Nishikawa Fumiko (1882-1960)
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Nishikawa Fumiko was born in 1882 to a prosperous family in Gifu; her maiden name was Shichi. After finishing high school in Kyoto (where she met Hō Satoko, Yosano Akiko’s younger sister, who later married Fumiko’s brother), she married the Christian socialist Matsuoka Koson (they met at a lecture about the Ashio Copper Mine incident incident), with whom she worked on a project for the support of children orphaned by the Nobi Earthquake until Matsuoka’s death in 1904.
In 1905 Fumiko remarried Nishikawa Kojiro, at that time employed by the left-wing Heiminsha, whom she had met through Sakai Toshihiko; she assisted Kojiro in his work on the journal Hikari [Light]. They had several children, and the repetitive hard work of housework and childcare frustrated Fumiko. Along with her friends Miyazaki Mitsuko and Kimura Komako, both married women with children, she held a lecture meeting on “New Real Women” in 1913. However, the date fell just after the “Bluestocking” lecture meeting held by Hiratsuka Raicho and company, and the heckler interrupting Iwano Homei’s speech at the latter to demand clarification of his relationship with Endo Kiyoko happened to be Mitsuko’s husband; this created some tension between the New Real Women and the Bluestockings, whether they had intended it or not. Fumiko and company could see the Bluestockings’ point to some extent, regardless of their socially dramatic behavior, but Raicho looked down on the New Real Women as bourgeois and shallow. The position of Fumiko and her colleagues, indicated in their journal of the same name, was along the lines of “we recommend that single women do not marry without love and avoid marrying men who refuse to admit that women are people,” and “we recommend that married women remain active and do not surrender to becoming nothing more than wives and mothers”; they called for women to be independent and career-oriented, for love-based marriages and equality in the household, and for the abolition of gender roles. The journal included interviews and essays (by Soma Kokko, Hayashi Kimuko, and Senuma Kayo among others), as well as a wide range of advertisements, mostly for things in use by the theoretical new woman: fountain pens, cosmetics, and soy sauce, as well as hospitals, hair tonics, diet tonics, and books, including one by Raicho. Publication continued until the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, outlasting Bluestocking by several years.
After the earthquake, Fumiko joined Raicho and Chujo Yuriko in a women’s relief association. For nearly twenty years from 1905 through the early 1920s, she protested along with Raicho, Ichikawa Fusae, Oku Mumeo and others against the clause of the Peace Police Law forbidding women from free assembly, eventually leading to its amendment. In 1924 she helped form a League for Women’s Suffrage. Her autobiography was published more than twenty years after her death in 1960.
Sources
Mori 2008
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A5%BF%E5%B7%9D%E6%96%87%E5%AD%90 (Japanese) Includes a photo of Fumiko, Komako, and Mitsuko, and one of Fumiko with other women activists.
In 1905 Fumiko remarried Nishikawa Kojiro, at that time employed by the left-wing Heiminsha, whom she had met through Sakai Toshihiko; she assisted Kojiro in his work on the journal Hikari [Light]. They had several children, and the repetitive hard work of housework and childcare frustrated Fumiko. Along with her friends Miyazaki Mitsuko and Kimura Komako, both married women with children, she held a lecture meeting on “New Real Women” in 1913. However, the date fell just after the “Bluestocking” lecture meeting held by Hiratsuka Raicho and company, and the heckler interrupting Iwano Homei’s speech at the latter to demand clarification of his relationship with Endo Kiyoko happened to be Mitsuko’s husband; this created some tension between the New Real Women and the Bluestockings, whether they had intended it or not. Fumiko and company could see the Bluestockings’ point to some extent, regardless of their socially dramatic behavior, but Raicho looked down on the New Real Women as bourgeois and shallow. The position of Fumiko and her colleagues, indicated in their journal of the same name, was along the lines of “we recommend that single women do not marry without love and avoid marrying men who refuse to admit that women are people,” and “we recommend that married women remain active and do not surrender to becoming nothing more than wives and mothers”; they called for women to be independent and career-oriented, for love-based marriages and equality in the household, and for the abolition of gender roles. The journal included interviews and essays (by Soma Kokko, Hayashi Kimuko, and Senuma Kayo among others), as well as a wide range of advertisements, mostly for things in use by the theoretical new woman: fountain pens, cosmetics, and soy sauce, as well as hospitals, hair tonics, diet tonics, and books, including one by Raicho. Publication continued until the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, outlasting Bluestocking by several years.
After the earthquake, Fumiko joined Raicho and Chujo Yuriko in a women’s relief association. For nearly twenty years from 1905 through the early 1920s, she protested along with Raicho, Ichikawa Fusae, Oku Mumeo and others against the clause of the Peace Police Law forbidding women from free assembly, eventually leading to its amendment. In 1924 she helped form a League for Women’s Suffrage. Her autobiography was published more than twenty years after her death in 1960.
Sources
Mori 2008
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A5%BF%E5%B7%9D%E6%96%87%E5%AD%90 (Japanese) Includes a photo of Fumiko, Komako, and Mitsuko, and one of Fumiko with other women activists.