Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Endo Kiyoko was born in 1882 in Tokyo. After leaving high school, she worked as a teacher, a railway company clerk, and a reporter as well as becoming involved in political activism (demanding the revision of Article 5 of the Peace Police Law (forerunner of the infamous Peace Preservation Law), which forbade women to engage in political activity; she picketed the National Diet building in men’s clothes and a woman’s traditional hairstyle).

In December 1909 she met the writer Iwano Homei, nine years older than she was, who already had one wife, six children, and countless girlfriends. Five days after their first meeting he was already asking her to live with and marry him. Kiyoko herself had had a troubled love life, once attempting suicide when her “platonic lover” of five years betrayed her (she had refused to sleep with him without marriage, unwilling to become “one of his belongings”). She had no reason whatsoever to trust Iwano, but she wanted a change of scene, and agreed to live with him on the grounds that a) he would never hit her and b) they would live together as friends sharing a house. Each of them had their own room, with both names on the gate. At the time this was unusual enough to bring reporters from the Yorozu Choho [Universal Morning News], to whom Kiyoko said “I’m still hooked on my previous man. I’m not even slightly in love with Iwano,” while Iwano said “She continues to refuse my second condition [ie sex], but I have hopes.” The reporter added a sensationalist headline along the lines of “Two Oddities: Will the Spirit or the Flesh Win?”.

As recorded in her diary, Iwano continued to press his attentions on Kiyoko, using every method in the book from a kiss on the hand to a hint that she must be sexually abnormal if she wasn’t interested. Her former lover visited and Iwano complained that he couldn’t lord it over him; his ex-wife visited to ask for money, remarking snidely “you two seem well matched” (given that she was raising Iwano’s six children, it’s hard to blame her for her tone). Various other friends appeared to observe the situation. Iwano wrote Kiyoko letters addressed from his room to hers. When Kiyoko gave in is not clear, but by the following spring she was calling him her husband and they were working together on his new book. They were officially married three years later in 1913. [It is extremely tempting to think that Dorothy Sayers was influenced by this story when she wrote Strong Poison, except that the chances of her actually having heard about it are for all intents and purposes zero. Proving the universality of certain kinds of male behavior?]

In 1912 Kiyoko had begun writing for Hiratsuka Raicho’s feminist journal Seito [Bluestocking], where she left a vivid impression with her “strong personality, heavy makeup, big hair, and green cape” (Raicho). In 1913, she and Iwano both spoke at a Bluestocking-sponsored lecture series, Iwano on “Men’s Demands” (interrupted by a heckler demanding “so why did you get divorced?”) and Kiyoko on “Ideological Independence and Economic Independence”: men and women were essentially equal and discrimination against women was a problem of society, so women must become both ideologically and economically independent and should have the right to handle their own finances.

Their son Tamio was born in 1914; predictably, Iwano began to lose interest in his wife thereafter, going so far as to sleep with Kambara Fusae, the young Bluestocking staff member engaged by Kiyoko to work with Iwano on a translation. Kiyoko moved out, demanding two-thirds of Iwano’s income into the bargain, to which Iwano grudgingly agreed. In the following two years, however, she sued him twice for failing to pay child support. Iwano sued in return for divorce; Kiyoko won (advised by the judge to settle it amicably, she retorted that she didn’t mind divorcing but she insisted on cash in hand, although Iwano was too broke to pay up). During the trial, her diary of their marriage was published, dedicated by initials to her previous lover. Iwano married Fusae shortly after the divorce was complete (Fusae herself had protested that she had no intention of living off him as his mistress, only taking money for the work she actually did for his book). The newspapers went to town.

In 1917, Kiyoko began to live with an art student ten years younger than she, Endo Tatsunosuke (same family name, no relation), with whom she opened a flower shop; their relationship was ultimately short and conducted amid poverty, but very affectionate from all accounts. Their daughter Aiko was born in 1920; Kiyoko died (of gall bladder problems?) only seven months later (oddly enough, Iwano died in the same year). Tamio was adopted by Araki Ikuko, another Bluestocking staffer, but died in the 1923 earthquake; Aiko was adopted by Kiyoko’s lawyer, Kawaguchi Shozo, and eventually moved to America.

