Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Ando Teruko was born in 1880 in Tokyo. Her family, which sold lacquerware, fell on hard times in her youth, and at fourteen, on the eve of the First Sino-Japanese War, she became a geisha in the Shimbashi district. She took the name O-Koi, roughly “Little Carp,” an auspicious fish. At the time she was less afraid of the oncoming war than of the evenings where she was expected to entertain important customers old enough to be her grandfather, such as the frightening trio of the politician Ito Hirobumi (whose wife Umeko was herself a former geisha), the businessman Asano Soichiro, and the famous doctor Kitasato Shibasaburo.

Beautiful, intelligent, and talented, O-Koi became popular immediately, and in a few years acquired her first patron, a businessman who bowed out when she agreed to marry the actor Ichimura Uzaemon (geisha at the time were expected to be in actor fandom, as it were, and Uzaemon was on the rebound from one of O-Koi’s colleagues). However, married life with Uzaemon was stressful, since responsibilities were many and income was scarce. When he became the paid boyfriend of a banker’s wife, O-Koi walked out and refused to come back.

She returned to the life of a Shimbashi geisha, where she was passionate in defense of her colleagues from the men who abused them and the moneyed ladies who looked down on them; here she developed a reputation as generous and upright. Approached by the sumo wrestler Hitachiyama, she said coolly that while she was put off by the wrestlers’ huge builds, if she had to have one she would prefer his rival Araiwazeki. They engaged in a bout over the rights to her, which Araiwa won, making O-Koi his for the night.

She was twenty-five when then-Prime Minister Katsura Taro installed her as his mistress in a house of her own, based on a possibly apocryphal conversation along the lines of “How about it?” “I don’t care to be played with. Geisha are human too, you know. Don’t think of it unless you’re prepared to set me up for life.” Which Katsura did, providing the then enormous sum of seven thousand yen. The Russo-Japanese War was just ending; after the signature of the Portsmouth Treaty, nationalists enraged over Japan’s failure to lay hands on more of the spoils of war started the so-called Hibiya Riots around the Prime Minister’s Residence, and O-Koi received her own death threats, which she took with dignity and a dagger in her sash. As matters settled down, a messenger arrived from Katsura to ask her to leave him for her own sake, with ten thousand yen to sweeten the pot. O-Koi refused the money and wrote him a famous letter to the effect that her birth might be lowly but her spirit was not, and he could at least have the common decency to come and speak to her (or at least write to her) in person. Thereafter, she ran his household in place of his sickly wife.

After Katsura’s death in 1913, his colleague Inoue Kaoru (husband of Takeko) arranged for O-Koi to receive a monthly annuity from his estate, attached to a long list of conditions (live modestly, don’t go out and about, and so on). O-Koi refused both the conditions and the money.

She spent her middle age running cafés and similar establishments, while raising two of Katsura’s children by other women. Eventually, after a prison sentence for perjury, she became a Buddhist nun under the name Myosho; unable not to take on responsibility for something, she restored the Gohyaku Rakanji temple in Tokyo’s Meguro area, which had fallen into disrepair, and where she is still honored as “O-Koi Kannon.” She died in 1948.

Sources
Ishii
Mori 1996
https://bakumatsu.org/blog/2014/04/meiji_bijin_ranking.html/okoi_teruko_ando_m (Japanese) Very striking photograph of O-Koi in her youth.

Yamamuro Kieko was born in 1874 in Iwate, where her family were farmers; her birth name was Sato Kieko. Originally well-to-do, the Sato family had spent more than it had to alleviate the effects of the repeated northern famines and subsequently fallen on hard times. Kieko grew up in this sacrificial atmosphere. While helping with the family silkworms, she studied hard, subscribing to Jogaku Zasshi [Women’s Learning], which excited her with its liberal Christianity.

At eighteen she traveled south to attend the Meiji Girls’ School, where she became a Christian. She graduated in 1895 in the middle of the First Sino-Japanese War, and set out to make herself useful by helping alcoholic ex-servicemen; however, it was hard to find support. At the same time she served as secretary of the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs, taught at a vocational school for working-class girls set up by Shimoda Utako, and did clerical work for Jogaku Zasshi, indicating how busy she liked to keep herself. The impression she left was of a calm, patient, feminine young woman, who would remark gently “Well, none of us is God [we all have our faults].”

It was in this year that a number of Salvation Army representatives came to Japan in order to set up a branch there. To become accepted, they wore Japanese dress and ate Japanese-style, which backfired somewhat, earning them a reputation as “actors from the Japan Village in London,” “that crazy religion” and so on. Kieko happened to have a tutoring job near the Salvation Army ladies’ house, and took it on herself to teach them proper Japanese etiquette so that they would no longer have to make fools of themselves.

