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.

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.

Yasui Kono was born in 1880 in Kagawa Prefecture, where her family ran a shipping business; they were in favor of education for their daughters as well as their sons, sending her to high school in her home prefecture and then to the Women’s Higher Normal School (later Ochanomizu University) in Tokyo. She graduated in 1902, taught high school for three years, and became the first graduate student in science at the Women’s Higher Normal School, publishing zoological and botanical articles in Japanese and international scientific journals, in all cases as the first Japanese woman to do so. (Although she wrote a physics textbook for girls’ high schools while teaching herself, it was rejected by the Ministry of Education because they believed that a woman could not have written it.) She became an assistant professor at her alma mater after receiving her graduate degree there in 1907.

Although Kono’s application to study abroad was endorsed by multiple eminent scientists, it was rejected on the basis of her gender by the Japanese Ministry of Education, and finally accepted only on the grounds that she included “home economics research” in her goals and that she committed herself solely to research, without marrying. In the end, she studied cells at the University of Chicago in 1914 and coal at Harvard in 1915, returning to Japan the following year to research coal further at the University of Tokyo. In 1927 she completed her doctoral thesis on coal, discussing its botanical origins among other points; to collect research samples, she made a practice of having herself lowered into coal mines, horrifying her friends and family. This thesis made her the first woman in Japan to receive a doctoral degree in the sciences.

Alongside her research she taught at the University of Tokyo and at the Women’s Higher Normal School. She also founded a scientific journal on cytology, studied plant genetics, and after the war researched the botanical effects of the atomic bomb. For fifty years she shared a home with her much younger sister Masa, a painter who did the housekeeping so that Kono could concentrate on her work. She retired as a full professor in 1952. Along with fellow scientist Kuroda Chika, she created the Yasui-Kuroda Scholarship for women at Ochanomizu University researching science. She died in 1971, the recipient of numerous honors, with her bedside table stacked with well-thumbed scientific texts.

Sources
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-pioneering-botanist-broke-down-japans-gender-barriers-180967595/ (English)
https://archive.mith.umd.edu/gcr/text/text_1358298125.html (English)
https://www.ge-at-utokyo.org/kono-yasui (English; nice photos)
[There are quite a few articles in English about Kono online, but nothing on her in any of my Japanese source books; maybe because the authors tend to be more interested in literature and the arts than in the sciences?]

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.

Yamada Waka was born in 1879 in Kanagawa, where her family were farmers; her maiden name was Asaba. Although she did well in elementary school, her family did not permit her, as a girl, to study further, instead giving her farm and housework tasks and marrying her off at sixteen. At this point her birth family came down in the world; in order to support them, having been refused help by her pennypincher husband, at the age of eighteen she went to Yokohama, the nearest big city, to find work. Instead, she was kidnapped and taken to Seattle in the US to work as a prostitute, where she was called “O-Yae of Arabia.”

Three years later, she encountered the Japanese journalist Tachii Nobusaburo (there is no agreement on how to pronounce either his first or last names, he could be Tachii or Ritsui or Tatei, Nobusaburo or Shinzaburo, and he seems, probably fittingly, to have been entirely lost to history except as an adjunct to Waka’s story)), who helped her escape to San Francisco. When he proved to have designs on her of his own, she fled to the Cameron House, a mission which offered shelter to sex workers. There she became a Christian and studied English. In 1903, at twenty-four, she met and married Yamada Kakichi, a sociologist and English teacher, and returned with him in 1906 to Japan.

Yamada Kakichi’s students in Japan included the extraordinary anarchist Osugi Sakae as well as his latterday wife Ito Noe, Hiratsuka Raicho, Ichikawa Fusae, and Yoshiya Nobuko. Waka became a regular contributor to Hiratsuka Raicho’s Seito [Bluestocking] journal, translating the works of Ellen Key (a major influence on Japanese feminism of the time) and Olive Schreiner in addition to writing her own essays. As a women’s rights activist, she was notable for her focus on women’s maternal tendencies, based in Key’s work, in contrast to many of her contemporaries (she and Raicho were on opposite sides of the debate from Yosano Akiko and Yamakawa Kikue), and for her refusal to conceal her past as a forced sex worker, instead using her experience to work against prostitution. Along with Raicho, Fusae, and Oku Mumeo, she was instrumental in founding the New Women’s Association in 1912, working toward political, educational, and employment equality for women in Japan.