Sources
Mori 1996, Mori 2008
Hasegawa Shigure [I’m tempted to sit down and translate this, one of Shigure’s “Modern Beauties” essays, because it’s so readable—part one describing a very sad group visit to Kiyoko’s grave long after her death, and part two in quasi-fictional form from Kiyoko’s POV shortly after moving in with Iwano, hearing something in the next room and thinking it’s the cat she gave away when she moved, until she realizes it’s her new ?partner snoring. “Losing oneself might be necessary in order to build a bigger self, she told herself.” “She missed him so [while he was away working in Osaka], even the frogs seemed to be croaking o-sa-ka o-sa-ka.”]

Kuba Tsuru was born in 1881 in Shuri, Okinawa. She is said to have been the first (confirmed) literate Okinawan woman. In 1896 she was among the first students to enter the women’s department of the Okinawa Normal School, passing a tough exam to do so, and the only native Okinawan in her class of ten; she was able to attend advanced schooling (for the time) because her father was a postmaster, but she concealed her attendance at school from her neighbors, hiding books in her pockets and never reading aloud at home.

She became a teacher at Shuri Elementary School two years later (graduates of the Normal School were required to work as elementary school teachers for six years). The new existence of female elementary school teachers made a difference in their communities not only in the classroom but as advisors and supporters for other women, who previously could only consult priestesses or shamans (miko or yuta, I don’t know enough about Okinawan customs to get the terms right in English) with their concerns.

Tsuru was among the first women to switch from Okinawan to Japanese clothing, influencing female students to do the same; this was in part because the traditional Okinawan dress was associated with peasants and commoners, so that students from well-to-do families would look down on their teacher in her Okinawan garb, making her job more difficult. She also worked to eliminate the custom of hajichi or hand tattooing (one theory is that as education became more widespread among women, the use of hajichi as a sign of coming-of-age was no longer needed; the custom did not entirely disappear until the 1950s). Many of these changes were met with significant opposition from the community (“The Kubas’ girl Tsuru is all Japanese now, next thing you know she’ll cut her hair and become Dutch.”).

There is relatively little information about her later life; she married a man called Yasumura (or Amura?) Ryokoh and had four daughters, continuing to work as a teacher for over thirty years. She died in 1943.

Sources
http://www.ayirom-uji-2016.com/woman-that-character-cant-be-summation (Japanese) Picture of girls dressed up in historical school uniforms, right to left representing 1898, 1901, 1904, 1920-ish, 1927.
*It is worth noting that none of my reference books contain any Okinawan women at all, and no Ainu women apart from Chiri Yukie. Japan has such a blind spot about this kind of thing, even now. H/t two friends, thank you T-kun and T-先辈, who are well informed on Okinawan matters and pointed me in the direction of some people to include.

Kanno Suga, also called Sugako, was born in 1881 in Osaka, where her father was an itinerant mining engineer. Her mother Nobu died when Suga was twelve, to be replaced by a wicked stepmother who abused her (according to some accounts, having her raped and spreading rumors of her bad behavior); at age nineteen, she was married off to support the family’s failing finances. Shortly divorced, she returned home and helped support her younger sister and brother.

She studied writing with the author Udagawa Bunkai, joined Yajima Kajiko’s WCTU, and thereby developed an interest in socialism and pacifism through her acquaintance with the writer, editor, and all-around good guy Sakai Toshihiko [to whose daughter Magara Suga willed her best kimono], then running the Heimin Shimbun left-wing newspaper. She was apparently particularly moved by an article in which Sakai argued that women who had been raped should bear no more responsibility for it than women bitten by mad dogs.

Suga addressed woman’s issues from her own earliest days as a journalist, working for the Osaka Morning News: she criticized the plan to have geisha dance at the Fifth National Industrial Exhibition held in 1903, calling them “women of low repute,” a daring move given how many high governmental officials were then married to ex-geisha (she later regretted this stance, shifting to criticize the social structure in general rather than the women involved in it.) In 1906, with help from Sakai, she moved to Wakayama to edit a newspaper there while its original editor was in prison; she subsequently married her colleague Arahata Kanson and moved to Tokyo with him, although this marriage likewise did not last more than a year. Her articles continued to call on women to stand up for themselves against men’s double standards and perfidy.

