Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Hani Motoko was born in 1873 as Matsuoka Motoko in far-northern Aomori, where her father was a former samurai; he left the family in disgrace when she was small, having lost the status he gained by marrying in when his disporting with local geisha became public (as a child Motoko would stride into the geisha house and sit down right next to her father as he drank, refusing the sweets offered her by the madam, until he could be dragged home). From early on she was a determined student who did not accept what she was taught at face value: “all right, one plus one is two, but why is it?”

After graduating from the local girls’ school, she moved on to study in Tokyo with the support of her education-mad grandfather (it took five days on a sled to Sendai, the nearest big city, and from there a day on the train). She eventually enrolled in the Meiji Girls’ School in order to study with its principal Iwamoto Yoshiharu (husband of Wakamatsu Shizuko), editor of the magazine Jogaku Zasshi [Women’s Learning], a liberal, Christian, quasi-feminist organ of which Motoko was a devoted reader. She earned her dormitory fees by working as a proofreader for the magazine.

In 1893 she returned to the north to teach elementary school, where she fell into a brief marriage which lasted only six months, apparently due to her husband’s dissolute ways (or possibly to his mother’s refusal to accept Motoko as his wife); they met by correspondence and she may not have known what he was like until meeting him in person. Another theory is that she married him thinking she could change him and found out she was wrong. Later she called it her “first love (I’d rather not think of it as a marriage).”

Afterward, she went back to Tokyo and found a home with the doctor Yoshioka Yayoi as a live-in maid. Yayoi and her husband were helpful in finding work better suited to Motoko’s abilities: after another stint as an elementary school teacher, in 1898 she went to work for the Hochi Shimbun newspaper as Japan’s first woman reporter, or at least one of the very earliest (originally hired as a proofreader, having bluffed her way past the gender barrier on the strenght of her work, she wrote articles on spec that impressed the editors enough to let her move up). Her articles tended to focus on often-neglected social and women’s issues.

Three years later, Motoko married her colleague Hani Yoshikazu, seven years younger than she; the two subsequently left the paper to found their own magazine, Katei no Tomo [Household Friend] (later Fujin no Tomo [Housewife’s Friend]. Written by Motoko and managed by Yoshikazu, the magazine was full of interviews, accounts from readers, and housekeeping hints (including Motoko’s rational template for keeping a household budget), which brought it immediate popularity.

Their oldest daughter Setsuko was born in 1903, followed by Keiko in 1909 (a middle daughter died young). In 1921 Motoko and her husband, realizing they couldn’t find a school where they wanted to enroll their children, founded the Jiyu Gakuen [Free School, named based on the Biblical quotation “the truth shall set you free”], originally aimed at girls from age twelve to nineteen, offering a liberal education not in accordance with government regulations or the “mechanical” rote education then prevalent (the more things change). The students met in “family groups” of five rather than classes, cleaned their own rooms and made their own meals, and studied according to their interests. The only hitch was that tuition and meal costs were high, meaning that the students came uniformly from well-to-do families. However, the school gained considerable social recognition for its students' volunteering to help the disaster-afflicted, including in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. The school kept its “Free” name throughout World War II, in spite of governmental pressure, and retains it today (it now runs from kindergarten through college, coeducational although with separate boys/girls sections for junior high and high school).

Hani Yoshikazu died in 1955 and Motoko followed him in 1957, aged eighty-three. Her reflections on life included “There are two forces in life: ‘give it a try’ and ‘it won’t work anyway.’ You’ve got to choose one or the other.” Her younger daughter Keiko took over the school after her parents’ deaths, while Setsuko became a feminist writer and activist; Setsuko’s son Susumu and his daughter Mio were both film directors, and Susumu’s sister Kyoko was a music educator.

Sources
Nakae, Ishii, Mori 1996, Shimamoto
https://www.fujinnotomo.co.jp/about/life/ (Japanese) Very cute photos of Motoko and her husband in their youth
https://jiyu.jp/ (Japanese) Photos of the Jiyu Gakuen school, including the dazzling Myonichikan designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Urata Tada (or Tadako, or Yui) was born in 1873 in present-day Kumamoto, down south in Kyushu, the daughter of a traditional physician and businessman. At seventeen she was married to the son of another local merchant, but either a few months into married life or during the wedding (stories differ), she ran away, leaving a note saying “It’s not that I don’t like you, I just want to study more.” Her would-be husband recognized that she was not going to change her mind, and the marriage was cancelled.

