nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Kanno Suga, also called Sugako, was born in 1881 in Osaka, where her father was an itinerant mining engineer. Her mother Nobu died when Suga was twelve, to be replaced by a wicked stepmother who abused her (according to some accounts, having her raped and spreading rumors of her bad behavior); at age nineteen, she was married off to support the family’s failing finances. Shortly divorced, she returned home and helped support her younger sister and brother.

She studied writing with the author Udagawa Bunkai, joined Yajima Kajiko’s WCTU, and thereby developed an interest in socialism and pacifism through her acquaintance with the writer, editor, and all-around good guy Sakai Toshihiko [to whose daughter Magara Suga willed her best kimono], then running the Heimin Shimbun left-wing newspaper. She was apparently particularly moved by an article in which Sakai argued that women who had been raped should bear no more responsibility for it than women bitten by mad dogs.

Suga addressed woman’s issues from her own earliest days as a journalist, working for the Osaka Morning News: she criticized the plan to have geisha dance at the Fifth National Industrial Exhibition held in 1903, calling them “women of low repute,” a daring move given how many high governmental officials were then married to ex-geisha (she later regretted this stance, shifting to criticize the social structure in general rather than the women involved in it.) In 1906, with help from Sakai, she moved to Wakayama to edit a newspaper there while its original editor was in prison; she subsequently married her colleague Arahata Kanson and moved to Tokyo with him, although this marriage likewise did not last more than a year. Her articles continued to call on women to stand up for themselves against men’s double standards and perfidy.

In 1908, she was arrested as part of the so-called Red Flag Incident, in which anarchists including Arahata, Osugi Sakae, and Kotoku Shusui waved red flags marked with anarchist and socialist slogans when welcoming a comrade back from prison, clashed with police, and were arrested in large numbers. Shortly after the incident, Suga and Kotoku began to live together (he was technically still married, but his wife Chiyo had stayed home when he came to Tokyo. Arahata, Suga’s ex-lover, did not hesitate to use this and other points to blacken Suga’s name in later years; he famously described her as “not at all pretty, but very sexy” or words to that effect, implying that she had slept with almost every man she met). Along with Kotoku, Suga became editor of the journal Liberal Thought, which was promptly banned.

In 1910, Suga, Kotoku, and a number of their comrades were arrested in what became the High Treason Incident, on suspicion of plotting to assassinate the Meiji Emperor. Even at the time it was widely known that most of the charges were entirely falsified (in part by chief prosecutor Hiranuma Kiichiro), as part of the increasing crackdown on the left wing. According to some accounts, Suga, who was already suffering from tuberculosis, knew herself not to be long for this world in any case, and decided to die with her comrades rather than plead her innocence; others have her a central part of the conspiracy, considering herself a latter-day Sofia Perovskaya. Regardless, she was hanged for treason in January of 1911, at the age of thirty.

Buried in a Tokyo temple, her remains disappeared during the war. While it was originally thought that they had been ravaged by the wartime military, a postwar survey found that they had been taken by comrades for safe reinterment in Okayama; her grave is still with her sister's in Tokyo.

Sources
Nakae, Ishii, Mori 1996, Tanaka
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kanno-sugako-reflections-on-the-way-to-the-gallows (English; translator unknown) Suga’s record of her sentencing and thereafter. A LOT.
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi
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.
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Hasegawa Shigure was born in 1879 in Tokyo, where her father was a lawyer; her birth name was Yasuko and her intimates knew her as O-Yat’chan all her life. She was fond of novels and plays from childhood on, popular among her elementary school classmates for her recountings of the stories she had read. At age fifteen she began to study waka poetry with Sasaki Nobutsuna, until her mother Taki, who resented her oldest daughter Yasuko for the short shrift given Taki by her husband and mother-in-law, sent her out to train as a maid.

Four years later she was married to the son of nouveau-riche family friends, a wastrel who was shortly dispatched to a remote mining town in the north to teach him proper behavior. Yasuko, lonely and isolated in what might at the time as well have been a different country, consoled herself with writing and sent the results to various magazines, winning an award in 1901 for a short story. This gave her the impetus to return to Tokyo in 1904 in order to focus on her writing, eventually divorcing her husband. It was at this point that she began to use “Shigure” as a pen name.

By 1908 Shigure’s theater and kabuki works were beginning to be staged; she was the first female playwright to be recognized by name at the Kabuki-za theater. Rapidly becoming known as a popular playwright (even her mother Taki applauded her success at this point, although she may have had financial motives), she also wrote for dance productions and experimental troupes, working with the kabuki actor Onoue Kikugoro VI, who became a lifelong friend. In 1917 she fell in love with the writer Mikami Otokichi, twelve years younger than she. They lived together from then on but were never formally married.

In 1928, Mikami—whose popular novels were raking in enough cash for him to support multiple mistresses, thanks in part to Shigure’s support and networking—offered to buy her a diamond ring. She requested instead the seed money for a magazine, and subsequently founded Nyonin Geijutsu [Women’s Art] in order to cast light on more women authors: serving as a Japanese equivalent of sorts to the English Time and Tide, it offered a platform to writers including Okada Yachiyo, Hirabayashi Taiko, Sata Ineko, Hiratsuka Raicho, Ozaki Midori, Kamichika Ichiko, the two Fumikos (Enchi and Hayashi), Tamura Toshiko, Takamure Itsue, and many others. Adopting the left-wing orientation of literary circles at the time, the magazine was banned more than once. While its publication run was only five years long, it was a major event in the history of twentieth-century Japanese women’s literature.

