Takaba Osamu (1831-1891)

[nnozomi]

Takaba Osamu was born in 1831 in Fukuoka, the younger daughter in a well-known domain physician’s household. (Wikipedia tells me she had a double handful of names, from Ran and Yomei as a child to Gen’yo and Osamu for classical studies, Kogatana as a nickname, and Senshi or Kugedo for artwork.) Her father resolved to raise her as a boy, teaching her medicine, Confucianism, and classical Chinese studies, and upon her genpuku coming-of-age ceremony at age ten, she was officially registered with the domain as a boy, granted the right to wear a sword and don male clothing. (It has been suggested that her father was inspired by the example of the wandering poet Hara Saihin, another woman from Fukuoka, born in 1798, who studied the classics, dressed as a man, and carried a sword.)

After her coming-of-age, Osamu used masculine language, wore a male hairstyle and clothes, and rode horseback (and sometimes cowback) as a traveling doctor. She married at sixteen, immediately divorced her husband, and (like Saihin) spent some time studying at the Kameijuku school, which admitted both women and men and did not discriminate over class. She was also influenced by her cousin Nomura Botoni, an imperialist poet and nun who often played host to the party loyal to the emperor, traveling to Yamaguchi and elsewhere for their sake. Osamu is said to have harbored the same desires to leave Fukuoka as these two sources of inspiration, but her duties at the clinic kept her where she was.

Instead, she opened the Koshijuku school at her clinic in 1873 (the former use of its location led to the nickname “Ginseng Field School”). Her free school enjoyed popularity among passionate, iconoclastic young men (I could not find anything on whether she imitated the Kameijuku and admitted women as well), including the alarming Toyama Mitsuru and the right-wing activist/terrorist Kurushima Tsuneki, among some 300 students in all.

The fires of the Meiji Restoration were already burning here and there in the region; the Koshijuku students were inclined to support Saigo Takamori in the Satsuma Rebellion’s stance against the Meiji government once it was established, some imprisoned and put to death for their participation in the Battle of Fukuoka, where Osamu was likewise seized and questioned. Threatened with the death penalty for failing to regulate her students better, she replied that if she had failed to govern her students, the governor of Fukuoka was likewise at fault for doing the same by the prefecture’s citizens, and that he should receive any penalty meted out to her.

In 1889, her former student Kurushima threw a bomb at Okuma Shigenobu, then the Foreign Minister, wounding but not killing him, and then killed himself. Osamu remarked sadly that this was hippu no yu, or hotheadedness rather than true bravery. She took to her bed the following year, and died in 1891 at the age of 59, having refused any medical treatment for her illness.

Sources
Ishii
http://www.harasaihin.com/ Hara Saihin (in Japanese)
https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item?id=NR31895&op=pdf&app=Library&oclc_number=480641326 Hara Saihin (in English)
https://readyfor.jp/projects/takaba-ran Japanese article with some related photographs and illustrations
https://kyusyu-manga.azusashoin.com/%E4%BA%BA%E5%8F%82%E7%95%91%E3%81%AE%E5%A5%B3%E5%82%91%E3%80%80%E9%AB%98%E5%A0%B4%E4%B9%B1/ (a short manga excerpt, in Japanese)

Comments

[sakana17]

Wow!

[nnozomi]

I know!