Takebayashi Fumiko (1888-1966)
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senzenwomenTakebayashi Fumiko was born in Ehime in 1888, where her father was a stationmaster; her maiden name was Nakahira. Her mother died when Fumiko was eight; her father remarried his late wife’s sister, who became a loving stepmother to Fumiko. When she was fifteen they moved to Kyoto, where she graduated from high school and attempted to elope with a medical student, getting only as far as the station. After that the family moved to Tokyo as Fumiko’s father was promoted; she considered answering an ad for newspaper reporters but was convinced by her family to give it up. She married a businessman and had three children before their divorce in 1912.
After studying acting with Tsubouchi Shoyo for a few months, she was hired as a reporter, writing under the pen name Nadeshiko; her first article was an interview with the actress Shirai Sumiyo. In 1915 she began a series of “undercover reports,” working as a waitress in various inns and full-service restaurants and writing about her experiences there. The series ran to over fifty articles and drew great attention, but Fumiko was fired at the end of 1915 because of her relationship with an executive of the newspaper (married, with at least one other mistress), which became a major scandal, the more so as Fumiko defended herself in print. She took refuge in a Zen temple and considered becoming a nun, until she met the politician Hayashi Kamobei, who became her second husband. They lived on the royalties from collections of her articles; finding that Hayashi was both violent and jealous as well as unproductive, Fumiko fled to Shanghai where she got a new job as a reporter. She did not return to Japan until the police intervened to ensure that they were safely divorced.
After her return home, she was introduced to the flamboyant writer Takebayashi Musoan (by the romance novelist and mountain climber Naito Chiyoko). Musoan invited her to Paris and she went; they were married first, in 1920, with a crowd of literary luminaries at the reception. Fumiko found herself unexpectedly pregnant; her daughter Yvonne (or Ioko) was born in Paris, and Fumiko adored her so much she started making all Yvonne’s clothes herself. This led to a job running the children’s clothes department at the fashion and cosmetics house Shiseido after they returned to Japan, at a high salary; after a year Fumiko left the company and set up on her own as a high-class milliner.
Upon losing home and business in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (where Fumiko was buried under rubble in the street, though unhurt), the family returned to Paris. Having tried and failed to manage a Japanese restaurant (during its brief period of success, the customers included Sessue Hayakawa), Fumiko began performing as a Japanese classical dancer, achieving great popularity and making friends with Isadora Duncan. In January 1926, however, her business partner shot her in the face during an argument. She survived without serious injury, but this “Monte Carlo Scandal” blackened her name considerably. In 1932, when Musoan ran out of money, Fumiko returned on her own to Japan; she drove a new General Motors Chevrolet from Osaka to Tokyo, and played the lead in a movie directed by Murata Minoru, returning in triumph to Paris the following year.
In 1934, amid a plan to interview the Prince of Ethiopia upon his marriage, Fumiko met the Japanese merchant Miyata Kozo (six years younger than she) in Antwerp, and they fell in love; they were married in Japan in 1936, once she had divorced Musoan. She and Miyata spent World War II on the outskirts of Brussels and Berlin, before being deported to Harbin via the Siberian Railway. Arriving finally in Osaka, she bought two used buses and turned one into their home and the other into a restaurant/café/beer hall which she called Mistinguett. For the rest of her life, she made a living from restaurant management and sewing while traveling as far as Africa (including a trip back to Europe with the writer Uno Chiyo) and continuing to write. She died in 1966 at the age of seventy-seven; her published work included, among other books, three volumes of autobiography, published over a fifty-year span under the names of Nakahira Fumiko, Takebayashi Fumiko, and Miyata Fumiko respectively (they were recently given snazzy new reprints).
Fumiko’s daughter Yvonne, incidentally, married Tsuji Makoto, the oldest son of Ito Noe; her older daughter, adopted by Takehisa Yumeji’s son, became the Japanese-Colombian painter Nobu Takehisa, while Nobu’s sister Eve joined the Takarazuka Revue.