Shigure continued to write in her later years while caring for her ill husband. In 1936 she published Kindai Bijinden [Modern Beauties], a collection of biographical sketches of women of the time which she had written over the last two decades, including essays on O-Yuki Morgan, Yanagiwara Byakuren, Matsui Sumako, Raicho, Tazawa Inabune, Takemoto Ayanosuke, Shugensha Hamako, Kujo Takeko, Otsuka Kusuoko, and Iwano Kiyoko among others. As the war took shape, she founded a women’s organization called the Kagayaku Kai [Shining Group] which worked on behalf of Japan’s wartime machine, supporting Japanese troops overseas, Chinese women students in Japan, injured veterans, and the families of soldiers killed in action. She died in 1941 at the age of sixty-three, frustrated on her deathbed that she would not live long enough to write a biography of Higuchi Ichiyo.

Sources
Nakae
Mori 2008
Ishii
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
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”
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Isomura Haruko was born in 1877 in Fukushima; her maiden name was Koizumi. She attended Miyagi Girls’ School (but unlike Soma Kokko, a year older, apparently did not participate in the students’ strike there), and became a teacher there after graduating. She also probably became a Christian at some point during her schooling.

In 1903 she married the businessman Isomura Gento and moved with him to Tokyo. He handled various manufacturing and trading concerns; Haruko helped out by using her school English to read technical documents, and in order to polish it spent time studying at Japan Women’s University and the Women’s English Institute (founded by Tsuda Umeko), remaining in school even when she became pregnant.

In 1905 she was hired by the Hochi Shimbun newspaper as a reporter, following in the footsteps of Hani Motoko. She had small children by this point (she was to bear a total of eight children), and because of her habit of bringing her children to work, became known as the “reporter with the ruby text,” a pun on the use of a smaller (ruby) font to add pronunciation text next to the larger main text. She reported on the visit of an American fleet to Yokohama in 1908, making use of her English, and at some point (probably in 1907) secured an exclusive interview with future President Taft. In 1911 she went up in Yamada Isaburo’s experimental airship and reported on the experience.

In 1913 Haruko published a collection of her writing called Ima no Onna [Women of Today], containing dozens of interviews and word-sketches of both individuals and situations, the former including Hasegawa Shigure, Okada Yachiyo, Shimoda Utako, and Soma Kokko, as well as many lesser known women (a midwife, a clerk, a young mother, a printing press worker, a beautician, a tea master, the wives of a detective, an actor, a miner, and a hotelier, and more) the latter covering topics from a station waiting room to a marriage brokerage, a movie house, a rakugo theater, an advice bureau, and so on).

Haruko’s husband’s business failed in 1915; they moved to a much smaller house and she went to work for the Yamato Shimbun newspaper and then became a freelancer. In 1918, she died of heart disease at the age of 41.

Sources
宮城女学校第7回生の夫たち:顔写真特定と目歯比率 (I can’t link this because it’s a PDF, but googling it will get the link; Japanese) An account of Haruko and her husband’s history, along with those of several of her classmates and their husbands; interesting photographs
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/951262/1/139 (Japanese) Haruko’s book on Women of Today online; it looks extremely interesting if one takes the time to struggle through the prewar characters (also a good example of what ruby text looks like)
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi
[Kind of cheating, because she did not actually ever live in Japan as far as I can tell, but her marriage and her activism relate interestingly to her Japanese contemporaries.]

Josephine Conger-Kaneko was born in Missouri in 1875; she became involved with newspaper work early on, setting type for the newspaper run by her brother. She attended the socialist Ruskin College in the same state and began working for a local socialist newspaper, later founding her own journal, The Socialist Woman, which continued under various names for many years.

In 1905 Josephine married the Japanese socialist Kaneko Kiichi. After his death in 1909 (he had returned to Japan for his health, writing her letters promising to update her on the situation of the oppression of Japanese women and to be back in America within a few months), she moved to Chicago and continued to publish her journal as well as working in journalism elsewhere and running for office on the Socialist Party ballot. In 1911 her journal, then called The Progressive Woman, ran a special issue on Kotoku Shusui, a Japanese socialist who had been put to death earlier that year along with his girlfriend Kanno Suga among others; the articles included translations of letters from Kotoku and [Japanese male feminist] Sakai Toshihiko to Kaneko Kiichi.

In 1918 she edited an anthology called Woman’s Voice, which featured excerpts from the writings of some 250 women of note, including Susan B. Anthony, George Eliot, Cicely Hamilton, Ellen Key, Maria Montessori, and Rahel Varnhagen. The preface noted that “[i]t is the editor’s hope that this volume will circulate very largely in the small towns and country districts of our nation. I want the millions of women who are feeling, and thinking, but who are as yet inarticulate upon the larger affairs of life, to find their need and their voice in this volume.”

She died in 1934.

Sources
https://archive.org/details/womansvoiceanan00kanegoog/page/n12/mode/2up?view=theater (English) Josephine’s anthology, available on openlibrary.org
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2020/5/15/maedako-2/
https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2020/10/16/takeshi-takahashi-4/ (English) Includes a newspaper photograph of Josephine and Kiichi.
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
[I’m sorry this is both late and too short; Qiu Jin deserves better, but I’ve been sick this weekend and thought I was better off posting what I had. I hope other people can fill in more]

Qiu Jin was born in 1875 in Fujian, China, the daughter of government officials. Although her feet were bound according to the custom of the time, she was taught to ride a horse and use a sword along with writing poetry in her childhood. She was briefly and unhappily married in her early twenties, moving to Beijing with her husband, where she unbound her feet.

In 1903 she traveled to Japan to study, leaving two children behind in China; she attended the Girls’ Practical School run by Shimoda Utako, where she joined various revolutionary societies and made herself notable by wearing Western men’s clothes. She also edited the Vernacular Journal, which published revolutionary articles in vernacular written Chinese (still a rarity at the time), including her own protests against bound feet and forced marriage, as well as (with Xu Zihua) the China Women’s News.

