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Yamamuro Kieko (1874-1916)
Nov. 29th, 2024 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiYamamuro Kieko was born in 1874 in Iwate, where her family were farmers; her birth name was Sato Kieko. Originally well-to-do, the Sato family had spent more than it had to alleviate the effects of the repeated northern famines and subsequently fallen on hard times. Kieko grew up in this sacrificial atmosphere. While helping with the family silkworms, she studied hard, subscribing to Jogaku Zasshi [Women’s Learning], which excited her with its liberal Christianity.
At eighteen she traveled south to attend the Meiji Girls’ School, where she became a Christian. She graduated in 1895 in the middle of the First Sino-Japanese War, and set out to make herself useful by helping alcoholic ex-servicemen; however, it was hard to find support. At the same time she served as secretary of the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs, taught at a vocational school for working-class girls set up by Shimoda Utako, and did clerical work for Jogaku Zasshi, indicating how busy she liked to keep herself. The impression she left was of a calm, patient, feminine young woman, who would remark gently “Well, none of us is God [we all have our faults].”
It was in this year that a number of Salvation Army representatives came to Japan in order to set up a branch there. To become accepted, they wore Japanese dress and ate Japanese-style, which backfired somewhat, earning them a reputation as “actors from the Japan Village in London,” “that crazy religion” and so on. Kieko happened to have a tutoring job near the Salvation Army ladies’ house, and took it on herself to teach them proper Japanese etiquette so that they would no longer have to make fools of themselves.
There she met Yamamuro Gunpei, who was the Salvation Army’s main Japanese colleague; seeing him at meetings, she came to feel that the Salvation Army was her job in life. Two years older than she, Gunpei was a printworker (traditionally an occupation rife with left-wing organizers and hotheads) who had put himself through an informal university education before joining the Salvation Army. He and Kieko were married in 1899. They held a modest summer wedding at which, according to Kubushiro Ochimi, “the two of them started to sermonize after the ceremony, startling everyone.” Yajima Kajiko also approved of the marriage, saying that the pace of her own Women’s Association for Reforming Customs was too slow for Kieko’s devotion to her work.
They were extremely poor, which did not slow them down at all. Kieko in particular worked to set up a shelter for women escaping from prostitution, which at the time often involved poor rural girls effectively sold into slavery. While would-be ex-prostitutes made up the majority of the women who made use of the safe space, it was also open to women who had tried to throw themselves under trains, upper-class young ladies under the watch of conservators, married women who had been shaved bald by their husbands on suspicion of adultery, and others who were struggling. Not all of them were willing to stay once they had come, but Kieko was patient in her insistence that more education would help them no matter what, and most of them ended up in better situations than they had left (with the help of various donations from benefactors including Tsuda Umeko). She also took practical action to cut off human trafficking before it could start during the great northeastern famine of 1905, working along with the Salvation Army to protect girls from the Northeast from being sold to buy their families food.
Kieko died in 1916, perhaps out of simple overtiredness after a lifetime of hard work, pregnancy and child-raising, and poverty. Her husband Gunpei wrote her posthumous biography, while apparently wondering with unnecessary borrowed modesty “if she was enough of a person to convey to the world.” He survived her by some years; the family grave contains Gunpei, Kieko, his second wife Etsuko, and several of their six children. Among these their son Buho, who followed his parents into the Salvation Army, was named after William Booth and the Quaker George Fox. Their oldest daughter Tamiko, born in 1900, was instrumental along with Hani Motoko’s daughter Setsuko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Sato Ineko and others in founding the Femin Women’s Democracy Club after World War II.
Sources
Mori 1996
https://christianpress.jp/july-12-yamamuro-kieko-anniversary/ (Japanese) Worth a look just for her extremely stubborn-looking photograph
At eighteen she traveled south to attend the Meiji Girls’ School, where she became a Christian. She graduated in 1895 in the middle of the First Sino-Japanese War, and set out to make herself useful by helping alcoholic ex-servicemen; however, it was hard to find support. At the same time she served as secretary of the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs, taught at a vocational school for working-class girls set up by Shimoda Utako, and did clerical work for Jogaku Zasshi, indicating how busy she liked to keep herself. The impression she left was of a calm, patient, feminine young woman, who would remark gently “Well, none of us is God [we all have our faults].”
It was in this year that a number of Salvation Army representatives came to Japan in order to set up a branch there. To become accepted, they wore Japanese dress and ate Japanese-style, which backfired somewhat, earning them a reputation as “actors from the Japan Village in London,” “that crazy religion” and so on. Kieko happened to have a tutoring job near the Salvation Army ladies’ house, and took it on herself to teach them proper Japanese etiquette so that they would no longer have to make fools of themselves.
There she met Yamamuro Gunpei, who was the Salvation Army’s main Japanese colleague; seeing him at meetings, she came to feel that the Salvation Army was her job in life. Two years older than she, Gunpei was a printworker (traditionally an occupation rife with left-wing organizers and hotheads) who had put himself through an informal university education before joining the Salvation Army. He and Kieko were married in 1899. They held a modest summer wedding at which, according to Kubushiro Ochimi, “the two of them started to sermonize after the ceremony, startling everyone.” Yajima Kajiko also approved of the marriage, saying that the pace of her own Women’s Association for Reforming Customs was too slow for Kieko’s devotion to her work.
They were extremely poor, which did not slow them down at all. Kieko in particular worked to set up a shelter for women escaping from prostitution, which at the time often involved poor rural girls effectively sold into slavery. While would-be ex-prostitutes made up the majority of the women who made use of the safe space, it was also open to women who had tried to throw themselves under trains, upper-class young ladies under the watch of conservators, married women who had been shaved bald by their husbands on suspicion of adultery, and others who were struggling. Not all of them were willing to stay once they had come, but Kieko was patient in her insistence that more education would help them no matter what, and most of them ended up in better situations than they had left (with the help of various donations from benefactors including Tsuda Umeko). She also took practical action to cut off human trafficking before it could start during the great northeastern famine of 1905, working along with the Salvation Army to protect girls from the Northeast from being sold to buy their families food.
Kieko died in 1916, perhaps out of simple overtiredness after a lifetime of hard work, pregnancy and child-raising, and poverty. Her husband Gunpei wrote her posthumous biography, while apparently wondering with unnecessary borrowed modesty “if she was enough of a person to convey to the world.” He survived her by some years; the family grave contains Gunpei, Kieko, his second wife Etsuko, and several of their six children. Among these their son Buho, who followed his parents into the Salvation Army, was named after William Booth and the Quaker George Fox. Their oldest daughter Tamiko, born in 1900, was instrumental along with Hani Motoko’s daughter Setsuko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Sato Ineko and others in founding the Femin Women’s Democracy Club after World War II.
Sources
Mori 1996
https://christianpress.jp/july-12-yamamuro-kieko-anniversary/ (Japanese) Worth a look just for her extremely stubborn-looking photograph
