Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Hanai O-Ume was born in 1864 to a minor samurai family in northern Chiba. The family moved to Tokyo in accordance with the Meiji Restoration, but life was not easy and when O-Ume was nine years old her father Hanai Sennosuke sold her/adopted her out to the merchant Okada Tsunesaburo, who had her taught dance and shamisen playing so that she could make a living as a geisha. At fifteen she entered a geisha house, becoming a full-fledged geisha three years later.

With both beauty and boldness, she became extremely popular, especially with dubious customers such as kyokyaku gangster samurai, speculators, and moneylenders. She is said to have met the Imperial doctor Erwin Baelz at the geisha house, striking him prophetically as “a woman who just might not balk at murder.”

At nineteen she removed her name from Okada’s family register and bought back her original family name of Hanai; she had been going by “Kohide” at that time. Of the three hundred or so geisha at her house she had become the top earner. Her birth father Sennosuke had fallen on particularly hard times and was working as a rikisha driver; in hopes of supporting him, O-Ume moved closer to his address, renaming herself “Hidekichi” (and becoming the butt of jokes about calling herself after Toyotomi Hideyoshi, written with the same characters). Her life was a complicated one, including a bank president who acted as her patron and a love affair with the kabuki actor Sawamura Gennosuke.

In 1886, she gave up life as a geisha and opened a teahouse called the Suigetsu, with her father’s name on the papers. Sennosuke kept the books, but they clashed frequently and O-Ume ran away for several days. On her return home, in June of that year, she encountered Yasugi Minekichi (or Minesaburo), an employee who had been tasked with carrying her shamisen and doing other useful tasks in her geisha days. (If the gossip of the time is to be trusted, Minekichi had started out as a servant of O-Ume’s would-be lover the actor Gennosuke. When still a geisha she had sent Gennosuke an elaborate kimono for him to wear on stage; however, after the show was over he gave it to Kiyoji, another geisha, which O-Ume learned from Minekichi. Furious, she called on Gennosuke with knife in hand. The matter went no further at the time, but the love affair was over and Minekichi lost his job as well, only to be hired by O-Ume herself.)

O-Ume asked Minekichi to help mend fences between herself and her father, little knowing that he was more interested in driving them further apart in order to get his own hands on the Suigetsu. “I can do that, but you have to do whatever I say,” Minekichi told her, and started to rape her. O-Ume pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death. (Or possibly the stabbing was less in immediate self-defense and more as a reaction to his machinations with her father; stories vary.)

At her trial in November, O-Ume was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. Released in 1903, fifteen years later, she started various small businesses, but all failed as soon as the initial rush of customers interested in her notoriety petered out. Like other dokufu of the time, she resorted to taking the stage in dramatizations of her own life story. She died in 1916 at the age of 53, attended (according to one story) by her fellow ex-geisha Kiyoji, formerly a rival over Gennosuke. Both in her lifetime and thereafter, her story became the basis for numerous popular songs, plays, and films.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.fujiarts.com/meiji-era-japanese-prints/yoshitoshi/1085056-hanai-oume-killing-minekichi-1887 (English) Painting by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi of the murder scene

Takahashi O-Den was born in 1850 (or maybe 1848 or 1851) in Gunma, supposedly the daughter of the domain retainer Hirose Han’emon and a maidservant; she was adopted by Takahashi Kanzaemon and his wife Kino (or maybe O-Haru), and upon their divorce fostered out to Kanzaemon’s brother Kyu’emon and his wife Hatsu. Or maybe Kino was the maidservant in question all along? Who knows, not us and probably not O-Den herself.

She was married at fourteen to Miyashita Yojiro, but they got along badly and were divorced two years later. She began work in a restaurant and found herself pestered by unruly clients; concerned, her foster father brought her home and, in 1867, had her marry Takahashi Naminosuke, who became an adopted husband. At first they worked peacefully in the fields together, but Naminosuke’s increasing gambling habit made him a bad husband and led to the confiscation of their rice paddy to pay his debts, leaving them little choice but to flee under cover of darkness. (Or maybe they were chased away after he developed Hansen’s disease, without any gambling happening.) They settled in Yokohama, where O-Den worked as a maid and Naminosuke became bedridden with Hansen’s disease (or maybe something else). Finding that her wages weren’t enough to pay the medical bills, she became one of the prostitutes then servicing the many foreigners in Yokohama. After Naminosuke’s death in 1872, O-Den moved to Tokyo, living with first a merchant called Ozawa Ihei and then a vagabond called Ogawa Ichitaro.

The next part depends which account you follow.
Possibly: Under Ogawa’s influence, she fell into the habit of getting money any way she could come by it. In 1876 she acquired an admirer called Goto Kichizo, a rich used clothes dealer in his fifties, and asked him to meet her at an inn and bring with him two hundred yen (not enough for two cans of coffee today, but a huge sum at the time) in order to “arrange a business opportunity.” Goto met her there, slept with her, and told her that he hadn’t had the money on hand at the moment but would absolutely bring it next time. Then he rolled over and fell asleep. O-Den saw red, and slit his throat with the razor she had on hand. She ransacked his belongings, seized the twenty-six yen he had on him, and fled. Captured not long after, she was put to death in December 1879, among the last women in Japan to be beheaded.

