Katori Miwako (1843-1921)

[nnozomi]

Katori Miwako was born in 1843 in Hagi to a low-ranking samurai called Sugi Yurinosuke and his wife Taki; her birth name was Fumi. She was the younger sister of the radical educator Yoshida Shoin. Having been imprisoned for trying to sneak onto Matthew Perry’s ships, Shoin was eventually released from Noyama Prison (where he met Takasu Hisako) and put into house arrest with his family. His mother Taki, perhaps finding a bored son impossible to deal with, suggested that he started giving lectures there; with the support of Taki and Fumi, the lectures became very popular and eventually developed into the Shoka Sonjuku school.

Fumi was married at fifteen. There was some suggestion of marrying her to the imperialist activist Katsura Kogoro (later Kido Takayoshi, husband of Kido Matsuko), but at Shoin’s insistence she was married instead to Kusaka Genzui, then eighteen and one of the school’s brightest students (for MDZS/CQL fans, he and Takasugi Shinsaku were known as the 双璧 or Twin Jades). Their marriage lasted only seven years; Genzui spent most of it traveling in order to further the imperialist faction’s movement against the shogunate, and in 1864 he was killed fighting. Having originally complained that she “wasn’t his type,” Genzui seems to have become fonder during his absence: Fumi saved the letters he wrote to her, which were eventually put together as the “Book of Sleeve Tears,” named for the way she wiped her tears with her sleeve as she read them over. Once widowed, she went to work for the Mohri family, the Hagi domain lords, where she became governess to the heir Motoakira; at this point, she changed her name to Miwa or Miwako.

In 1883, Miwako married Katori Motohiko, her older sister Hisa’s widower—Miwako had been running their household during Hisa’s last illness—and a leading Meiji statesman. She was forty-one, he was fifty-five. She outlived him, dying in 1921 at the age of seventy-eight, having seen the future her more famous younger brother did not get to.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.ymfg.co.jp/finance/pdf/disclosure/h26_03/info/ymfg_05.pdf Japanese article with some nice pictures

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

In what circumstances might someone change their given name like that? Did it have a broader social meaning, or was it purely personal?

[nnozomi]

That is a good question! I had to look it up and I still don't really know. In general there was a LOT of name-changing around the Meiji Restoration, partly because that's when family name + personal name became compulsory (until then commoners weren't allowed official family names). Also, some sources tell me that certain (men's) names taken from old official positions were temporarily forbidden in the early Meiji period (keeping commoners from using them?). (Miwako's second husband changed his name from Odamura Inosuke to Katori Motohiko, and this may be partly why he changed his first name, -suke being one of the forbidden ones, but then again maybe not?)
Adding -ko to your name was a bit of a modern fashion for women a little way into the Meiji period (see also Tsuda Ume(ko), when I get to her), but I can't find a whole lot of information about women changing their names. My impression in general is that, because record-keeping was not yet totally standardized, it was done more often and more easily; also that, because social class, position, etc., were hugely in flux, people, women included, changed their names to put a period to their former lives and/or announce their stance on their new ones (Kido Matsuko changed her name from Ikumatsu when she became a politician's wife instead of a geisha, and the Meiji Empress changed her name when she married the emperor, for a couple of obvious examples).
That was a lot of words to say not very much, sorry. (I'm always fascinated with names and the way they reflect languages and eras...).

[chestnut_pod]

Thank you for all the research put into this response! In some ways the Meiji-inspired scramble of renaming reminds me of Das Patent über die Judennamen and subsequent legislation about standardizing and formalizing family names.

My impression in general is that, because record-keeping was not yet totally standardized, it was done more often and more easily; also that, because social class, position, etc., were hugely in flux, people, women included, changed their names to put a period to their former lives and/or announce their stance on their new ones -- this all makes complete sense!

[nnozomi]

Very little research, just some curious googling!

In some ways the Meiji-inspired scramble of renaming reminds me of Das Patent über die Judennamen and subsequent legislation about standardizing and formalizing family names.
I did not know anything about that, thank you! Fascinating. And yeah, a really interesting comparison to be made.