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Mitsuko Coudenhove-Kalergi (1874-1941)
Dec. 6th, 2024 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiMitsuko Coudenhove-Kalergi was born in 1874 in Tokyo, the daughter of an antiques dealer; her maiden name was Aoyama. While she may or may not have finished elementary school, she was taught dance and the shamisen from early on. She was eighteen when she met Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, son of a count and the Austro-Hungarian chargé d’affaires in Tokyo; accounts of their meeting vary (he saw her working as a waitress at the government’s Koyokan salon, he came to look at the antiques in the shop, she cared for him when he fell off a horse near the shop…). However they met, they promptly fell in love. (Or then again there is a theory that Heinrich fell in love with her one-sidedly and talked her father into having her marry him, regardless of her consent.)
Over various objections, Mitsuko became Heinrich’s common-law wife; she moved in at the embassy, where she learned to speak English and German, dress in the Western manner, and use a knife and fork, as well as becoming a Catholic. In 1893 Heinrich became the Count upon his father’s death, meaning that he and Mitsuko could finally register their marriage officially (although some versions have them marrying in 1892). Their sons Johann Kotaro and Richard Eijiro were born that year and a year later. In 1896, the family of four returned to the Coudenhove castle in Bohemia. Before their departure, Mitsuko was summoned to an audience with the Meiji Empress (who would never have spoken to an ordinary shopkeeper’s daughter), who enjoined her to uphold her husband’s honor and that of Japan while she lived abroad.
Heinrich’s relatives, displeased to find the Count married to an “Oriental” woman and the daughter of a merchant at that, did not treat Mitsuko well; she relied on her husband’s reassurance and spent her time learning languages (working to catch up with her husband, who spoke eighteen of them), history, geography, oil painting, and horseback riding, as well as having five more children. Heinrich preferred them to grow up as European children and forbade the use of Japanese at home. (Their daughter Ida Görres, a writer on Catholicism, was nevertheless to say much later that she “loved [the Church and its priests] and clung to them, not only as a daughter and sister, but as a Japanese daughter and sister, in the intensity of unconditional submission which belongs to Japanese filial piety.”)
Heinrich died suddenly of a heart attack in 1906, leaving a will naming Mitsuko responsible for his non-entailed assets and for the supervision of their children. His relatives challenged the will. As well as hiring lawyers, Mitsuko studied law and estate management herself to prove herself capable. Her children recalled that from this point on she was transformed from a gentle mother into a strict and short-tempered one.
Having eventually sent her oldest sons to university in Vienna, Mitsuko followed them there and became a star of the Viennese salons, not least because of the Japonisme boom of the time. During World War I, two of her sons were soldiers, both surviving; Mitsuko herself volunteered with the Red Cross. She was eventually to (temporarily) disown her son Richard when he married the older Jewish actress Ida Roland, in an ironic turn given the opposition to her own marriage. She was moved by Japanese prejudice against actresses; Richard’s older brother Hans horrified her even further by dating a circus horse-trainer, although he was eventually to marry the Jewish-Hungarian pilot Lilly Steinschneider. Richard is better known as the originator of the “Pan-Europa” concept which eventually led to today’s European Union; he may have taken after his father Heinrich, a linguist and philosopher-nobleman who dreamed of unifying the world’s religions. When his beliefs drove him into exile under the Nazis, Mitsuko remained under the protection of the Japanese government abroad.
Mitsuko had a stroke in her fifties and became partially bedridden, amusing herself with the shamisen she had brought from Japan. Her daughter Olga, to whom she left everything in her will, remained at her side to care for her. She died in 1941 at the age of seventy-six.
Sources
Ishii
Nakae
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQYe8DShlWU (Japanese) Excerpt from the Takarazuka musical about Mitsuko’s life (!)
https://www2.nhk.or.jp/archives/movies/?id=D0009040131_00000 (Japanese) Excerpt from the TV drama likewise.
https://www.japanjournals.com/feature/survivor/9097-mitsuko.html (Japanese) Article including photographs of various relevant people and places
Over various objections, Mitsuko became Heinrich’s common-law wife; she moved in at the embassy, where she learned to speak English and German, dress in the Western manner, and use a knife and fork, as well as becoming a Catholic. In 1893 Heinrich became the Count upon his father’s death, meaning that he and Mitsuko could finally register their marriage officially (although some versions have them marrying in 1892). Their sons Johann Kotaro and Richard Eijiro were born that year and a year later. In 1896, the family of four returned to the Coudenhove castle in Bohemia. Before their departure, Mitsuko was summoned to an audience with the Meiji Empress (who would never have spoken to an ordinary shopkeeper’s daughter), who enjoined her to uphold her husband’s honor and that of Japan while she lived abroad.
Heinrich’s relatives, displeased to find the Count married to an “Oriental” woman and the daughter of a merchant at that, did not treat Mitsuko well; she relied on her husband’s reassurance and spent her time learning languages (working to catch up with her husband, who spoke eighteen of them), history, geography, oil painting, and horseback riding, as well as having five more children. Heinrich preferred them to grow up as European children and forbade the use of Japanese at home. (Their daughter Ida Görres, a writer on Catholicism, was nevertheless to say much later that she “loved [the Church and its priests] and clung to them, not only as a daughter and sister, but as a Japanese daughter and sister, in the intensity of unconditional submission which belongs to Japanese filial piety.”)
Heinrich died suddenly of a heart attack in 1906, leaving a will naming Mitsuko responsible for his non-entailed assets and for the supervision of their children. His relatives challenged the will. As well as hiring lawyers, Mitsuko studied law and estate management herself to prove herself capable. Her children recalled that from this point on she was transformed from a gentle mother into a strict and short-tempered one.
Having eventually sent her oldest sons to university in Vienna, Mitsuko followed them there and became a star of the Viennese salons, not least because of the Japonisme boom of the time. During World War I, two of her sons were soldiers, both surviving; Mitsuko herself volunteered with the Red Cross. She was eventually to (temporarily) disown her son Richard when he married the older Jewish actress Ida Roland, in an ironic turn given the opposition to her own marriage. She was moved by Japanese prejudice against actresses; Richard’s older brother Hans horrified her even further by dating a circus horse-trainer, although he was eventually to marry the Jewish-Hungarian pilot Lilly Steinschneider. Richard is better known as the originator of the “Pan-Europa” concept which eventually led to today’s European Union; he may have taken after his father Heinrich, a linguist and philosopher-nobleman who dreamed of unifying the world’s religions. When his beliefs drove him into exile under the Nazis, Mitsuko remained under the protection of the Japanese government abroad.
Mitsuko had a stroke in her fifties and became partially bedridden, amusing herself with the shamisen she had brought from Japan. Her daughter Olga, to whom she left everything in her will, remained at her side to care for her. She died in 1941 at the age of seventy-six.
Sources
Ishii
Nakae
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQYe8DShlWU (Japanese) Excerpt from the Takarazuka musical about Mitsuko’s life (!)
https://www2.nhk.or.jp/archives/movies/?id=D0009040131_00000 (Japanese) Excerpt from the TV drama likewise.
https://www.japanjournals.com/feature/survivor/9097-mitsuko.html (Japanese) Article including photographs of various relevant people and places
