Kimura Komako (1887-1980)

[nnozomi]

Kimura Komako was born in 1887 in Kumamoto, where her family sold fire extinguishers; her maiden name was Kurose. Her grandmother was a singer and she studied shamisen, dance, and theater from early childhood, performing in “children’s kabuki” as well, in part as a way to help support the family: she was eight when the family was bankrupted and her father went to work in Taiwan. She went to needlework school but found it unsatisfying, also studying the Chinese classics and visiting a local church to learn English. After working as a switchboard operator, she had her tuition paid by a family friend at the Kumamoto Girls’ School, where the principal was Yajima Kajiko’s older sister Junko and the school aimed to produce “new women” rather than just the traditional “good wives and wise mothers.” She graduated in 1906.

The friend who had paid her way had a nephew, Kimura Hideo, on whom Komako had a crush. Hopeful of following him to study in America, she entered the Fukuoka Eiwa Girls’ School to improve her English (and apparently picked up a girlfriend in passing), and then went on to study further at the Aoyama Girls’ School in Tokyo. Hideo got Komako pregnant almost immediately upon his return to Japan: their son Shoji (spelled 生死 or “life and death”) was born in 1907. The following year she applied to the Imperial Theatre School for Actresses when it opened and was accepted without an exam, but either prevented from attending by her husband or rejected once the school learned she had had a child before marriage (accounts differ).

In 1909 the Kimuras moved to Tokyo, which they used as a base to travel around promoting Hideo’s kanjizai practice, which lay somewhere among psychotherapy, Buddhism, and spiritualism/woo, based in part on his study with the maverick yoga teacher Pierre Bernard. Komako dressed as the quasi-Buddhist deity Daikokuten to bring in the customers, but they were not especially successful. In 1913 she became one of the founding members of the New Real Women group, along with Nishikawa Fumiko and Miyazaki Mitsuko; they published a journal and offered lectures on women’s rights, working toward women’s suffrage. With Fumiko taking over most of the work, however, Komako went back to acting, becoming a well-paid star at a theater in the Asakusa entertainment district (she also took voice lessons with Miura Tamaki). It may have been at this point that she ran her own theater in Tokyo, performing political protest plays as well as more standard fare.

In 1917 the family traveled to the United States, where Komako performed at Carnegie Hall, met with Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, and marched with American suffragettes. After their return in 1925, she worked as a dance teacher, hoping at one point to start an arts college. Hideo died in 1935; Komako lived until the age of ninety-two, dying in 1980. They had two children; Akari, born in 1911, died in babyhood, while Shoji became a journalist and the publisher of Japan’s first science fiction magazine. His daughter Fujiko followed in her grandmother’s footsteps to become an actress.

Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komako_Kimura (English) Citing the English Wikipedia article because its content, notably different from the Japanese article, seems to be derived largely from contemporary newspaper articles in English; the links in the citations are interesting.
https://unseen-japan.com/kimura-komako/ (English) Long biographical article with photos

Comments

[trobadora]

Shoji (spelled 生死

OMG, what a name!

[chestnut_pod]

What an interestingly bohemian family this sounds like -- for better and for worse!