In 1908, she was arrested as part of the so-called Red Flag Incident, in which anarchists including Arahata, Osugi Sakae, and Kotoku Shusui waved red flags marked with anarchist and socialist slogans when welcoming a comrade back from prison, clashed with police, and were arrested in large numbers. Shortly after the incident, Suga and Kotoku began to live together (he was technically still married, but his wife Chiyo had stayed home when he came to Tokyo. Arahata, Suga’s ex-lover, did not hesitate to use this and other points to blacken Suga’s name in later years; he famously described her as “not at all pretty, but very sexy” or words to that effect, implying that she had slept with almost every man she met). Along with Kotoku, Suga became editor of the journal Liberal Thought, which was promptly banned.

In 1910, Suga, Kotoku, and a number of their comrades were arrested in what became the High Treason Incident, on suspicion of plotting to assassinate the Meiji Emperor. Even at the time it was widely known that most of the charges were entirely falsified (in part by chief prosecutor Hiranuma Kiichiro), as part of the increasing crackdown on the left wing. According to some accounts, Suga, who was already suffering from tuberculosis, knew herself not to be long for this world in any case, and decided to die with her comrades rather than plead her innocence; others have her a central part of the conspiracy, considering herself a latter-day Sofia Perovskaya. Regardless, she was hanged for treason in January of 1911, at the age of thirty.

Buried in a Tokyo temple, her remains disappeared during the war. While it was originally thought that they had been ravaged by the wartime military, a postwar survey found that they had been taken by comrades for safe reinterment in Okayama; her grave is still with her sister's in Tokyo.

Sources
Nakae, Ishii, Mori 1996, Tanaka
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kanno-sugako-reflections-on-the-way-to-the-gallows (English; translator unknown) Suga’s record of her sentencing and thereafter. A LOT.

Fujikage Seiju was born in 1880 in Niigata on the north coast; her birth name was Uchida Yai or Yae (she had an unreasonable number of names throughout her life). Her father was a sushi chef, and it may have been through his catering connections that she was adopted early on into the geisha quarters, where she learned to dance and play the shamisen at an early age, as well as becoming literate at a terakoya. She made her debut as a dancing girl at age thirteen.

When she was nineteen, she went to Tokyo to study with the Kabuki actress Ichikawa Kumehachi, taking the stage name Uchida Shizue; she also studied poetry with Sasaki Nobutsuna, along with Hasegawa Shigure among others. In 1903 she appeared with Kumehachi in a production at the theater run by Kawakami Otojiro and his wife Sadayakko; advised thereafter to switch to Japanese dance, she became a disciple of Fujima Kan’emon II. In 1909 she was given the right to call herself Fujima Shizue. Unable to support herself as a dancer alone, she also worked as a geisha under the name of Shintomoeya Yaeji, becoming known as “the literary geisha.”

In 1910, at age thirty, Shizue met the writer Nagai Kafu, then a professor of literature at Keio University. They had a child, who was adopted out, and subsequently married in 1914; however, Kafu’s persistent infidelity drove Shizue to leave him within a year of the marriage, starting an off-again on-again relationship which was to last until their final parting in 1937. Kafu made use of her love life in his writing.

In 1917, she founded the Fujikage-kai dance study group, in effect a production company; originally a joint effort with two other disciples of Kan’emon, it quickly became her own group, and she gave up her geisha work two years later to concentrate on performing and producing a new form of Japanese dance, including new explorations of dance in folklore and children’s songs. Collaborators with the Fujikage-kai included luminaries of the era in various fields, such as the artist Wada Eisaku, the writer Kitahara Hakushu, the composer Yamada Kosaku (younger brother of Tsuneko Gauntlett), the singer Sato Chiyako, the critic Katsumoto Seiichiro (also a lover of Shizue’s, until he fell in love with the novelist Yamada Junko), and the actresses Okada Yoshiko and Mizutani Yaeko.