In 1937 she gave a lecture tour in the US, visiting Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House; the following year she opened a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Japan. During World War II, her stance on women lined up with the Imperial policy of good wives and wise mothers, keeping her in good odor with the government; she visited Germany and Italy in 1941 and came back praising the German attitude toward motherhood. After the war, distressed by the prevalence of sex workers available to American soldiers in Japan, she opened a home teaching former sex workers useful skills. She died in 1957.

Sources
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14672715.1980.10405590 (English) Book review of a Japanese-language biography of Yamada, including a charming photograph of Waka and her husband
Note: I don’t know why none of my usual reference books has a section on Yamada Waka; she is by no means a minor figure, certainly compared to some of the people they do include. A pity.

Minakata Matsue was born in 1878 in Wakayama, where her father was a Shinto priest; her maiden name was Tamura. She remained unmarried longer than was usual for the time, having been devoted to supporting her destitute family through sewing and flower arrangement. At twenty-eight she married the biologist Minakata Kumagusu, who was then forty. He had spent the previous decade as a researcher in the West and was then settled near Matsue’s hometown, near his own birthplace, to study slime molds.

Minakata said that his motive for marriage was “the inconvenience of single life,” but he was apparently fond of his wife, in particular her encyclopedic knowledge of local customs and folktales, naturally acquired from her background at the family shrine. Their marriage was celebrated by the gift of a diamond ring from Frederick Dickins, Minakata’s former supervisor at London University. Unfortunately, this romantic beginning was ruined by Matsue’s discovery of lice in the marital bed, which she had to clean out thoroughly before venturing on any activities there.

The Minakatas’ son Kumaya was born in 1907 and their daughter Fumie four years later. Minakata, absorbed in scientific research, copying religious texts, political-religious activism, and drinking, was inclined to leave the management of his household and his children to Matsue, complaining fiercely when she made any attempt to tidy up his belongings: he was busy using them to grow molds for observation. Matsue put up with her oddball husband and assisted in later years with his research, responsible along with Fumie for the publication of his later collected works. She died in 1955, fourteen years after her husband.

Sources
Nakae

Yosano Akiko was born in 1878 in south Osaka, where her family ran a sweetshop. Her birthname was Hō Shō. She was notable from early youth for her beauty and her bookworm tendencies, reading the classics while she minded the shop counter after school and writing waka poems in her head while she wrapped yokan jelly sweets. In 1900 she submitted seven poems to the Myojo [Morning Star] literary magazine, edited by the poet Yosano Tekkan, who accepted six of them. When he came to give a lecture in Osaka the same year, she fell in love with him on the spot, although he was already married. She and another young poet, Yamakawa Tomiko, were best friends and rivals for Tekkan’s affection until Tomiko married another man; in 1901, when Tekkan had divorced his first wife, he and Sho, now called Akiko, were married.

In August of the same year, Akiko published a collection of poems called Midaregami [Tangled Hair], mostly love poems inspired by her relationship with Tekkan. It became a runaway hit, although also facing criticism for its “immorality.” In 1904, when the Russo-Japanese War broke out, she published a poem in Myojo called “Kimi shinitamau koto nakare [Don’t die for your country’s sake],” addressed to her younger brother. In response to criticism of the poem as anti-war (ie unpatriotic), she retorted in print, “What young woman is in favor of war?” (However, her wartime poems from the Pacific War, thirty-odd years later, were much more conventionally patriotic in tone.)

As his wife’s star rose, Tekkan was losing confidence in his own writing; he closed down Myojo in 1908. To give him a fresh start, Akiko stood him a trip to Paris, paying his travel fees by selling screens calligraphed with poetry to her acquaintances. In 1912, he wrote to suggest that she join him in Europe, not just for the pleasure of travel but as a sop to her grief for the poet Ishikawa Takuboku, who had died that year at the age of twenty-six and had been like a little brother to her. Akiko left her seven children in Japan and set off to enjoy traveling around Europe with her husband.