In 1905 she returned to China and became principal of a girls’ school with a revolutionary focus in Shaoxing. She was arrested and put to death in 1907 for plotting against the Qing Dynasty. She wrote poetry and (often unfinished) novels throughout her life.

Sources
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/qiu-jin-five-poems/ (translations of Qiu Jin’s poetry by Yilin Wang)
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Yamamuro Kieko was born in 1874 in Iwate, where her family were farmers; her birth name was Sato Kieko. Originally well-to-do, the Sato family had spent more than it had to alleviate the effects of the repeated northern famines and subsequently fallen on hard times. Kieko grew up in this sacrificial atmosphere. While helping with the family silkworms, she studied hard, subscribing to Jogaku Zasshi [Women’s Learning], which excited her with its liberal Christianity.

At eighteen she traveled south to attend the Meiji Girls’ School, where she became a Christian. She graduated in 1895 in the middle of the First Sino-Japanese War, and set out to make herself useful by helping alcoholic ex-servicemen; however, it was hard to find support. At the same time she served as secretary of the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs, taught at a vocational school for working-class girls set up by Shimoda Utako, and did clerical work for Jogaku Zasshi, indicating how busy she liked to keep herself. The impression she left was of a calm, patient, feminine young woman, who would remark gently “Well, none of us is God [we all have our faults].”

It was in this year that a number of Salvation Army representatives came to Japan in order to set up a branch there. To become accepted, they wore Japanese dress and ate Japanese-style, which backfired somewhat, earning them a reputation as “actors from the Japan Village in London,” “that crazy religion” and so on. Kieko happened to have a tutoring job near the Salvation Army ladies’ house, and took it on herself to teach them proper Japanese etiquette so that they would no longer have to make fools of themselves.

There she met Yamamuro Gunpei, who was the Salvation Army’s main Japanese colleague; seeing him at meetings, she came to feel that the Salvation Army was her job in life. Two years older than she, Gunpei was a printworker (traditionally an occupation rife with left-wing organizers and hotheads) who had put himself through an informal university education before joining the Salvation Army. He and Kieko were married in 1899. They held a modest summer wedding at which, according to Kubushiro Ochimi, “the two of them started to sermonize after the ceremony, startling everyone.” Yajima Kajiko also approved of the marriage, saying that the pace of her own Women’s Association for Reforming Customs was too slow for Kieko’s devotion to her work.

They were extremely poor, which did not slow them down at all. Kieko in particular worked to set up a shelter for women escaping from prostitution, which at the time often involved poor rural girls effectively sold into slavery. While would-be ex-prostitutes made up the majority of the women who made use of the safe space, it was also open to women who had tried to throw themselves under trains, upper-class young ladies under the watch of conservators, married women who had been shaved bald by their husbands on suspicion of adultery, and others who were struggling. Not all of them were willing to stay once they had come, but Kieko was patient in her insistence that more education would help them no matter what, and most of them ended up in better situations than they had left (with the help of various donations from benefactors including Tsuda Umeko). She also took practical action to cut off human trafficking before it could start during the great northeastern famine of 1905, working along with the Salvation Army to protect girls from the Northeast from being sold to buy their families food.

Kieko died in 1916, perhaps out of simple overtiredness after a lifetime of hard work, pregnancy and child-raising, and poverty. Her husband Gunpei wrote her posthumous biography, while apparently wondering with unnecessary borrowed modesty “if she was enough of a person to convey to the world.” He survived her by some years; the family grave contains Gunpei, Kieko, his second wife Etsuko, and several of their six children. Among these their son Buho, who followed his parents into the Salvation Army, was named after William Booth and the Quaker George Fox. Their oldest daughter Tamiko, born in 1900, was instrumental along with Hani Motoko’s daughter Setsuko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Sato Ineko and others in founding the Femin Women’s Democracy Club after World War II.

Sources
Mori 1996
https://christianpress.jp/july-12-yamamuro-kieko-anniversary/ (Japanese) Worth a look just for her extremely stubborn-looking photograph
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Tsuneko Gauntlett was born in 1873 in Aichi; her birth name was Yamada Tsune. Her parents Kenzo and Hisa were the children of a doctor and a horsemaster respectively, but had little luck in their own career trying to do business in Tokyo. For a while Tsune was fostered out to an aunt married to a doctor working with Hansen’s disease; she continued to seek advice and support from her aunt and uncle throughout her youth.

At age six she entered the Sakurai Girls’ School. When its first principal, Sakurai Chika, resigned her post in favor of Yajima Kajiko, Tsuneko was prepared to rebel; eventually, however, she became Kajiko’s devoted supporter and remained so all their lives. In 1890 she went to teach English at the Kyoai Girls’ School in Gunma north of Tokyo; among her students there was Okubo (Kubushiro) Ochimi, Kajiko’s niece, who was later to be her colleague in the Women’s Suffrage Association.
It was through the introduction of a British colleague that she met Edward Gauntlett, a missionary and fellow English teacher. He fell first; she was reluctant to accept his proposal for a long time, not sure she was attracted to him and also cognizant of the trouble inherent in marrying a foreigner. He persevered, however, and on the advice of her aunt and uncle as well as Kajiko, they were married in 1898 (Tsuneko’s mother, fiercely opposed, was persuaded to come to the wedding but sat sulking the whole time). Gauntlett was a respectable young Englishman with an extra dose of intellectual curiosity which had brought him to Japan. They shared not only a religion but also an interest in music; Gauntlett was an amateur organist, and Tsuneko had studied the organ and had the family musical ability (her brother became the noted composer Yamada Kôsçak ).