In 1928, Shizue took the Siberian Railway to Europe, where she visited London in company with the writer Yoshiya Nobuko and performed at the Théâtre Femina in Paris. Thereafter, her Fujikage-kai performances incorporated European music and dance influences as well as traditional Japanese ones such as nagauta. In 1931 her erstwhile teacher refused to let her use the Fujima name any more (they were to mend relations in 1940), and she took the name Fujikage Shizue, also leaving the Japanese Dance Association.

During the war she was compelled to conform to patriotic dance themes such as Japan’s theoretical 2600th national anniversary. She fled to her birth prefecture of Niigata to avoid the worst of the postwar chaos, returning to Tokyo in 1946 to continue the Fujikage-kai productions; she also performed with her disciples for the Occupation army. In 1957 she retired from active performance, passing on the name of Fujikage Shizue to her disciple Fujikage Miyoe and taking the name Seiju instead (“quiet tree” as opposed to Shizue, “quiet branch”).

After Nagai Kafu’s death in 1959, she made a commemorative habit of eating katsudon, his favorite dish, on the 30th of each month. She received numerous national honors before her death in 1966 at the age of eighty-six. The Fujikage-ryu modern dance style remains an official institution today; the title of Fujikage Seiju was passed on to the third generation, her granddaughter by blood (birth name Sado Ichiko), who died just one month ago as of this posting.

Sources
Nakae

Mori Shige was born in 1880 in Tokyo, the daughter of a judge; her maiden name was Araki. A nicely brought up young girl who studied painting, koto and flower arrangement and graduated from Gakushuin Girls’ School (the school of choice for upper-class young ladies), she daydreamed as a child about becoming the Empress of Russia, eager to marry someone unique. Her first marriage, a family arrangement when she was in her teens, was to an up and coming young banker; however, it was rapidly dissolved when his relationship with a local geisha was discovered.

Shige met Mori Rintaro (better known as the novelist Mori Ogai) in 1902, when he was a military doctor in Kyushu; he was eighteen years older than she and, like her, had been married and divorced once already. He already had a twelve-year-old son, Otto (having studied in Germany, Ogai gave all his children German names written in Japanese characters). Although he had been stubbornly refusing his mother’s urgings to remarry, Ogai gave in when he met Shige and was struck by her beauty (“like a work of art” in his words). Shige, as a fan of his novels, was pleased with the opportunity to marry her idol.

The initial harmony of their married life was disturbed three months in when Ogai was posted back to Tokyo, where they moved in with his mother and sisters and Shige experienced the classic Japanese mother-in-law/daughter-in-law struggles. She found Ogai’s mother Mineko, who ran the household (including Ogai’s military salary) with an iron grip, so difficult to handle that she ended up taking shelter with her daughter Mari (born in 1903) in a room of her own parents’ house. Ogai put this into the short story Hanjitsu[Half a Day] in 1909; upon reading it, Shige was so infuriated that she started writing and publishing her own stories (in some accounts, encouraged to do so by Ogai), submitting them to Seito [Bluestocking] among other magazines. She depicted her husband in fiction as a loving partner and gentle father, while omitting her mother-in-law entirely.

Their son Fritz was born in 1907 and died the following year; Anne was born in 1909 and Louis in 1911. As her children told it, Shige was apparently a resistant mother, getting on badly with her stepson Otto and very critical of the children’s looks, including telling Louis that he had better sow his wild oats in the West where women didn’t know what really handsome men looked like (she also bought him prophylactics when she felt he was old enough to visit the red-light districts).

Ogai died in 1922; Shige survived him by over a decade, living to see her grandchildren, and like other writers’ wives suffering from the criticism of his family (including his younger sister Koganei Kimiko, also a writer) and friends. Afraid after Mari was divorced twice running that Anne would never be able to marry, Shige sent her to France to study painting, along with Louis, who was struggling in school (in the event Anne married the painter Kobori Shiro). All four of Ogai’s surviving children made themselves known; Otto became a pathologist, Mari a novelist known for tanbi better known to cdrama fans by its Chinese pronunciation of danmei novels, and Anne and Louis essayists. Shige died in 1936 at the age of fifty-five.

