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senzenwomen2023-10-20 08:59 pm
nnozomi) wrote in senzenwomen2023-10-20 08:59 pm
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Yajima Kajiko (1833-1925)
Yajima Kajiko was born in 1833, the sixth daughter of the mayor of her village, in what is now Mashiki Town, Kumamoto. As the latest of a long string of girls, no one got around to naming her until her oldest sister selected “Katsu.” She early on acquired vicarious experience of the world through her sisters, including Tsuseko, who was married to the much older Confucianist Yokoi Shonan as a second wife (or, for all intents and purposes, a concubine) and treated badly, as well as Hisako, who was temporarily divorced from her husband for bearing him only girls, taken back only when her son Iichiro (later to be the writer Tokutomi Soho) was born.
Katsu married Yokoi’s disciple, the samurai Hayashi Shichiro, when she was twenty-six. Handsome but a drunkard, he had two or possibly three children already, to which she added a son and two daughters. Ten years later, tired of his bad behavior, she left him and returned to her family home. (Accounts of what she did with her children differ; she may have left them with him, she may have taken them with her, she may have taken only the youngest daughter. Her son is said to have invited her to come and live with him in Tokyo many years later.) When he sent a messenger to demand her return, she cut off her hair at the roots and sent it to him as her response.
In 1872, four years later, she went up to Tokyo alone to see her oldest brother through an illness. On the way there, aged 40, she changed her name from Katsuko to the much more unusual Kajiko (“rudder”), inspired by the way little rudders could move big ships. After her brother’s recovery, she qualified as a schoolteacher and began teaching at Shiba Sakuragawa Elementary School. At some point during this time she had a child in secret with Suzuki Yosuke, a married man who was either her brother’s secretary or her eye doctor (accounts differ). Her new daughter Taeko was sent to live with a farming family and much later “adopted” back into Kajiko’s household (shades of Dorothy L. Sayers).
In 1878 she became a teacher at Shin-Sakae Girls’ School, a Presbyterian mission school under the auspices of the well-named missionary Mrs. Mary [or Maria] True, where she was famous for smoking a pipe in her office. A younger, Christian teacher said “Oh, smoking is bad, Mrs. Yajima,” to which Kajiko replied “For you young people, yes. Not for me.” In 1880 she became principal at Sakurai Girls’ School, founded by the young educationalist Sakurai Chika, remaining in that position through the merger of the two schools to form the Presbyterian Girls’ School in 1896. One of her students at Sakurai Girls, a rude young lady called Yamada Tsuneko or O-Tsun-chan to her friends, was not pleased when the youthful Chika was replaced by dour middle-aged Kajiko. “My dear, let us be good friends,” Kajiko coaxed. “Not interested, you’re not pretty like Mrs. Sakurai,” Tsuneko retorted. To be addressed here much later according to her birth year, she was later to marry Edward Gauntlett (the first official marriage of a Japanese woman and a Westerner, not counting instances like Cho-Cho San’s), become a teacher at her alma mater, and serve there and elsewhere as Kajiko’s right hand.
Kajiko herself eventually became a Christian as well (the records do not tell us whether she quit smoking). Her schools had no codified rules: “You have the Bible, so govern yourselves,” she told her students. Influenced by Mary Greenleaf Leavitt’s lectures, in 1886 she formed the first Japanese branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (the 東京夫人矯風会 or Tokyo Women’s Association for Reforming Customs) and became its chair. Their principles were (and remain, as the Japan Christian Women’s Organization) against drinking, smoking, and prostitution, and in favor of women’s rights, monogamy, gender equality, and peace. She met Frances Willard of the WCTU in Japan the following year, and continued working in this field throughout her life, attending the Boston WCTU Conference in 1906 and the London conference in 1920; in 1921, aged 89, she visited Manchuria and Korea and went to Washington, DC to present President Warren Harding with a “300-Foot Peace Plan” signed by Japanese women. Tsuneko Gauntlett accompanied her, did her hair and makeup, and taught her a speech in English to give as they lay in their bunk beds on the boat. Kajiko died in Tokyo at the age of 93.
Her sister Hisako’s younger son, the writer Tokutomi Roka, felt the need to complain in print after her death about Kajiko’s secrecy regarding her children (three from her marriage in Kumamoto, one in Tokyo), perhaps peeved that in life she had told him flatly “You have no way to understand how I feel.”
