Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Wakamatsu Shizuko was born in 1864 in Aizu, originally named Matsukawa Kashi, to a samurai family on the wrong side of the Meiji Restoration fighting. Like Niijima Yae and Oyama Sutematsu, she experienced the horrific siege of Aizu-Wakamatsu as a child. She was six when her mother died, leaving her alone in a DP camp (her father was fighting in Hokkaido, with Enomoto Tatsu’s husband Takeaki) until she was adopted by Okawa Jinbei, a Yokohama silk merchant (who wanted a child as company for his wife O-Roku, formerly an Aizu prostitute whose freedom Okawa had purchased).

The Okawas, and later Kashi’s birth father upon his return, sent her to Miss Kidder’s School for Girls, later Ferris Seminary, a boarding school run by missionaries. There Kashi was baptized in 1877 and became the school’s first graduate in 1882, giving a speech in English at the ceremony. One of her teachers described her as possessed of “[a] nervous temperament, yet having a masterly self-control that lent a quiet dignity to all her movements. She possessed quick mental activity and vivid emotions, without…offensive forwardness.”

She immediately became a teacher at her alma mater, running English literature and drama clubs alongside her classes and acting as an interpreter when needed. In 1886 she became engaged to Serata Tasuku, a naval officer who possessed all the virtues as far as she and the school were concerned (Christian, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, and very handsome). However, Kashi herself broke off the engagement for reasons that are not clear but may have had to do with her already poor health or with her sense that Serata was out of her star, or with a different man met in a different context.

Likewise in 1886, Kashi began to write essays and short stories for the magazine Jogaku Zasshi (Women’s Education). From this point on, she began to use “Wakamatsu Shizu” or “Shizuko” as a pen name. “Wakamatsu” came from her hometown; “Shizu,” written unusually with the character for “peasant” or “lowly,” may have come from a sense of herself as God’s servant.

Jogaku Zasshi was published by the Christian educator Iwamoto Yoshiharu, whose work Shizuko admired; she transformed his (Japanese) biography of Kimura Toko, the recently deceased founder of the Meiji Girls’ School, into a lengthy English poem. Shizuko and Iwamoto married in 1889. She wrote an English poem called “The Bridal Veil” to mark the occasion, which he published in the magazine thereafter. “…Look close on my heart, see the worst of its shining./It’s not yours to-day for the yesterday’s winning./The past is not mine. I am too proud to borrow./You must grow to new heights if I love you tomorrow./We’re married! O, pray that our love do not fail!/I have wings flattened down, and hid under my veil,/They are subtle as light, you can undo them,/And swift in their flight, you can never pursue them./And spite of all clasping, and spite of all bands,/I can slip like a shadow, a dream, from your hands./…”

She left her teaching job not long after, feeling unable to do it justice due to her failing health. As a translator, she produced Japanese versions of Longfellow, Tennyson, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy” (which became a bestseller in translation) and Sara Crewe, Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others of the time, focusing particularly on children’s literature; some of the lesser-known works, such as those of Adelaide Anne Procter, she rewrote to provide a Japanese setting more familiar to her readers. Her translations were extremely punctilious even when freer in nature, going through multiple drafts. She remarked that “[s]truggling to come up with the most appropriate word in translation is an agonizing process. But once you have found it the joyful satisfaction you feel is like to that of a woman who, rummaging through her dresser drawers, at last comes upon the very kimono collar whose design suits her perfectly.” Her translations were both very popular and critically acclaimed, even by the stringent standards of the male translators of the time.

Shizuko also wrote numerous short stories of her own, focusing on the status of women and their experiences of family life and marriage. In both her translations and her original work, she was a pioneer of genbun itchi, the practice of using a written style which approximated speech rather than an abstracted literary dialect. Somewhere in there, even as her health continued to decline, she also found the time to bear children in 1890, 1891, and 1893 (Kiyoko, Masahito, and Tamiko). From 1894 on she published a series of English essays on social and religious issues in The Japan Evangelist. In 1895, pregnant with a fourth child, she died.

Sources
Ishii, Nakae
Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000)