Or possibly (this version was reported by the newspapers at the time): While living with Ogawa, O-Den (or maybe Ogawa himself) fell into debt for 10 yen to a man named Tanaka. She consulted Goto the used clothes dealer for advice; he offered to put up the money, but kept putting it off. When he said one night “Let’s you and me go somewhere and get it on” to O-Den, she thought, this is my chance, I’ll do what he wants and then he’ll lend me the money, and if he doesn’t I’ll kill him. They checked into a hotel as “Uchiyama Sennosuke and his wife Matsu,” and went to bed together. In the morning, Goto told her he didn’t have any money on him; when he had gone back to sleep [this part is consistent among accounts] she slit his throat with the razor she had brought and left a note to the innkeeper on his corpse, saying that she had murdered him out of revenge for his part in her sister’s death and was going to turn herself in after visiting her sister’s grave, signed Matsu. She took 11 yen from his belongings and let herself out. The next day she paid Tanaka back his 10 yen, as well as returning one yen to a neighborhood woman named O-Kiku. The day after that she was arrested, and from there on the story is the same.

Her funerary name is engraved on the grave of the Takahashi family in her hometown. A widely believed legend says that shamisen players who visit her grave will become more skillful.

The life of O-Den as a famous dokufu or “poison lady” has been depicted in at least two dozen versions, fiction and non-fiction, from kabuki to movies, novels, biographies, and traditional songs. Many are highly sensationalized, painting her as a crazed victim of passion for sex and/or money. (Not even getting into the part about the autopsy or what the doctors are supposed to have said about her body.) This proliferation has helped give rise to the one zillion “or maybes” above.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.fujiarts.com/cgi-bin/item.pl?item=934089 (Woodblock print of O-Den and her crime)
https://makmjk.wixsite.com/takahashioden (English: comparison of historical facts about Oden with Kanagaki Robun’s play about her; a site put together by a couple of Japanese college students, very earnest, very pretty, terrible site design)
https://bushoojapan.com/jphistory/kingendai/2023/01/30/13671 (Japanese: straightforward and sympathetic account of O-Den’s life, including a pretty contemporary illustration, which argues that she did her best by all the men in her life (“except Goto, and he asked for it”).

Harada Kinu was born in 1845 in Edo, the daughter of Harada Daisuke, a temporary employee of the samurai (an unstable position treated with samurai rank when employed, which they lost immediately upon unemployment; the more things change). Or maybe she was the daughter of the fisherman Harada Sajiro, depending on which source one believes. In any case, having lost her parents to illness by sixteen, she was adopted by an uncle and eventually became the concubine of the daimyo Okubo Tadayoshi (or Tadanori), to whom she bore a son who became his official heir. [We think. None of the dates quite line up, never mind the names; the disadvantage of giving all male family members the same first character is clear in that the materials do not agree on how to read Tadanori/Tadayoshi or Tadayori/Tadanori/Tadatoshi, or indeed which of them was Kinu’s common-law husband and which her son.]

The disorder of the Meiji Restoration disrupted the Okubo household as well as many others, and Kinu was expelled in 1868, whereupon she became a geisha in the Asakusa district. [She may have spent some time as a Buddhist nun in the interim, mourning Okubo’s 1864 death. Or maybe not.] She became the mistress of the moneylender Kobayashi Kimpei, who supported her comfortably. Introduced by a friend, she fell in love with the Kabuki actor Arashi Rikaku (later Ichikawa Gonjuro), whose good looks and gentle conversation delighted her. She became both his financial patron and his lover.

Kobayashi resented this, not surprisingly, and tried everything up to and including physical abuse to keep her at home; meanwhile, warned by a senior actor not to consort with married women, Arashi refused to see her. At her wit’s end, Kinu sent a maid out to buy rat poison made from arsenic. She mixed tiny amounts of it into Kobayashi’s food, believing that a sudden death would be suspicious, but gradual ill health less so; eventually, in January, 1871, he died in agony. Perhaps she was lucky to avoid a Mithridates/Urquhart result? He was at first thought to have died of food poisoning, leaving Kinu free to attend on Arashi. Six months later, however, the matter came to light.

Kinu gave birth to a son, Rikimatsu, in November. In February of the following year, she was beheaded. The night before her execution, she wrote a poem, playing on her lover Arashi’s name, that became famous: “Yoarashi ni samete ato nashi hana no yume,” or roughly “Waking to a storm in the night which blows away dreams of flowers without a trace.” She became posthumously well known as “Yoarashi O-Kinu,” one of the dokufu or “poison women” murderesses whose stories were a staple of the social media of the time.

Little about her life is definitely known, and most information has been influenced by these sensational reports, presented both as fiction and as non-fiction. Anything above might or might not be factually true.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.myjapanesehanga.com/home/artists/utagawa-hiroshige-iii-1842-1894/the-true-story-of-harada-okina.html (Utagawa woodblock print about the incident)