senzenwomen | Isomura Haruko (1877-1918)

Isomura Haruko was born in 1877 in Fukushima; her maiden name was Koizumi. She attended Miyagi Girls’ School (but unlike Soma Kokko, a year older, apparently did not participate in the students’ strike there), and became a teacher there after graduating. She also probably became a Christian at some point during her schooling.

In 1903 she married the businessman Isomura Gento and moved with him to Tokyo. He handled various manufacturing and trading concerns; Haruko helped out by using her school English to read technical documents, and in order to polish it spent time studying at Japan Women’s University and the Women’s English Institute (founded by Tsuda Umeko), remaining in school even when she became pregnant.

In 1905 she was hired by the Hochi Shimbun newspaper as a reporter, following in the footsteps of Hani Motoko. She had small children by this point (she was to bear a total of eight children), and because of her habit of bringing her children to work, became known as the “reporter with the ruby text,” a pun on the use of a smaller (ruby) font to add pronunciation text next to the larger main text. She reported on the visit of an American fleet to Yokohama in 1908, making use of her English, and at some point (probably in 1907) secured an exclusive interview with future President Taft. In 1911 she went up in Yamada Isaburo’s experimental airship and reported on the experience.

In 1913 Haruko published a collection of her writing called Ima no Onna [Women of Today], containing dozens of interviews and word-sketches of both individuals and situations, the former including Hasegawa Shigure, Okada Yachiyo, Shimoda Utako, and Soma Kokko, as well as many lesser known women (a midwife, a clerk, a young mother, a printing press worker, a beautician, a tea master, the wives of a detective, an actor, a miner, and a hotelier, and more) the latter covering topics from a station waiting room to a marriage brokerage, a movie house, a rakugo theater, an advice bureau, and so on).

Haruko’s husband’s business failed in 1915; they moved to a much smaller house and she went to work for the Yamato Shimbun newspaper and then became a freelancer. In 1918, she died of heart disease at the age of 41.

Sources
宮城女学校第7回生の夫たち：顔写真特定と目歯比率 (I can’t link this because it’s a PDF, but googling it will get the link; Japanese) An account of Haruko and her husband’s history, along with those of several of her classmates and their husbands; interesting photographs
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/951262/1/139 (Japanese) Haruko’s book on Women of Today online; it looks extremely interesting if one takes the time to struggle through the prewar characters (also a good example of what ruby text looks like)