Sources
Mori 2008 Mori Mayumi has written a lot of interesting and useful books and my list for this site also draws heavily upon her work, but wow, the more I reread her, the more I find her mean-spirited and more interested in the men around the women she's supposedly writing about, oh dear. This one takes the cake, drawing on every source she can find to complain about how Fumiko was the next thing to a whore and only interested in the money she could get out of her men. The Wikipedia article seems a whole lot more even-handed.
https://www.oit.ac.jp/news/news/pressrelease10718.html (Japanese) Two volumes of Fumiko’s reprinted autobiography, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and Just Look At Her
After studying acting with Tsubouchi Shoyo for a few months, she was hired as a reporter, writing under the pen name Nadeshiko; her first article was an interview with the actress Shirai Sumiyo. In 1915 she began a series of “undercover reports,” working as a waitress in various inns and full-service restaurants and writing about her experiences there. The series ran to over fifty articles and drew great attention, but Fumiko was fired at the end of 1915 because of her relationship with an executive of the newspaper (married, with at least one other mistress), which became a major scandal, the more so as Fumiko defended herself in print. She took refuge in a Zen temple and considered becoming a nun, until she met the politician Hayashi Kamobei, who became her second husband. They lived on the royalties from collections of her articles; finding that Hayashi was both violent and jealous as well as unproductive, Fumiko fled to Shanghai where she got a new job as a reporter. She did not return to Japan until the police intervened to ensure that they were safely divorced.
After her return home, she was introduced to the flamboyant writer Takebayashi Musoan (by the romance novelist and mountain climber Naito Chiyoko). Musoan invited her to Paris and she went; they were married first, in 1920, with a crowd of literary luminaries at the reception. Fumiko found herself unexpectedly pregnant; her daughter Yvonne (or Ioko) was born in Paris, and Fumiko adored her so much she started making all Yvonne’s clothes herself. This led to a job running the children’s clothes department at the fashion and cosmetics house Shiseido after they returned to Japan, at a high salary; after a year Fumiko left the company and set up on her own as a high-class milliner.
Upon losing home and business in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (where Fumiko was buried under rubble in the street, though unhurt), the family returned to Paris. Having tried and failed to manage a Japanese restaurant (during its brief period of success, the customers included Sessue Hayakawa), Fumiko began performing as a Japanese classical dancer, achieving great popularity and making friends with Isadora Duncan. In January 1926, however, her business partner shot her in the face during an argument. She survived without serious injury, but this “Monte Carlo Scandal” blackened her name considerably. In 1932, when Musoan ran out of money, Fumiko returned on her own to Japan; she drove a new General Motors Chevrolet from Osaka to Tokyo, and played the lead in a movie directed by Murata Minoru, returning in triumph to Paris the following year.
In 1934, amid a plan to interview the Prince of Ethiopia upon his marriage, Fumiko met the Japanese merchant Miyata Kozo (six years younger than she) in Antwerp, and they fell in love; they were married in Japan in 1936, once she had divorced Musoan. She and Miyata spent World War II on the outskirts of Brussels and Berlin, before being deported to Harbin via the Siberian Railway. Arriving finally in Osaka, she bought two used buses and turned one into their home and the other into a restaurant/café/beer hall which she called Mistinguett. For the rest of her life, she made a living from restaurant management and sewing while traveling as far as Africa (including a trip back to Europe with the writer Uno Chiyo) and continuing to write. She died in 1966 at the age of seventy-seven; her published work included, among other books, three volumes of autobiography, published over a fifty-year span under the names of Nakahira Fumiko, Takebayashi Fumiko, and Miyata Fumiko respectively (they were recently given snazzy new reprints).
Fumiko’s daughter Yvonne, incidentally, married Tsuji Makoto, the oldest son of Ito Noe; her older daughter, adopted by Takehisa Yumeji’s son, became the Japanese-Colombian painter Nobu Takehisa, while Nobu’s sister Eve joined the Takarazuka Revue.
Sources
Mori 2008 Mori Mayumi has written a lot of interesting and useful books and my list for this site also draws heavily upon her work, but wow, the more I reread her, the more I find her mean-spirited and more interested in the men around the women she's supposedly writing about, oh dear. This one takes the cake, drawing on every source she can find to complain about how Fumiko was the next thing to a whore and only interested in the money she could get out of her men. The Wikipedia article seems a whole lot more even-handed.
https://www.oit.ac.jp/news/news/pressrelease10718.html (Japanese) Two volumes of Fumiko’s reprinted autobiography, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and Just Look At Her
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Date: 2026-04-10 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-10 07:43 pm (UTC)