She was later to bear five more children, two of them named Auguste (after Rodin) and Helene in honor of the voyage to France. In addition to her quantities of poetry (which she published in the feminist magazine Seito [Bluestocking] among elsewhere), she became a well-regarded critic as well. In 1916 she and Hiratsuka Raicho began their “motherhood debate,” in which Raicho argued that children belonged essentially to society and Akiko retorted that children were to be raised under the auspices of their own mothers, not the state (although three of her daughters were fostered out elsewhere, and she once applied for welfare and was turned down).

Tekkan (now using his original name of Hiroshi) became a professor at Keio University in 1919 (Mori Ogai had originally proposed Akiko herself for the position). In 1921, Akiko worked with Nishimura Isaku, Kawasaki Natsu, Yamada Kosaku, Edward Gauntlett and others to found Bunka Gakuin, a coeducational school—the first in Japan—with a focus on culture and the arts, intended to offer freedom and creativity unrestricted by Japan’s laws on education [the more things change], where she served as dean and lecturer; her daughter Nanase was among the students. The school remained open until 2018 and has a long and distinguished list of graduates in the arts.

Tekkan died in 1935. Akiko, undaunted, published her own translation into modern Japanese of the Tale of Genji before following her husband in 1942.

Sources
Nakae, Mori 1996, 2008, 2014, Shimamoto
https://voyapon.com/akiko-yosano-japanese-poet/ (English) Summary article with various photos
https://apjjf.org/roger-pulvers/3296/article (English) Selection of translated poems from Midaregami
https://culture-in-criticism.blogspot.com/2015/08/opinion-poem-thou-shalt-not-die-by.html (English) Translations and commentary/links on “Kimi shinitamau koto nakare”

Natsume Kyoko was born in 1877 in Tokyo, where her father was a senior bureaucrat; her maiden name was Nakane. At nineteen, she became engaged through a matchmaker to Natsume Kinnosuke, ten years older than she, at the time a high school English teacher in Shikoku. Their reactions on seeing each other’s photos, and agreeing to go ahead with the marriage, are recorded: she liked his firm features and thought he looked refined and gentle, while he noticed that her teeth were yellowed and snaggly but approved of the way she made no attempt to conceal this. (Also, he was a graduate of the University of Tokyo, and her father had already declared his refusal to marry off his daughter to any man who hadn’t attended one of the Imperial Universities.)

They were married in 1897, when Kinnosuke was appointed to teach in Kumamoto. Their married life was far from peaceful; Kyoko disliked getting up early and doing housework, sending her husband off to work without breakfast, and he complained about this (while paying more attention to his scholarship than to his wife): “your behavior is extremely uneconomic!” to which she would retort “Instead of dragging myself out of bed to struggle through the housework rubbing my eyes, I think it’s a lot more economic to get enough sleep and do the job in a good mood!”

Kinnosuke spent four years in England as an exchange student, returning in 1903 in a somewhat disturbed state of mind which went as far as violence. More than once Kyoko packed up her children (they had two sons and five daughters in total) and returned to her birth family, but she refused to give him a divorce: “he’s violent because he’s sick, not because of me.” She treated him with medication of all kinds and tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, considering him mentally ill, but he resisted.

It was at this time that Kinnosuke’s career as a writer began to take off—he is now, of course, much better known as the Meiji-era novelist Natsume Soseki. He acquired numerous disciples who came to visit weekly, at gatherings where Kyoko took a motherly role. Soseki struggled with stomach issues and repeated hospitalizations, dying at age 50 in 1916. For all they appeared seriously ill-matched, Kyoko remembered him largely with fondness, and the use of her birth name Kiyo for the maid in Soseki’s Botchan has been called a hint at a love letter to her on his part.