They were married in a Tokyo church. When they went to register their marriage at the local ward office, however, they were turned away: “there is no precedent for such a thing [as international marriage].” At the time, Japanese women taking up with foreign men were still seen as Madame Butterflies at best. Tsuneko applied to every relevant Ministry she could think of to find out the correct procedure, and was told only that nobody had ever done such a thing before, so nobody knew how to do it. In the end, she “ran away” in order to abandon her Japanese citizenship, applying at the same time for British citizenship, which she was eventually granted via a letter from Queen Victoria.

In 1901 the Gauntletts moved to Okayama (where a friendly Zen priest let them set up a pipe organ in the middle of his temple) to teach at high schools there. It was at this point that Tsuneko began to wear Western clothing, and to make Western clothes for her children likewise. Tsuneko’s brother joined them in Okayama for a while, receiving his early training in music from his brother-in-law (who also joined him in introducing table tennis to Japan there). The Gauntletts eventually moved to Kanazawa and then to Yamaguchi before returning to Tokyo in 1916, having gone through various health problems and had six children.

Tsuneko shifted her focus to social activism, working with Yajima Kajiko in the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs (Japan’s branch of the WCTU) for temperance and peace and against prostitution. She traveled overseas numerous times to speak at conferences on these issues. In 1920 she accompanied Kajiko to the West, taking care of her daily needs as well as tutoring her in English, acting as interpreter, and mending her aged kimono when it gave way unexpectedly during a party. She took the chance to travel to her husband’s hometown while in England, where his brothers and stepmother (who was relieved to find that her Japanese daughter-in-law was human and not a monster out of distorted paintings) received her warmly. In 1937 she was named president of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association.

During the war, Tsuneko and Ted remained in Japan but kept to themselves, effectively under house arrest under the eye of the thought police as one-time citizens of a hostile country, although both had become Japanese nationals by this point (their oldest son Owen sued the Japanese government after the war for forcing him to take Japanese citizenship); they were fortunate enough to survive and not to be imprisoned, however. In 1946 Tsuneko became head of the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs. She died in 1953 at the age of eighty, followed three years later by her husband. Of their six children, two settled in Britain while four remained in Japan; all six worked as teachers at some point.

Sources
Nakae, Shimamoto
https://www.japanjournals.com/feature/72-culture/survivor4/1085-2011-03-21-12-00-10-9917180.html?limit=1 (Japanese) Article with various pictures (click through from pages 1 to 7)
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Fukuda Hideko was born in 1865 in Okayama, daughter of the minor samurai Kageyama Katashi, who held down various ill-paying jobs and ran a terakoya school to make ends meet, and his wife Ume, who taught Japanese and Chinese classics there. When Hideko was seven, her mother went to teach at the prefectural Girls’ Training School, where she was considered an excellent lecturer who held that all girls should have as much education as possible.

Hideko herself—bookish, energetic, and given to wearing boys’ clothes for comfort and convenience—went back to her own elementary school as a teacher’s aide when she was fifteen. A year later, she turned down a proposal of marriage from a naval lieutenant, on the grounds that she was uninterested in a loveless marriage in which she would gain nothing and lose her independence to the feudal system. At seventeen, she was much moved by hearing Kishida Toshiko speak on the Liberal Party’s Freedom and Rights Movement and women’s rights. The following year, she left the elementary school to teach full-time, along with her mother and older brother, in their newly established Joko Academy, a private school for girls and women of all stripes, including evening classes for working mothers. Only a year later, however, the school was closed down for participation in a Liberal Party event. Hideko, infuriated, set off for Tokyo to become an activist.

There she spent some time studying English at Shinsakae Girls’ School (run by Yajima Kajiko). In 1885, however, she found herself involved in the Osaka Incident, in which Liberal Party leftists Oi Kentaro, Isoyama Seibei, and Kobayashi Kusuo were caught collecting money and weapons to bring down the regime in Korea. Kobayashi and Hideko had become engaged some time previously (the older brother of her friend Masako, he wooed her by lending her a biography of Joan of Arc), and she had been collecting funding for them. She was horrified to find that Kobayashi and his comrades spent this hard-earned money in the pleasure houses, but hung on for the sake of her ideals. Their plans for revolution came to light in November 1885, when they were arrested in Osaka. Hideko fled with explosives in her luggage, eventually captured in Nagasaki.

She was sentenced to a year and nine months in prison (where she was relatively well treated and became aware of the crippling effects of poverty on many women’s lives), fêted upon her release as the “Joan of Arc of the Orient.” She and Oi Kentaro (eventually released for the 1889 amnesty declared to celebrate the new Constitution) became lovers and had a child together, but his unfaithfulness (with the writer Shimizu Shikin among others) eventually drove her away from their revolutionary movement altogether.

In 1892, Hideko married the US-educated journalist and social reformer Fukuda Tomosaku, with whom she had three children before his death in 1900; thereafter she lived for some time with his friend Ishikawa Sanshiro, another left-wing writer. In 1901 she established a vocational school for women in poverty. A neighbor, Sakai Toshihiko (socialist, feminist, writer, and supportive big brother to the whole movement in general), introduced her to socialism and brought her into the circle of the Heiminsha activist group and its socialist newspaper, where she met Kotoku Shusui and his wife Chiyoko; she also studied Christianity with Uchimura Kanzo. She wrote and published an autobiography, Warawa no Hanshogai (My Life So Far), which found considerable success. In 1907 she founded the journal Sekai Fujin (Women of the World), the first socialist women’s newspaper in Japan, with content ranging from essays on women’s rights to household hints to short stories in translation to calls for support for women and the poor (she also went out and fought these campaigns in person). The newspaper was shut down by the government in 1909.

Hideko struggled in middle age, but continued to call for women’s rights, publishing influential articles in Hiratsuka Raicho’s Seito (Bluestocking) journal. She died in 1927 at the age of sixty-one.