Sources
Nakae
https://forbesjapan.com/articles/detail/50669 (Japanese) Includes photographs of Shige in her youth.

Hasegawa Shigure was born in 1879 in Tokyo, where her father was a lawyer; her birth name was Yasuko and her intimates knew her as O-Yat’chan all her life. She was fond of novels and plays from childhood on, popular among her elementary school classmates for her recountings of the stories she had read. At age fifteen she began to study waka poetry with Sasaki Nobutsuna, until her mother Taki, who resented her oldest daughter Yasuko for the short shrift given Taki by her husband and mother-in-law, sent her out to train as a maid.

Four years later she was married to the son of nouveau-riche family friends, a wastrel who was shortly dispatched to a remote mining town in the north to teach him proper behavior. Yasuko, lonely and isolated in what might at the time as well have been a different country, consoled herself with writing and sent the results to various magazines, winning an award in 1901 for a short story. This gave her the impetus to return to Tokyo in 1904 in order to focus on her writing, eventually divorcing her husband. It was at this point that she began to use “Shigure” as a pen name.

By 1908 Shigure’s theater and kabuki works were beginning to be staged; she was the first female playwright to be recognized by name at the Kabuki-za theater. Rapidly becoming known as a popular playwright (even her mother Taki applauded her success at this point, although she may have had financial motives), she also wrote for dance productions and experimental troupes, working with the kabuki actor Onoue Kikugoro VI, who became a lifelong friend. In 1917 she fell in love with the writer Mikami Otokichi, twelve years younger than she. They lived together from then on but were never formally married.

In 1928, Mikami—whose popular novels were raking in enough cash for him to support multiple mistresses, thanks in part to Shigure’s support and networking—offered to buy her a diamond ring. She requested instead the seed money for a magazine, and subsequently founded Nyonin Geijutsu [Women’s Art] in order to cast light on more women authors: serving as a Japanese equivalent of sorts to the English Time and Tide, it offered a platform to writers including Okada Yachiyo, Hirabayashi Taiko, Sata Ineko, Hiratsuka Raicho, Ozaki Midori, Kamichika Ichiko, the two Fumikos (Enchi and Hayashi), Tamura Toshiko, Takamure Itsue, and many others. Adopting the left-wing orientation of literary circles at the time, the magazine was banned more than once. While its publication run was only five years long, it was a major event in the history of twentieth-century Japanese women’s literature.

Shigure continued to write in her later years while caring for her ill husband. In 1936 she published Kindai Bijinden [Modern Beauties], a collection of biographical sketches of women of the time which she had written over the last two decades, including essays on O-Yuki Morgan, Yanagiwara Byakuren, Matsui Sumako, Raicho, Tazawa Inabune, Takemoto Ayanosuke, Shugensha Hamako, Kujo Takeko, Otsuka Kusuoko, and Iwano Kiyoko among others. As the war took shape, she founded a women’s organization called the Kagayaku Kai [Shining Group] which worked on behalf of Japan’s wartime machine, supporting Japanese troops overseas, Chinese women students in Japan, injured veterans, and the families of soldiers killed in action. She died in 1941 at the age of sixty-three, frustrated on her deathbed that she would not live long enough to write a biography of Higuchi Ichiyo.

Sources
Nakae
Mori 2008
Ishii

Sasaki Nobuko was born in 1878 in Tokyo, where her father ran a hospital and her mother, Sasaki Toyoju, was the head of the Japan Women’s Christian Temperance Union (founded jointly with Yajima Kajiko), working actively for monogamy and against prostitution and alcoholism; Toyoju was also aunt to Soma Kokko. Nobuko spent her youth studying at mission schools; her mother hoped to have her study in the United States and become a journalist.