Kyoko survived her husband by almost half a century. In 1927, her daughter Fudeko’s husband Matsuoka Yuzuru (a novelist and one of Soseki’s disciples) recorded her memories of life with Soseki, which were published serially, drawing considerable disapprobation of her putative provocation of Soseki’s mental state and failure to act as the legendary author’s perfect consort (although her children and grandchildren took her side). She died in 1963 at the age of eighty-five.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.ch-ginga.jp/detail/sousekinotsuma/ (Japanese) Site citing one of the numerous TV dramas made about Kyoko and Soseki

Soma Kokko was born in 1876 in Sendai; her birth name was Hoshi Ryoko. Her family was visited by misfortune early in her life, including the deaths of her father and several brothers as well as a sister’s mental illness; she was something of a brand saved from the burning. After starting high school at the Miyagi Girls’ School (a Christian mission school where she took part in a students’ strike intended to increase the ratio of Japanese language, literature, and history in the Western-heavy curriculum), she transferred to the Ferris Girls’ School in Yokohama and ended up at the more liberal Meiji Girls’ School, where she read Jogaku Zasshi, edited by the school principal, Iwamoto Yoshiharu, and daydreamed of becoming a writer out of her admiration for his wife the translator Wakamatsu Shizuko. “Kokko” or “black light” was a penname given to her in school by Iwamoto, in order “not to sparkle too much.”

After her graduation in 1897, she married Soma Aizo, a silkworm farmer/researcher and a fellow northerner and Christian (one biographer suggests that her sudden marriage to this practical man was impelled in part by seeing all her friends, including her cousin Sasaki Nobuko, marry or fall in love with hapless writers). Their daughter Toshiko, named for Kishida Toshiko, was born the following year. Life with silkworms in a Nagano village was hard, though, and by 1901 Kokko had convinced Aizo to move to Tokyo. He commuted back and forth for his silkworm studies, while she used the money they had saved for Toshiko’s education to buy the Nakamuraya, a bakery situated just outside the University of Tokyo, well positioned to cater to hungry students. Her friends were surprised that the would-be writer had become a businesswoman, but she enjoyed researching better baked goods. The bakery thrived, shortly expanding into larger quarters; particularly popular items included cream buns and waffles, as well as “Kokko-style” Japanese sweets, Russian chocolates, pine-nut castella cake, mooncakes, and so on, the fruits of the Somas’ visits abroad to Harbin and Beijing as well as the refugees and travelers they hired, who had reasonable working hours and wages in accordance with Aizo’s “gentleman’s way of doing business.”

Between the food and Kokko’s personal charm—friends described her as not at all beautiful, but irresistibly attractive—the Nakamuraya became a popular hangout, sometimes labeled a salon, for artists, writers, and theater people (including the actress Matsui Sumako) of the time. Among these was the sculptor Ogiwara Rokuzan, a family friend and early admirer of Kokko, who had been inspired by her to go to Paris and study with Rodin. Discovering that Aizo had a mistress in his hometown, he urged Kokko to divorce her husband and marry him instead, but she refused, indirectly inspiring his statue Woman; he died shortly after completing it.

In 1915, the Somas, who held Pan-Asianist views, offered sanctuary to the fugitive Indian independence activist Rash Behari Bose, who later married Toshiko and taught the Somas how to make real “Indian curry,” which became one of the Nakamuraya’s most famous offerings. They also gave shelter to the Russian poet Vasili Eroshenko for four years (having come to study at a school for the blind, he was rendered stateless by the Russian Revolution; he inspired the addition of borscht to the Nakamuraya menu); when the police eventually barged in to drag him away, Kokko sued the local police chief for home invasion. In addition, she was a sponsor of Tane maku hito [The Seed Planter], Japan’s first proletarian literary magazine.

Kokko died in 1955, a year after her husband, survived by three of their nine children. “Very few people have lived their lives just the way they wanted to like she did,” her son Yasuo said ambiguously. The Nakamuraya is still a thriving enterprise today.

Sources
Tanaka, Shimamoto, Mori 1996, Mori 2014, Nakae, Ishii
https://www.redcircleauthors.com/news-and-views/changing-nations-the-japanese-girl-with-a-book/ (English) Very interesting, wide-ranging article about Kokko and Toshiko (although very much in need of an edit), with good illustrations