Sources
Nakae, Mori 1996, Tanaka
https://isaacmeyer.net/2023/02/episode-471-the-osaka-incident/ (English) Detailed account of the Osaka Incident
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/14749/1/MQ45977.pdf (English) Thesis on Fukuda Hideko and Hiratsuka Raicho and their respective publications
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000057/files/43276_18829.html (Japanese) Hideko’s autobiography (the style is grammatically very old-fashioned and I find it heavy going, but I will happily look up what she has to say about any given incident if requested)
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Okay, imagine you are seven years old and you’re being shipped off to a country all the way around the world, where everything is different, and you will not be going home or seeing your family again for at least another decade. The only familiar people you have with you are four other (unrelated) girls, two teenagers and two preadolescents. When you get to your destination you will be adopted by a middle-aged couple; you will take up their religion, learn their language so well you forget your own, make friends, and graduate from high school with honors. You will not return to your own country until you’re eighteen, and it will take you painful years there to relearn your birth language. You will be constantly conscious of the responsibility conferred on you by the opportunity you were given when too young to choose for yourself. You will remain close friends with your two closest agemates on the voyage all your lives; seeing how marriage circumscribes their lives, you will be more than happy to remain single. You will be endlessly eager to learn, even as you devote your whole life to education for others, specifically for girls and women. The girls’ school you found will bear your name down into the next century. You will stay in touch with your adopted family for almost thirty years.

I apologize for the second person, but Ume gets to me. The above is pretty much the essence of her life as I understand it. She was born in Tokyo in 1864. Her father Tsuda Sen was an agricultural scientist and a Christian (notable for introducing strawberries and asparagus, among other crops, to Japan), involved in the Hokkaido colonization project for which educated women were required. Along with Ume, the girls chosen to be sent to the US in 1871 were Yoshimasu Ryo and Ueda Tei (both older teenagers who returned to Japan after a short time due to illness), Yamakawa Sutematsu, who was eleven, and Nagai Shige, who was nine. Ume, Sutematsu, and Shige remained close all their lives, even after Sutematsu married the much older Count Oyama and Shige (who later became Japan’s first female piano teacher) the up-and-coming naval officer Uryu Sotokichi. Ume lived in Washington, DC with the librarian Charles Lanman and his wife Adeline until she was eighteen.

Upon her return to Japan, Ume was kept busy relearning the language and customs, as well as taking care of her numerous younger siblings. She assisted with charity bazaars (and sometimes danced) at the Rokumeikan, served as a tutor for Ito Hirobumi’s daughter, and taught English at the School for Noble Girls (working with Shimoda Utako and the French teacher Ishii Fudeko) and the Tokyo Women’s Normal School (now Ochanomizu University), returning to the US briefly to attend Bryn Mawr College from 1889 to 1892. Thereafter she founded her own school (with help from Sutematsu, her adopted sister Alice Bacon, and Shige among others), the Women’s English Institute, now Tsuda University. Run on liberal and progressive grounds, the school began with ten students and had grown to 150 in less than ten years. A strict and inspiring teacher, Ume dedicated much of the rest of her life to administration and fundraising. She died in 1929.

