Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

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

Kawakami Sadayakko was born in 1871 to a merchant family in Tokyo, where her original name was Koyama Sada. At age seven, when her family went bankrupt, she was adopted by (probably = sold to) a geisha house. Expected to become a success in the future with her promise of beauty, she was taught by a foster mother who adored her to dance and to play the shamisen (she also studied the less feminine arts of literacy, riding, billiards, judo and archery). She made her geisha debut at the age of fourteen under the name of Koyakko; her beauty, brightness and brains made her instantly popular, and the leading politician Ito Hirobumi (husband of Umeko) became her patron, when she began to call herself Sadayakko.

It was around this time when she was rescued during a horse-riding misadventure by a college student called Iwasaki Momosuke, with whom she immediately hit it off; unfortunately, he shortly married Fukuzawa Yukichi’s daughter Fusako. Sadayakko was still recovering from her heartbreak when she met Kawakami Otojiro, an actor and sometime liberal activist who had written a satirical song that became a runaway hit, and married him in 1894.

Otojiro, ambitious, idealistic, and by all accounts very attractive to women, was however not otherwise very good at life; when he built a theater it failed to flourish and was eventually taken by his creditors, when he ran for office he was not only not elected but ran up a huge debt. In search of escape and a new outlook, he and Sadayakko made their way from Tokyo to Kobe by the sea route (in a small boat, which Sadayakko tartly hoped would teach him responsibility), before leaving with his troupe for America in 1898. Unfortunately, it was an all-male troupe, and American audiences did not welcome men in female roles. When they lost one of their female-role actors, with nothing left to lose, Sadayakko filled in. Her early geisha training came to her rescue and she was a hit, with feminine beauty that seemed “exotic” to western audiences as well as expert dancing and singing. In this way she became, according to some, the first Japanese actress. Performing in Paris, she was hailed by Le Figaro as “more gifted than the Eiffel Tower is high”; the crowned heads of Europe applauded, the nineteen-year-old Picasso sketched her from the audience, everyone from Rodin to Klee to Puccini to Isadora Duncan became a fan, perfumes and clothing styles were named after her.

Back in Japan, she started a school for actresses (which faced vicious criticism, based on Sadayakko’s background and the low social position of the theater in general; unrelatedly, one of her students was the actress Mori Ritsuko and another the future writer Tamura Toshiko) and performed in Japanese productions of Western classic plays and operas, playing Ophelia, Desdemona, Salomé, and Aida among others. Hasegawa Shigure, founder of the women’s journal Nyonin Geijutsu, interviewed her in her dressing room for an admiring profile called “Madam Sadayakko.” Her career lasted only ten years or so, however; when Otojiro died in 1911, she gave up acting, but still refused to pay attention to nasty comments along the lines of “get thee to a nunnery” based on her widowhood (over three thousand people wrote in to a newspaper on the topic of “what’s to be done with Sadayakko,” and she ignored all of them).

Reunited with her old crush Momosuke (who said to Hasegawa “some people worry that I spend too much time taking care of Kawakami, but for a man, it’s all about having a woman you adore”), now a leading industrialist, she went into business with him, playing the stock market and building a silk spinning factory (where, very unusually for the time, the young women working there were treated humanely) with her gains. She died in 1946.

Sources
Nakae
Ishii
Mori 2008
http://easternimp.blogspot.com/2015/09/sadayakko-through-artists-eyes-part-1.html (English) Lots of illustrations and details about the plays in which Sadayakko appeared (click through also to parts 2 and 3)