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Soma Kokko (1876-1955)
Mar. 7th, 2025 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiSoma 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
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
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