Because Ume’s own voice is too good to miss, I have compiled some selections from her letters to her “American mother,” Adeline Lanman (I hope I’m not breaking copyright) to be found AT LENGTH below.
November 19, 1882
Sutematsu and I awoke this morning and said, “Just think only one more day—only twenty-four hours.” I am wild with joy and can hardly contain myself—next moment I am filled with strange misgivings. If I could only speak my own language, it would be so much easier for me.
December 1882
Japanese food is very nice and it has agreed with me very well indeed. It is strange how natural everything tastes. Oh, if the language would only come back to me as easily! I am bound hand and foot, I am both deaf and dumb. …when there are six or seven ways to say anything and they tell me all, I get in a muddle truly.
…To tell the truth, I do feel already much older than I did—partially because I am considered older here in Japan, and then because I have lived a long time in the weeks spent here, already—such new feelings and experience make the time seem long.
December 17, 1882
Mrs. Lanman, I’m sure you would not believe it of me, but I am quiet, orderly, regular, and punctual.
December 28, 1882
…though I often long to see you all again and be back in America, I would not have it different, for I feel I must be of use, not because I know much, but because I am a Japanese woman with an education.
January 6, 1883
I verily believe it is as hard for me as for a foreigner, and I have no talent for languages. … “O me miserum,” poor me, no one has so hard a time in learning their own tongue, and I do feel so discouraged and have no energy to look at those complicated characters or to learn six different ways to say anything. Now, when I think I have a sentence pat, and say it, is it not discouraging to be told that I must only say that to children and servants, that it would be very rude to anyone else, and that what I should say is some long-winded, intangible, incomprehensible sentence? There are more than eight different ways of saying I and you, alone, not to speak of other variations.
…Sometimes I wonder why we went to America. I don’t believe we can do any good, and the government seems to be indifferent as to our work, and we seem to be forgotten.
January 16, 1883
I would not marry unless I wanted to, no matter if I have to live like a hermit, and nothing would induce me to make a regular Japanese marriage, where anything but love is regarded.
March 27, 1883
Yet hard as many things are, hard as many things will be to a woman in Japan placed as we are in the land of such women, yet, do you know my life is not one to shrink from or draw back? I must live and work and do, and I do never want or expect to leave Japan, to live anywhere else.
June 6, 1883
But I want to have my school, and never marry, though I do not say I shall never do so, because it is so hard, so very hard, to get along alone. Oh, it is so hard to feel yourself as different from others, and be looked on with contempt! If I could only do my own way, and not have everyone think me strange, just because I am not married. But that is one of the trials—and trials have to come.
September 28, 1883
In fact, you would be shocked truly. Shige said, when we were discussing something, I think hair, and we admired [Shige’s husband] Mr. Uriu’s soft locks, “I wish you would give your baby that” before me. Now don’t you think we are losing all our civilization?
October 19, 1883
Japanese standards of beauty and niceness are just the opposite of yours—for instance, these servants were saying “What dreadfully big, high noses foreigners have and such far back eyes, and so staring too, so unwomanly, not demure and drooping, and light hair is so dreadful and fuzzy,” etc. How Japanese make fun of foreign waists—they themselves with their thick girdles make themselves big there, and try and hide and make smooth the front of their bodies, and they think the high bust, the depression below, and the again swelling out at the hip and stomach something dreadful and vulgar, and they hate it. They dislike curly hair so much and any other color than black, and straight at that. They dislike big eyes. They like them bright but shy, drooping, slanting upwards a little, and they adore above all whiteness of skin. It makes no difference in the clearness of complexion, only it must be white, and for that reason, they use so much white powder or wash and make themselves like pictures, and it is not a thing to hide or feel ashamed of—they do it most openly.
December 4, 1883
I follow my own method—no books—but I began with a few nouns of common use. Then I had a sentence like “I have,” then “I have a book, a pen, a chair, etc.,” then “Have I a pen, a book, etc.,” then “Have you, etc.,” then “Have we.” After that such sentences as “What is this,” “This is a book,” “What is that,” “That is, etc.,” then numerals, then “I have one book, two books, etc.,” and then I get up, and get things and show in that way the meaning.
January 4, 1884
You will be sorry if I tell you that Sutematsu never goes to church, and seems to have forgotten her profession. She seems so submissive to Mr. Oyama, that though he would not forbid her going, still as he doesn’t go, she doesn’t venture, especially since Sunday is his day home. I do not have patience with such wifely tameness.
January 9, 1884
I am just reading a translation of a famous Japanese work [probably the Tale of Genji], a story, written by a woman—a luxurious, dreamy, poetical thing, but full of Oriental immorality. …I am also going to read Democracy in America by de Tocqueville, which Mr. Ito lent me.
February 26, 1884
It was written in the papers that Mr. Ito and Mr. Inoue spoke most strongly at court against the custom allowing the Emperor to legally have twelve wives, and begged that such things be done away with. That a protestation arises from these men to such an effect is a great thing, though I think that their own lives might be more perfect in some of these ways.
June 15, 1884
I never would have believed it of these quiet ladies, the most of whom think talking of money, of bargaining, or anything of that kind, is a sort of disgrace and, you know, in Japan these high ladies never attend to money matters or touch a cent of money themselves. Well, they got a good lesson. I suppose they caught it from the few of us who don’t mind.
July 29, 1884
I have been lazing the summer days just as I used to in America, by reading novels, just the trashiest kind, and enjoying them. … I have not inquired for a long time how Necko is, and all her numerous children scattered over the neighborhood. Does Necko still exist, and do you pet her any?
January 25, 1885
They had no idea what Christianity was, having only heard of it now and then. They asked me if it was true what people said, that it was a part of Christians’ worship to stamp daily upon the Emperor’s photograph… . They asked what I believed about future life and I told them, and also that those who believe shall meet again. … I said “Do you think when one dies, that is the end of everything?” and they said “Yes.”
June 13, 1885
My scholars at school are doing nicely. I have two or three that are studying splendidly, and they are very fond of their English. They study it so much, and are so anxious to get on, to the neglect of their Japanese studies, that they have been dubbed by their schoolmates “English-crazy.”
June 15, 1883
I met Mrs. Mori [Arinori] also there, and had quite a little talk with her. What a very homely person she is! Nothing pretty about her, and yet they say Mr. Mori’s marriage was a pure love match, and he is considered a man of the highest morals and very faithful and dedicated to Mrs. Mori. So it is not always beauty in this world, and in rank, too, she was a Miss Nobody, I think. Think of Mrs. Ito [Hirobumi], beautiful as she was, and is, and yet from such a rank that their beauty is their all, and when men tire of that, then it is all up.
July 1, 1886
I think the men dressing in foreign dress is well enough, but the women! and Japanese dress is so nice. They are throwing away the good of their native land together with the evil. The Empress will also begin one of the foreign languages—I don’t know which. I don’t envy whoever teaches her—it will be so much trouble and bother, and one would be afraid to move. All this is Mr. Ito’s doing. I think he is going too far—should like to tell him so, but don’t have any chance to do so at all.
August 1, 1886
I have not had any matrimonial arrangements made for me with anyone lately, and least of all with anyone of any rank, but the Pages you met seem to have decided that it was a count. I have not heard of any count of any kind that was marriageable, or I might have set my cap for him, but unluckily I can’t recall one, nor have I heard the least thing from Father or anyone about it, so your advice to accept him was a little premature, wasn’t it? But the wonder is, how such a story got around. I must ask Mrs. Page about it when I see her next time. I think I had better be an old maid after all, so please don’t talk about “Why don’t you fall in love, etc.”
September 23, 1886
How does the opera The Mikado flourish? Items have appeared in the Japanese papers about it…and the general feeling is quite a sore one. …Just the costumes and manner would not be so much, but to make fun of the government, and to put such absurd things in the mouths of the officials and the Emperor especially when the mass of people are in ignorance of the true state of affairs and believe it to be something like this—why, it is an insult. If people ask you, tell them this, and that it is an insult to everyone, Japanese feel—and to a country as well and reasonably governed as Japan, a farce. Can’t you send me the libretto of it just for fun? The costumes and all are very, very absurd, I hear from Japanese, and I should like to see and read it anyhow to judge of it.
…If I were a man, I think nothing would daunt me if I wanted to do something very much.
October 9, 1886
A few days ago, the Emperor’s only son, the Heir Apparent Prince Haru, came to visit our school. He is still a wee bit of a fellow, being only ten years old. I wonder what he thought of so many rows and rows of girls as there were. The poor little fellow seemed quite bewildered, and I don’t suppose it interested him very much. I fear he won’t amount to very much, from all accounts.
November 28, 1888
(Private) When I received the garters you sent me the other day in the box, those that come from the waist, I thought I would ask you if you wouldn’t some time, when you have a chance, send me one of those bands for ladies to use at certain times. I want one as a model and should like to show the Japanese ladies, as their method is so uncomfortable.
November 1, 1899
Our school has been quite excited over the fact that one of our little pupils, the daughter of Prince Kujo and sister to the Princess I teach is to be engaged to the Crown Prince and the engagement is expected to be announced in a few days. Of course, our school is very proud having been the place where she got her education. The young lady is only sixteen, and quite clever and accomplished.
February 5, 1900
How strange it seems to be writing 1900! I make mistakes all the time, and write eighteen and then have to correct it. It is very strange that we are in another century, is it not?
January 22, 1902
It was only a few days ago I was thinking how useful has been all that miscellaneous reading I did as a child in your library. Much of it has been more useful to me than the schooling I got, and the hard lessons I learnt, especially in the English teaching I am doing lately, when the odd reading gave me so much that has proved useful.
August 21, 1904
We are daily waiting to hear of the fall of Port Arthur. It will be a terrible struggle. I am so sorry they refused to surrender—the fools. No one doubts that the place will be taken, and yet for the empty name of honor, they are willing to sacrifice thousands and thousands of lives on both sides. It is a terrible thing to think of, and when will this false standard of bravery give way and people get to see the truth plainer?
May 23, 1910
Just a line to tell you that our new building is actually finished and paid for, and we are using it. It is such a fine, splendid building, and we are rejoicing greatly over it. The girls and teachers were so glad to go into the fine, clean, bright schoolrooms, so light and airy and pleasant. It is a big, beautiful building and cost nearly seven thousand dollars, which is a very big sum in Japan. It is anywhere, but especially in Japan. I only wish you could see it, for it is so beautiful and convenient and a joy to us, in every way. I feel it a great responsibility to have such a big place here to look after and run.
June 5, 1910
We were very much excited about the Comet and all the girls thought that we might be burnt if we got into its tail. However, nothing has happened. On some of the different nights last week, it shone very brilliantly and we saw its tail a long, long distance.


