senzenwomen | Kitamura Mina (1865-1942) (Reply)

Kitamura Mina was born in 1865 in western Tokyo, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer called Ishizaka Masataka and his wife Yama. Masataka, an influential local politician who was enthusiastic about education, sent his daughter to Yokohama Kyoritsu Girls’ School, where she became a Christian. In 1885 she encountered a friend of her younger brother’s by the name of Kitamura Tokoku; she was twenty, he was seventeen. He had just given up participation in the Freedom and Civil Rights Movement on account of a former friend who urged him to acquire funding for the movement (in particular Oi Kentaro’s attempt to overthrow the Korean regime, in which Fukuda Hideko was also involved) by way of robbery. He and Mina fell in love; in 1888, she broke her engagement to a family friend and married Tokoku.

They had a daughter called Eiko in 1892. Tokoku began to make a name for himself as a poet and essayist, influenced by various Western writers as well as Mina’s Christianity. Among other topics he wrote extensively on love and romance, reflecting his love letters to Mina before their marriage. In 1894 he killed himself.

After some years of missionary and settlement work in Japan, Mina went to the United States in 1899, where she studied at Union Christian College and Defiance College, graduating in 1906. She returned to Japan in 1909 to work in education, teaching English at Toshima Normal School and Shinagawa Girls’ High School. She also published an English translation of her husband’s poems before her death in 1942.

Sources
Nakae
https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=zRlvAAAAQBAJ (English) Includes a short biography of Mina and Tokoku’s marriage and Mina’s life thereafter, as well as some family history.