience—went back to her own elementary school as a teacher’s aide when she was fifteen. A year later, she turned down a proposal of marriage from a naval lieutenant, on the grounds that she was uninterested in a loveless marriage in which she would gain nothing and lose her independence to the feudal system. At seventeen, she was much moved by hearing Kishida Toshiko speak on the Liberal Party’s Freedom and Rights Movement and women’s rights. The following year, she left the elementary school to teach full-time, along with her mother and older brother, in their newly established Joko Academy, a private school for girls and women of all stripes, including evening classes for working mothers. Only a year later, however, the school was closed down for participation in a Liberal Party event. Hideko, infuriated, set off for Tokyo to become an activist.
There she spent some time studying English at Shinsakae Girls’ School (run by Yajima Kajiko). In 1885, however, she found herself involved in the Osaka Incident, in which Liberal Party leftists Oi Kentaro, Isoyama Seibei, and Kobayashi Kusuo were caught collecting money and weapons to bring down the regime in Korea. Kobayashi and Hideko had become engaged some time previously (the older brother of her friend Masako, he wooed her by lending her a biography of Joan of Arc), and she had been collecting funding for them. She was horrified to find that Kobayashi and his comrades spent this hard-earned money in the pleasure houses, but hung on for the sake of her ideals. Their plans for revolution came to light in November 1885, when they were arrested in Osaka. Hideko fled with explosives in her luggage, eventually captured in Nagasaki.
She was sentenced to a year and nine months in prison (where she was relatively well treated and became aware of the crippling effects of poverty on many women’s lives), fêted upon her release as the “Joan of Arc of the Orient.” She and Oi Kentaro (eventually released for the 1889 amnesty declared to celebrate the new Constitution) became lovers and had a child together, but his unfaithfulness (with the writer Shimizu Shikin among others) eventually drove her away from their revolutionary movement altogether.
In 1892, Hideko married the US-educated journalist and social reformer Fukuda Tomosaku, with whom she had three children before his death in 1900; thereafter she lived for some time with his friend Ishikawa Sanshiro, another left-wing writer. In 1901 she established a vocational school for women in poverty. A neighbor, Sakai Toshihiko (socialist, feminist, writer, and supportive big brother to the whole movement in general), introduced her to socialism and brought her into the circle of the Heiminsha activist group and its socialist newspaper, where she met Kotoku Shusui and his wife Chiyoko; she also studied Christianity with Uchimura Kanzo. She wrote and published an autobiography, Warawa no Hanshogai (My Life So Far), which found considerable success. In 1907 she founded the journal Sekai Fujin (Women of the World), the first socialist women’s newspaper in Japan, with content ranging from essays on women’s rights to household hints to short stories in translation to calls for support for women and the poor (she also went out and fought these campaigns in person). The newspaper was shut down by the government in 1909.
Hideko struggled in middle age, but continued to call for women’s rights, publishing influential articles in Hiratsuka Raicho’s Seito (Bluestocking) journal. She died in 1927 at the age of sixty-one.
Sources
Nakae, Mori 1996, Tanaka
https://isaacmeyer.net/2023/02/episode-471-the-osaka-incident/ (English) Detailed account of the Osaka Incident
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/14749/1/MQ45977.pdf (English) Thesis on Fukuda Hideko and Hiratsuka Raicho and their respective publications
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000057/files/43276_18829.html (Japanese) Hideko’s autobiography (the style is grammatically very old-fashioned and I find it heavy going, but I will happily look up what she has to say about any given incident if requested)
no subject
Date: 2024-06-29 04:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-01 02:11 pm (UTC)Yes! I think she's the first socialist activist to show up here, but there are a lot more to come and their interaction with history/politics/women's rights/etc. is especially fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-30 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-01 02:10 pm (UTC)I'm sorry to say that of the many left-wing activist women who are going to show up here over the next fifty years or so, a lot of them had TERRIBLE luck with men in the movement. With some exceptions (see Sakai Toshihiko above, etc.) Japanese left-wing men were a mess.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-30 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-01 02:09 pm (UTC)