After training as a pharmacist, getting her license in Osaka in 1892, she moved to Tokyo in 1895 and entered the Saisei Gakusha (familiar to us from various other faces here) to study as a doctor. Although there was no shortage of prejudice against women, she was undisturbed (tall even for a man of the time, she dressed as a man for convenience when attending school and enjoyed it when rickshaw drivers asked her “and where would you like to go, sir?”). She was licensed to practice in 1898, having taken only half the normal period of study, thanks in part to her pharmaceutical experience and partly to her habit of staying up to study whenever she woke in the night.

She worked briefly on the study of infectious diseases with Kitasato Shibasaburo, an enormously distinguished doctor and Kumamoto landsman who kept a friendly eye on her throughout her life, before returning to Kyushu in 1899 to practice medicine.

In 1903 Tada went to Germany to study ophthalmology in depth, able to do so in part because of her family’s wealth (she also studied German without marrying her German teacher, unlike Yoshioka Yayoi, who was among the friends seeing her off). Notwithstanding the news of her father’s death during her first year overseas, she went on to earn a doctorate from the University of Marburg in 1905 as not only the first Japanese woman but the first woman of any nationality to do so. Her doctoral thesis (dedicated to her mother and to her father’s memory) was, of course, in German, as were her oral exams. (She later submitted a thesis to the Japanese Ministry of Education and requested a doctoral degree based thereupon, but was rejected on the basis that “there was no precedent for granting doctoral degrees to women” (plus ça change, Japanese bureaucracy).)

Returning to Japan in 1906 (where she received a heroine’s welcome she could have done without), Tada practiced in her hometown, taught at the Gakushuin School for Girls, rejected an offer to serve as physician to the Meiji Emperor, and finally opened an ophthalmology clinic in Tokyo. In 1911 (or maybe 1907?) she married Nakamura Tsunesaburo, also a doctor; the following year they moved to Tianjin, China, where they ran a hospital in the Foreign Concession. Tada was the hospital’s director (her husband managed the pharmacy and the print room); she spoke with her foreign and Chinese patients in English, German, and her newly learned Chinese, eschewing an interpreter and thus gaining her patients’ trust. She also did not hesitate to eat Chinese style as her patients did, including garlic, when the opportunity arose.

As the presence of the war became felt more strongly, Tada’s activities were limited, although she continued to set off in rickshaws to see patients, explaining to Japanese and Chinese soldiers alike that she was a doctor on business. In 1932 her husband died, unexpectedly, of diabetes; Tada blamed herself and questioned her mission as a doctor for being unable to save him, but kept the hospital open until the war made it impossible to do so, later that same year, when she returned to Japan.

She died in 1936. Visitors to Marburg can (I’m told) set foot on “Tada-Urata-Platz” there.

Sources
https://kyusyu-manga.azusashoin.com/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E4%BA%BA%E5%A5%B3%E6%80%A7%E5%88%9D%E3%81%AE%E5%8C%BB%E5%AD%A6%E5%8D%9A%E5%A3%AB%E3%80%80%E5%AE%87%E8%89%AF%E7%94%B0-%E5%94%AF%EF%BC%88%E3%81%86%E3%82%89%E3%81%9F-%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A0/ (Japanese) Excerpt from a manga about Tada’s life
https://www.asahi.com/articles/photo/AS20231128003809.html?iref=pc_photo_gallery_1 (Japanese) Photos (click on the right arrow for more)

Kawakami Sadayakko was born in 1871 to a merchant family in Tokyo, where her original name was Koyama Sada. At age seven, when her family went bankrupt, she was adopted by (probably = sold to) a geisha house. Expected to become a success in the future with her promise of beauty, she was taught by a foster mother who adored her to dance and to play the shamisen (she also studied the less feminine arts of literacy, riding, billiards, judo and archery). She made her geisha debut at the age of fourteen under the name of Koyakko; her beauty, brightness and brains made her instantly popular, and the leading politician Ito Hirobumi (husband of Umeko) became her patron, when she began to call herself Sadayakko.

It was around this time when she was rescued during a horse-riding misadventure by a college student called Iwasaki Momosuke, with whom she immediately hit it off; unfortunately, he shortly married Fukuzawa Yukichi’s daughter Fusako. Sadayakko was still recovering from her heartbreak when she met Kawakami Otojiro, an actor and sometime liberal activist who had written a satirical song that became a runaway hit, and married him in 1894.