Sources
Nakae
Yoshiko Furuki et al. ed., The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her American Mother, Weatherhill, 1991
https://www.city.kodaira.tokyo.jp.e.fj.hp.transer.com/kurashi/111/111677.html (machine translated, ignore the text, but there are lots of good illustrations)
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Kishida Toshiko was born in 1863 in Kyoto, where her father Kishida Mobei owned a kimono shop (although he was prone to amusing himself in the nearby red-light districts, and it was Toshiko’s mother Taka who ran the shop and taught Toshiko the classics). She was top of the class throughout school, dropping out of the Kyoto Normal School to run her own tutoring business when she became frustrated that her own intellect exceeded that of her teachers. At age seventeen she entered the Imperial Household to tutor Empress Haruko (more than a decade her senior) in the Chinese classics, Mengzi in particular. She was the first commoner to take up a role of this kind.

Unable to acclimate to the strict class divisions and practices such as concubinage within the Palace, she left after eighteen months (although the Empress tried to persuade her to stay) and became involved in the Risshisha civil rights movement, which developed into the Liberal Party founded by Itagaki Taisuke. Toshiko spoke on women’s rights at political meetings around West and South Japan, drawing acclaim for her well-reasoned arguments as well as her youth and elegance, and often sharing the podium with Itagaki’s right hand Nakajima Nobuyuki. In May 1882 she spoke in Okayama, inspiring Fukuda Hideko to join the movement as well.

In October 1883, however, Toshiko spoke in Otsu on “sheltered maidens” (using a Japanese term literally translated as “daughters kept in boxes”), and was arrested for violating the Assembly Ordinance. In this famous speech she had called for women’s social independence and the societal reforms this would require, advocating women’s education and greater freedom rather than the destruction of the “boxes” of society altogether. The police, who considered her speech to have crossed the line from academic discussion to politics, detained her for eight days.

Thereafter, as a law forbidding women to participate in political meetings came into force, Toshiko spoke less and wrote more, publishing a series of articles called “Addressing my Sisters” in the Liberal Party organ. She expressed respect for love between men and women while criticizing the patriarchy of Japan (including the men demanding liberty and civil rights) and its insistence on women’s subservience to men. “Destroy the daydream they live in!” Toshiko demanded.

She also wrote for Iwamoto Yoshiharu’s Jogaku Zasshi and taught classics at the Shin’ei Girls’ School and the Ferris Seminary. In 1884 she married Nakajima Nobuyuki, thereafter often using “Nakajima Shoen” as her pen name. Their marriage—criticized as wanton for its basis in individual love rather than arrangements for the sake of the family—was said to be a very happy one; unfortunately, both developed tuberculosis during Nakajima’s diplomatic service in Italy. Nakajima, who was eighteen years older than his wife, died in 1899 and Toshiko followed him in 1901.

Sources
Ishii, Nakae
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=hst_facpubs (English) Article about Kishida and other female speakers of the time
https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1001325826 (English) Text of Kishida’s “daughters in boxes” speech
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
[Sorry this is so late! Busy/sleepy/forgetful.]

Hirose O-Tsune (or Tsune, or Tsuneko) was born in 1855 to a family prominent under the bakufu government which fell on hard times during the Meiji Restoration. Seeing a path to an independent life, she attended the girls’ branch of the Temporary Pioneer School set up in Shiba, Tokyo, which was intended to train would-be pioneers to settle in Hokkaido (“temporary” because it was to move to Sapporo and become the precursor to Hokkaido University; it also included a wing for male and female Ainu students forcibly brought to Tokyo to study). The school taught languages, arithmetic, geography, history, and handicrafts to girls aged twelve to sixteen; O-Tsune, eighteen, lied about her age and entered in 1872. Not only would the government pay her tuition, but there were Dutch teachers from whom she could learn English and European ways. One of them offered to marry her; she turned him down, but he was persistent. Marriage to the up and coming young diplomat Mori Arinori seemed like the ideal way out.