Sources
Mori 1996, Nakae, Shimamoto, Tanaka
https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/e/datas/6039/ (various photos of Kajiko)
Katsu married Yokoi’s disciple, the samurai Hayashi Shichiro, when she was twenty-six. Handsome but a drunkard, he had two or possibly three children already, to which she added a son and two daughters. Ten years later, tired of his bad behavior, she left him and returned to her family home. (Accounts of what she did with her children differ; she may have left them with him, she may have taken them with her, she may have taken only the youngest daughter. Her son is said to have invited her to come and live with him in Tokyo many years later.) When he sent a messenger to demand her return, she cut off her hair at the roots and sent it to him as her response.
In 1872, four years later, she went up to Tokyo alone to see her oldest brother through an illness. On the way there, aged 40, she changed her name from Katsuko to the much more unusual Kajiko (“rudder”), inspired by the way little rudders could move big ships. After her brother’s recovery, she qualified as a schoolteacher and began teaching at Shiba Sakuragawa Elementary School. At some point during this time she had a child in secret with Suzuki Yosuke, a married man who was either her brother’s secretary or her eye doctor (accounts differ). Her new daughter Taeko was sent to live with a farming family and much later “adopted” back into Kajiko’s household (shades of Dorothy L. Sayers).
In 1878 she became a teacher at Shin-Sakae Girls’ School, a Presbyterian mission school under the auspices of the well-named missionary Mrs. Mary [or Maria] True, where she was famous for smoking a pipe in her office. A younger, Christian teacher said “Oh, smoking is bad, Mrs. Yajima,” to which Kajiko replied “For you young people, yes. Not for me.” In 1880 she became principal at Sakurai Girls’ School, founded by the young educationalist Sakurai Chika, remaining in that position through the merger of the two schools to form the Presbyterian Girls’ School in 1896. One of her students at Sakurai Girls, a rude young lady called Yamada Tsuneko or O-Tsun-chan to her friends, was not pleased when the youthful Chika was replaced by dour middle-aged Kajiko. “My dear, let us be good friends,” Kajiko coaxed. “Not interested, you’re not pretty like Mrs. Sakurai,” Tsuneko retorted. To be addressed here much later according to her birth year, she was later to marry Edward Gauntlett (the first official marriage of a Japanese woman and a Westerner, not counting instances like Cho-Cho San’s), become a teacher at her alma mater, and serve there and elsewhere as Kajiko’s right hand.
Kajiko herself eventually became a Christian as well (the records do not tell us whether she quit smoking). Her schools had no codified rules: “You have the Bible, so govern yourselves,” she told her students. Influenced by Mary Greenleaf Leavitt’s lectures, in 1886 she formed the first Japanese branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (the 東京夫人矯風会 or Tokyo Women’s Association for Reforming Customs) and became its chair. Their principles were (and remain, as the Japan Christian Women’s Organization) against drinking, smoking, and prostitution, and in favor of women’s rights, monogamy, gender equality, and peace. She met Frances Willard of the WCTU in Japan the following year, and continued working in this field throughout her life, attending the Boston WCTU Conference in 1906 and the London conference in 1920; in 1921, aged 89, she visited Manchuria and Korea and went to Washington, DC to present President Warren Harding with a “300-Foot Peace Plan” signed by Japanese women. Tsuneko Gauntlett accompanied her, did her hair and makeup, and taught her a speech in English to give as they lay in their bunk beds on the boat. Kajiko died in Tokyo at the age of 93.
Her sister Hisako’s younger son, the writer Tokutomi Roka, felt the need to complain in print after her death about Kajiko’s secrecy regarding her children (three from her marriage in Kumamoto, one in Tokyo), perhaps peeved that in life she had told him flatly “You have no way to understand how I feel.”
Sources
Mori 1996, Nakae, Shimamoto, Tanaka
https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/e/datas/6039/ (various photos of Kajiko)
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Excellent!
the writer Tokutomi Roka, felt the need to complain in print after her death about Kajiko’s secrecy regarding her children
Rolling my eyes at this dude.
Very cool that there are so many photos of her.
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Tsuneko Gauntlett accompanied her, did her hair and makeup, and taught her a speech in English to give as they lay in their bunk beds on the boat. -- even this small glimpse at their relationship makes me want a novel.
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Doesn't it? I won't get to Tsuneko for a while but there's a lot to say about her. There was an old-fashioned vogue for biographies in novel form (or the other way around), and I'm surprised not to find one about her (and Kajiko), but you (one) could absolutely write one and then some.