Otojiro, ambitious, idealistic, and by all accounts very attractive to women, was however not otherwise very good at life; when he built a theater it failed to flourish and was eventually taken by his creditors, when he ran for office he was not only not elected but ran up a huge debt. In search of escape and a new outlook, he and Sadayakko made their way from Tokyo to Kobe by the sea route (in a small boat, which Sadayakko tartly hoped would teach him responsibility), before leaving with his troupe for America in 1898. Unfortunately, it was an all-male troupe, and American audiences did not welcome men in female roles. When they lost one of their female-role actors, with nothing left to lose, Sadayakko filled in. Her early geisha training came to her rescue and she was a hit, with feminine beauty that seemed “exotic” to western audiences as well as expert dancing and singing. In this way she became, according to some, the first Japanese actress. Performing in Paris, she was hailed by Le Figaro as “more gifted than the Eiffel Tower is high”; the crowned heads of Europe applauded, the nineteen-year-old Picasso sketched her from the audience, everyone from Rodin to Klee to Puccini to Isadora Duncan became a fan, perfumes and clothing styles were named after her.

Back in Japan, she started a school for actresses (which faced vicious criticism, based on Sadayakko’s background and the low social position of the theater in general; unrelatedly, one of her students was the actress Mori Ritsuko and another the future writer Tamura Toshiko) and performed in Japanese productions of Western classic plays and operas, playing Ophelia, Desdemona, Salomé, and Aida among others. Hasegawa Shigure, founder of the women’s journal Nyonin Geijutsu, interviewed her in her dressing room for an admiring profile called “Madam Sadayakko.” Her career lasted only ten years or so, however; when Otojiro died in 1911, she gave up acting, but still refused to pay attention to nasty comments along the lines of “get thee to a nunnery” based on her widowhood (over three thousand people wrote in to a newspaper on the topic of “what’s to be done with Sadayakko,” and she ignored all of them).

Reunited with her old crush Momosuke (who said to Hasegawa “some people worry that I spend too much time taking care of Kawakami, but for a man, it’s all about having a woman you adore”), now a leading industrialist, she went into business with him, playing the stock market and building a silk spinning factory (where, very unusually for the time, the young women working there were treated humanely) with her gains. She died in 1946.

Sources
Nakae
Ishii
Mori 2008
http://easternimp.blogspot.com/2015/09/sadayakko-through-artists-eyes-part-1.html (English) Lots of illustrations and details about the plays in which Sadayakko appeared (click through also to parts 2 and 3)

Yasui Tetsu was born in 1870 to a family of traditional martial artists from Shimosa, northeast of Tokyo. She was educated in Tokyo, living with her grandparents (devout Buddhists), and graduated in 1890 from the Tokyo Women’s Normal School (later Ochanomizu University). Fascinated by what she learned about the Pestalozzi system of education, she began her career as a teacher at her own old elementary school. where she taught for four years, interrupted by a two-year period teaching in Iwate in the far north.

In 1896 she was directed by the government to study education in England; however, her English was not up to par, so she spent a few months living and studying with Tsuda Umeko, eventually departing Japan in early 1897. In England she studied education and psychology at the Cambridge Training College for Women under Elizabeth Hughes, who advised her to be out and about seeing as many schools and households as she could. Tetsu’s admiration for Miss Hughes not only did away with the anti-Western feelings she had been raised with but also gave her a strong interest in Christianity.

She became a Christian shortly after her return to Japan in 1900, when she took up a position as teacher and dormitory mistress at the Women’s Normal School. In 1904 she was once again uprooted by an invitation from the royal family of Siam (Thailand); for three years she served as educational director of the Rajini Girls’ School in Bangkok. Thereafter she spent another year studying ethics, ancient Greek philosophy, and English literature in Wales (perhaps inspired by Miss Hughes, a patriotic Welshwoman) and returned to Japan to teach once again, also founding a women’s journal.

In 1918, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University was founded with Nitobe Inazo as its first president and Tetsu as dean; the following year she joined Nitobe and Goto Shinpei on a fact-finding tour of Europe. (Tetsu’s brother Tsutomu suggested that she was in love with Nitobe at the time; who knows.) Five years later, when Nitobe went to work for the League of Nations, Tetsu succeeded him to become the first Japanese female college president. She continued to live and work in the college until 1940.

During the 1930s, when some of her students and alumnae were arrested for membership in the Japanese Communist Party, she spoke to them with understanding and brought them food and goods in jail (in an era when arrest for “thought crime” was a risk). During the war, she refused governmental demands to cut ties with American and Canadian colleagues and to cease teaching English. She died in the postwar confusion of 1945 at the age of seventy-five.

Sources
Nakae

Incidentally, this is post #52 (not counting the sticky), so this blog has now been running for a year! And we’re not even a quarter of the way through my list. Many thanks for reading along <3