There she met Yamamuro Gunpei, who was the Salvation Army’s main Japanese colleague; seeing him at meetings, she came to feel that the Salvation Army was her job in life. Two years older than she, Gunpei was a printworker (traditionally an occupation rife with left-wing organizers and hotheads) who had put himself through an informal university education before joining the Salvation Army. He and Kieko were married in 1899. They held a modest summer wedding at which, according to Kubushiro Ochimi, “the two of them started to sermonize after the ceremony, startling everyone.” Yajima Kajiko also approved of the marriage, saying that the pace of her own Women’s Association for Reforming Customs was too slow for Kieko’s devotion to her work.

They were extremely poor, which did not slow them down at all. Kieko in particular worked to set up a shelter for women escaping from prostitution, which at the time often involved poor rural girls effectively sold into slavery. While would-be ex-prostitutes made up the majority of the women who made use of the safe space, it was also open to women who had tried to throw themselves under trains, upper-class young ladies under the watch of conservators, married women who had been shaved bald by their husbands on suspicion of adultery, and others who were struggling. Not all of them were willing to stay once they had come, but Kieko was patient in her insistence that more education would help them no matter what, and most of them ended up in better situations than they had left (with the help of various donations from benefactors including Tsuda Umeko). She also took practical action to cut off human trafficking before it could start during the great northeastern famine of 1905, working along with the Salvation Army to protect girls from the Northeast from being sold to buy their families food.

Kieko died in 1916, perhaps out of simple overtiredness after a lifetime of hard work, pregnancy and child-raising, and poverty. Her husband Gunpei wrote her posthumous biography, while apparently wondering with unnecessary borrowed modesty “if she was enough of a person to convey to the world.” He survived her by some years; the family grave contains Gunpei, Kieko, his second wife Etsuko, and several of their six children. Among these their son Buho, who followed his parents into the Salvation Army, was named after William Booth and the Quaker George Fox. Their oldest daughter Tamiko, born in 1900, was instrumental along with Hani Motoko’s daughter Setsuko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Sato Ineko and others in founding the Femin Women’s Democracy Club after World War II.

Sources
Mori 1996
https://christianpress.jp/july-12-yamamuro-kieko-anniversary/ (Japanese) Worth a look just for her extremely stubborn-looking photograph

Hara Takashi, often better known as Hara Kei, was Japan’s so-called “commoner Prime Minister.” In 1883, then aged twenty-seven, he was appointed to a post as consul-general of Japan in Tianjin, China; however, it was considered a necessity for diplomats abroad to be married, and so he made haste to look for a bride. On the strong recommendation of the then Foreign Minister (ie his boss) Inoue Kaoru, Hara selected Nakai Sadako, the daughter of Nakai Hiromu (whose brief first marriage had been to Inoue’s subsequent wife Takeko; there were rumors, probably unfounded, that Sadako was actually Inoue’s daughter, or even Takeko’s). Sadako was fourteen at the time (FOURTEEN). Shipped off to a primitively appointed consulate in unfamiliar China with a husband twice her age, it is hard to believe that she was prepared to fulfill the various functions of a diplomat’s wife. When she broke down crying, Hara is said to have put her on his back and carried her around the garden like a child.

Fortunately, his next posting was to Paris, in 1887, where Sadako found the social whirl congenial. In 1889, however, they returned to Japan; Sadako was unimpressed by life as a civil servant’s wife and was accused by Hara of looking down on his humble northern origins. He suggested divorce, but she was unwilling, and they settled for living separately.　At some point in the following years, Hara became closely involved with a geisha called Kanno (or Sugano) Asa, who came from Iwate up north just as he did; by 1896 he had introduced her to his mother and made her free of his home.

In 1897, Sadako asked to live together once again. In addition to obtaining her permission for Asa’s presence there, Hara issued her with a twenty-one-point document covering such demands as “be filial to my mother,” “take charge of the household duties,” “be modest and unadorned with regard to makeup and dress,” and “don’t go out at night incautiously.” Sadako agreed to these and moved back in, but in the event did not seem especially inclined to follow his directions. In 1906, they were finally divorced when she became pregnant with another man’s child. Hara continued to send her alimony until her death in 1919.

Free to marry Asa, he did so immediately, although she protested that as an illiterate former geisha she was ill-suited to being the wife of a leading politician. They apparently lived very happily together, with Asa helping to raise their adopted son Mitsugi (Hara’s biological great-nephew); on weekends in the country, Hara would seat Asa in a rickshaw and pull it himself.
He was assassinated in 1921, when Asa took the lead in making sure his directions for a modest funeral and the disposal of his remains in his hometown were followed. She died two years later and was buried beside him with, as he had directed, a gravestone of equal size.

Sources
Ishii
http://harakeijiten.la.coocan.jp/ (Japanese) Unreasonably detailed website on Hara’s life and work

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)