In 1895, when Nobuko was eighteen, the Sasakis held a party for writers who had reported on the First Sino-Japanese War, among them the 25-year-old journalist Kunikida Doppo. Immediately struck by Nobuko’s straightforward intelligence and beauty, he began to court her with English poetry of his own as well as recitations of Wordworth. Nobuko was charmed enough to agree to his proposal of marriage, but her mother was fiercely opposed, and eventually gave in only on the condition that they married quietly and lived outside Tokyo. However, the marriage did not go well: Doppo, trying to make a living from his writing, was desperately poor, barely able to put rice on the table. He was also short-tempered and high-handed. Nobuko fled back to her parents less than six months later, where she shortly gave birth to a daughter called Urako, who was added to the family register in the guise of her younger sister.

Both her parents died not long after. In 1901, relatives sent her to America to marry a politician’s son called Mori Hiroshi; they did not expect, however, that on the long boat trip she would fall in love with the chief purser, Takei Kanzaburo, and he (although married), with her. Instead of staying in the US, she got straight back on the boat to return to Japan with Takei.
This “scandalous” behavior was leaked to the newspapers by a fellow passenger, the educationalist Hatoyama Haruko, which left Nobuko exposed to fierce criticism and slander as a “loose woman” “unbefitting to her class” and so on. The writer Arishima Takeo (a close friend of Nobuko’s unsuccessful fiancé Mori) picked up her story and made a novel out of it, Aru Onna [A Certain Woman] (in which the Nobuko figure dies in the end). Nobuko’s little sister Yoshie, furious, demanded to meet with Arishima and defend her sister’s honor, but Arishima committed suicide along with his lover Hatano Akiko before she could make this happen.

Once the furor had died down, Nobuko and Takei (until his death in 1921) ran an inn in the southern city of Sasebo, raising their daughter Ruriko. One of their guests, Okabe Kansuke, eventually married Sasaki Yoshie and took her to his hometown of Maoka in Tochigi. In 1925, when Yoshie became ill after childbirth, Nobuko took Ruriko and moved to Maoka to help look after her. There, as well as looking after her sister’s family, she ran a Sunday school which made her very popular among the local children, continuing it throughout World War II even when Christianity was not well regarded. She died in 1949 at the age of seventy-one.

Sources
Nakae
https://kusanomido.com/study/history/japan/shouwa/101171/ (Japanese) Biographical article with photographs of some of the relevant people

Beatrice Lane Suzuki was born in 1878 in New Jersey. She graduated from Radcliffe (where she was introduced to Theosophy by William James, and shared classes with Gertrude Stein) and received a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University in 1908. While at Columbia, she went to hear a lecture at the Vedanta Society given by the Japanese Buddhist scholar Suzuki Daisetsu (D.T. Suzuki); in 1911, after she finished her studies at Columbia and he his at Oxford, they were married in Japan. Their wedding reception was held at the Hotel New Grande, hosted by Nomura Yozo and Michi. Beatrice was sometimes thereafter known by the Japanese name Suzuki Biwako.

Both Suzukis became Theosophists in Tokyo in 1920 (if not earlier). The following year, after they moved to Kyoto, Beatrice founded the Eastern Buddhist Society and began to write numerous books (in English) on Japanese Buddhist temples, Mahayana Buddhism, and related subjects. She also spent her later life spreading Theosophy within Japan, leading Theosophist efforts in Kyoto. She was known as an animal lover and a strict vegetarian (although one report says that in her early days in Japan she enjoyed a good steak). Although the Suzukis had no children of their own, they adopted a son (Masaru, sometimes known as Alan), who was the child of a maid by an unknown foreigner, and became a successful lyricist. Beatrice died in 1939.

Sources
https://www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/beatrice-lane-suzuki-an-american-theosophist-in-japan (English) Details of Beatrice’s Theosophical work and her views on its (lack of) acceptance as a religion in Japan
https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=gCxuEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=ja&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (English) Not directly about Beatrice, but an interesting-looking book about their adopted son Alan

Isomura Haruko was born in 1877 in Fukushima; her maiden name was Koizumi. She attended Miyagi Girls’ School (but unlike Soma Kokko, a year older, apparently did not participate in the students’ strike there), and became a teacher there after graduating. She also probably became a Christian at some point during her schooling.

