Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Kawahara Misako was born in 1875 in Nagano. Her father Tadashi, a teacher and scholar of Chinese literature, was a Sinophile of sorts who believed strongly in harmony between Japan and China as the future of Asia (“harmony” here, of course, tending to refer to China’s peaceful submission to Japan), and he brought her up with an education suited to his beliefs (Misako’s mother, who died young, was named Shinako with remarkable symbolism, “Shina” being the common Japanese word for China at the time). After graduating from the Tokyo Women’s Normal School (or else its Nagano counterpart, sources differ), Misako returned to Nagano to teach high school, but found it frustrating. She visited the distinguished educator Shimoda Utako, who shared some of her father’s views, for advice and was directed to a position teaching Japanese to Chinese children at the Daido School in Yokohama.

In 1900, she was invited to go to Shanghai to teach at Wuben Girls’ School, whose founder Wu Xin believed that, unlike the numerous Western-led mission schools for girls springing up at that time, education should be in the direction of Asia and thus Japan. There she taught Japanese, arithmetic, singing, and drawing, while herself studying Chinese and living in the poor conditions of the Chinese quarter.

Misako’s sincere efforts to understand China and the Chinese drew the eye of the Japanese military, which was then winding up for the Russo-Japanese War and concerned with the Mongolian people living around the Qing-Russia border. The army invited Misako to go and teach at a girls’ school to be run along Japanese lines, founded by Prince Gungsangnorbu (Günsennorov) and Princess Shankun of the Qaracin (Harqin, Kharachin) Right Banner. However, this was not all it seemed; she was also asked to observe any Russian movements in the area and report back, given the code name of “Shen.”

Misako set off for Qaracin (now in Chifeng in China’s Inner Mongolia, in the grasslands halfway between Beijing and the Russian border), riding in a donkey cart with a dagger in her bra. The nine-day trip was plagued by weather and fear of bandits, but she arrived safely and began at once to set up her school and begin her espionage, assisted in both endeavors by Princess Shankun (who served as principal of the school, and was also incidentally aunt to Kawashima Yoshiko). The school taught Mongolian girls of high birth, numbering about sixty, and offered subjects including reading (in Japanese, Mongolian, and Chinese), Japanese, arithmetic, history, geography, calligraphy, drawing, knitting, singing (in Japanese and Mongolian), and gymnastics.

The following year, the Russo-Japanese War began in earnest. Misako was surprised to find that she recognized the faces of a group of lamas visiting the Qaracin palace; they were actually Japanese spies on their way to blow up the Eastern Qing Railway. She kept their secret and aided them on their way.

After the war Misako, decorated with the Order of the Sacred Crown for her spy work, remained in Qaracin to focus on education for Mongolian girls in earnest. In 1907 she decided to go back to Japan temporarily for further study (taking with her three students who became exchange students at Jissen Girls’ School), putting the Mongolian school in the hands of Torii Kimiko, wife and collaborator of the anthropologist Torii Ryuzo, and promising the princess and her students that she would be back. However, upon her return to Japan she found herself all unawares engaged to the banker Ichinomiya Rintaro, who was stationed in New York; she had no choice but to break her promise to the Mongolian women, which she regretted all her life. In 1909 she published a memoir of her time in Mongolia. She died in Shizuoka in 1945.

Sources
Ishii

Deguchi Nao was born in 1837 in Tamba, an hour or so west of Kyoto, as the daughter of a carpenter whose dissipated ways of life plunged his family into desperate poverty; Nao was entirely uneducated because they could not afford to send her to school. She became an indentured servant at age ten. Adopted at seventeen by an aunt, she married two years later. However, her husband Masagoro was much like her father, a carpenter whose debauchery brought ruin on the family, and Nao endured the mockery of her surroundings as she picked up scrap and sold buns to support herself and her three sons and five daughters. Her husband died when she was fifty-one. Her children’s lives were likewise made difficult by their poverty, some working as servants, daughters married off early and struggling with mental illness, one son attempting suicide, another dying in the Sino-Japanese War.

In 1892, when she was fifty-five years old, she began to find herself calling out mysterious words in a great voice, overcome by divinity. Her neighbors thought her mind had given way. It is recorded that she could not stop the voice even if she tried, and felt horribly ashamed. “The age of the gods’ country has come!” “Mend your ways, people of the world!” “There shall be war between Japan and the Tang!” This last was to be taken as a prophesy of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. “The life of every one of our people is precious, and yet we take one another’s lives…” (a little reminiscent of Yosano Akiko’s “Kimi shinitamau koto nakare”).

Nao was accused of arson, arrested, and shut up at home by her son-in-law for forty days. She pleaded with her interlocutor, the god “Ushitora no Konjin”: “At least please stop coming into me and making me shout!” The god replied, it is said, “Then from now on let us resort to writing instead.” Nao’s body moved willy-nilly to pick up an old nail and scratch letters into a post, the first of her O-fudesaki writings. Released from her confinement, she—unschooled and illiterate—wrote thousands of pages in phonetic hiragana script, criticizing society, protesting the endless scrabble for a living that she and many others had been condemned to, arguing against thoughtless male domination, and quoting the god’s warning that people must mend their ways to avoid terrible retribution. “A great battle shall begin in Russia, and shall spread to envelop the whole world…” The text beginning thus, written in 1903, is still considered by her followers to prophesy the Russo-Japanese War, the Second World War, and Japan’s defeat in the latter.

Nao was also given the power to heal, and gradually became an object of worship. However, she longed to return to her former self, and consulted numerous priests and fortunetellers, none of whom could give her helpful advice.

One day, a young man called Ueda Kisaburo, a sometime theology student, teacher, and farmer from nearby Kameoka, received a divine message to “go northwest and find the one who awaits you.” It was Nao he met there. He turned out to be the one who could distinguish Nao from the god working in her; he was also to marry her youngest daughter, Sumiko, and take the name Deguchi Onisaburo. It was he, a formidable theorist and organizer, who would create the Omoto-kyo religion with Nao as its spiritual leader. Most of their first worshippers were poor peasants like Nao, but Onisaburo was able to bring in Japan’s elites as well, including a number of prominent naval officers as well as Ueshiba Morihei, the inventor of aikido.

Nao died at age 81 in 1918, leaving a thriving New Religion behind. Viciously oppressed during the war by the Japanese government, Omoto-kyo managed to survive and remains in existence today. I once had the experience of teaching English conversation to its administrative head at the time, Onisaburo’s grandson, a courteous and competent old gentleman.

Note that while she doesn’t have a page of her own here, another 19th-century woman, Nakayama Miki (1798-1887), had a similar experience of divine possession and spirit writing, becoming the founder of the Tenri-kyo New Religion.

Sources
Ishii, Mori 1996
http://www.oomoto.or.jp/English/enKyos/kaisoden/index.html (lengthy biography on the Omoto-kyo site)
https://www.omt.gr.jp/o72 (photo of Nao’s O-fudesaki writings)