In 1903 she married the businessman Isomura Gento and moved with him to Tokyo. He handled various manufacturing and trading concerns; Haruko helped out by using her school English to read technical documents, and in order to polish it spent time studying at Japan Women’s University and the Women’s English Institute (founded by Tsuda Umeko), remaining in school even when she became pregnant.

In 1905 she was hired by the Hochi Shimbun newspaper as a reporter, following in the footsteps of Hani Motoko. She had small children by this point (she was to bear a total of eight children), and because of her habit of bringing her children to work, became known as the “reporter with the ruby text,” a pun on the use of a smaller (ruby) font to add pronunciation text next to the larger main text. She reported on the visit of an American fleet to Yokohama in 1908, making use of her English, and at some point (probably in 1907) secured an exclusive interview with future President Taft. In 1911 she went up in Yamada Isaburo’s experimental airship and reported on the experience.

In 1913 Haruko published a collection of her writing called Ima no Onna [Women of Today], containing dozens of interviews and word-sketches of both individuals and situations, the former including Hasegawa Shigure, Okada Yachiyo, Shimoda Utako, and Soma Kokko, as well as many lesser known women (a midwife, a clerk, a young mother, a printing press worker, a beautician, a tea master, the wives of a detective, an actor, a miner, and a hotelier, and more) the latter covering topics from a station waiting room to a marriage brokerage, a movie house, a rakugo theater, an advice bureau, and so on).

Haruko’s husband’s business failed in 1915; they moved to a much smaller house and she went to work for the Yamato Shimbun newspaper and then became a freelancer. In 1918, she died of heart disease at the age of 41.

Sources
宮城女学校第7回生の夫たち：顔写真特定と目歯比率 (I can’t link this because it’s a PDF, but googling it will get the link; Japanese) An account of Haruko and her husband’s history, along with those of several of her classmates and their husbands; interesting photographs
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/951262/1/139 (Japanese) Haruko’s book on Women of Today online; it looks extremely interesting if one takes the time to struggle through the prewar characters (also a good example of what ruby text looks like)

Inoue Hideko was born in 1875 to a prosperous family in Hyogo, west of Osaka [not to be confused with the artist of the same name born exactly a hundred years later]. Succeeding, against her father’s opposition, in entering high school in Kyoto, she was roommates with Hirooka Kameko, whose mother Hirooka Asako was a founder of Japan Women’s University; as a friend of the family, she sometimes accompanied Asako on business trips. In 1895 she married Adachi Masaji, who took Hideko’s family name in order to carry on her line (the relatively early marriage, for an educated woman, may have been a family decision based on her brother’s death the year before). Their daughter Shina was born four years later.

In 1901, encouraged by Hirooka Asako, Inoue entered the first graduating class at Japan Women’s University in the home economics department; she also served as dormitory supervisor. Upon graduation, she went to the US to study pedagogy at Columbia University. Returning in 1908 to Japan, she became a professor of home economics at her alma mater. In 1911 she took over leadership of the Japan Women’s Peace Association. She also marshalled her fellow alumnae to raise money for Japan’s first daycare center in 1913.

In 1921 she returned to the US in order to attend an international women’s conference on peace; she was accompanied by her secretary, the half-Japanese scientist Marian Irwin, and traveled the long way home along with her husband (now a businessman and politician), each later writing an account of the trip. In 1931 she became president of Japan Women’s University. As Japan slid into imperialism and warfare, Hideko didn’t struggle against the status quo, continuing to work for women’s education while supporting the Japanese Empire’s colonialist and jingoist policies; she also, along with Yoshioka Yayoi and others, formed the women’s wing of the National Language Association in order to promote the use of traditional feminine language, and held various government posts throughout the war.

Not surprisingly, she was purged by GHQ in the postwar for her wartime collaboration, prohibited from educational work from 1946 through 1950. This did not discourage her from once again visiting the US on a study tour in 1954 and later serving as president of a woman’s college in Kanagawa. She died in 1963, aged eighty-eight. Her daughter Shina followed in her footsteps as a peace activist and a professor (of philosophy) at Japan Women’s University