Their 1875 marriage was considered extremely modern and unusual for involving a contract between the two parties, which stated among other things that the two parties should respect and love one another, that they had a duty of chastity [by which I assume they meant fidelity], that they shared equal rights to any assets owned by the couple, and that unilateral breach of contract could be met with an appeal to the law. This was Mori’s attempt to put his belief in monogamous marriage (as opposed to one wife and several concubines, the standard among well-to-do men at the time) into practice. Their wedding was witnessed by Fukuzawa Yukichi.

Two years after their marriage Mori became Ambassador to Qing China, and two years after that Minister to the United Kingdom. With her good English and personable ways, O-Tsune made an excellent diplomat’s wife (Ambassador to Japan Ernest Satow remarked on her beauty in his diary). O-Tsune and Mori had two sons born in England, who were named for their stations: 清 (Kiyoshi, or Qing) and 英 ([Suguru?], or England). A daughter called Yasu was also born before their return to Japan.

They returned in 1884, just in time to grace the Rokumeikan. In 1885 Mori became Minister of Education; the next year, however, they dissolved their marriage contract in a divorce. O-Tsune left her children with their father and disappeared. It is not known for certain a) why they divorced (Mori was to marry again later on) or b) what happened to her afterward. Theories on a) include that O-Tsune had had an affair in England, resulting in their daughter Yasu “being born with blue eyes,” or that, as her stepbrother Hirose Shigeo had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in a plan to assassinate Ito Hirobumi, she was deliberately saving Mori from disgrace.

As to what happened to her afterward, one rumor is that the Japanese woman registered in the Glasgow Medical School under the name of “Iga Mori” was in fact Tsune, but this is probably an error for the actual (male) Iga Mori, unrelated. No one knows where she ended up or when she died.

Sources
Nakae
https://note.com/rokurou0313/n/n9cf9ffb56c7f (Japanese) Article on a novel about O-Tsune and how much of it can be considered fact
http://whiteplum.blog61.fc2.com/blog-entry-3521.html?sp (Japanese) Short summary of O-Tsune’s life after returning to Japan
https://decolonization.jp/article/2487 (Japanese) Article on the Temporary Pioneer school’s Ainu students
nnozomi: (pic#16721026)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Yajima Kajiko was born in 1833, the sixth daughter of the mayor of her village, in what is now Mashiki Town, Kumamoto. As the latest of a long string of girls, no one got around to naming her until her oldest sister selected “Katsu.” She early on acquired vicarious experience of the world through her sisters, including Tsuseko, who was married to the much older Confucianist Yokoi Shonan as a second wife (or, for all intents and purposes, a concubine) and treated badly, as well as Hisako, who was temporarily divorced from her husband for bearing him only girls, taken back only when her son Iichiro (later to be the writer Tokutomi Soho) was born.

Katsu married Yokoi’s disciple, the samurai Hayashi Shichiro, when she was twenty-six. Handsome but a drunkard, he had two or possibly three children already, to which she added a son and two daughters. Ten years later, tired of his bad behavior, she left him and returned to her family home. (Accounts of what she did with her children differ; she may have left them with him, she may have taken them with her, she may have taken only the youngest daughter. Her son is said to have invited her to come and live with him in Tokyo many years later.) When he sent a messenger to demand her return, she cut off her hair at the roots and sent it to him as her response.

In 1872, four years later, she went up to Tokyo alone to see her oldest brother through an illness. On the way there, aged 40, she changed her name from Katsuko to the much more unusual Kajiko (“rudder”), inspired by the way little rudders could move big ships. After her brother’s recovery, she qualified as a schoolteacher and began teaching at Shiba Sakuragawa Elementary School. At some point during this time she had a child in secret with Suzuki Yosuke, a married man who was either her brother’s secretary or her eye doctor (accounts differ). Her new daughter Taeko was sent to live with a farming family and much later “adopted” back into Kajiko’s household (shades of Dorothy L. Sayers).

In 1878 she became a teacher at Shin-Sakae Girls’ School, a Presbyterian mission school under the auspices of the well-named missionary Mrs. Mary [or Maria] True, where she was famous for smoking a pipe in her office. A younger, Christian teacher said “Oh, smoking is bad, Mrs. Yajima,” to which Kajiko replied “For you young people, yes. Not for me.” In 1880 she became principal at Sakurai Girls’ School, founded by the young educationalist Sakurai Chika, remaining in that position through the merger of the two schools to form the Presbyterian Girls’ School in 1896. One of her students at Sakurai Girls, a rude young lady called Yamada Tsuneko or O-Tsun-chan to her friends, was not pleased when the youthful Chika was replaced by dour middle-aged Kajiko. “My dear, let us be good friends,” Kajiko coaxed. “Not interested, you’re not pretty like Mrs. Sakurai,” Tsuneko retorted. To be addressed here much later according to her birth year, she was later to marry Edward Gauntlett (the first official marriage of a Japanese woman and a Westerner, not counting instances like Cho-Cho San’s), become a teacher at her alma mater, and serve there and elsewhere as Kajiko’s right hand.

Kajiko herself eventually became a Christian as well (the records do not tell us whether she quit smoking). Her schools had no codified rules: “You have the Bible, so govern yourselves,” she told her students. Influenced by Mary Greenleaf Leavitt’s lectures, in 1886 she formed the first Japanese branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (the 東京夫人矯風会 or Tokyo Women’s Association for Reforming Customs) and became its chair. Their principles were (and remain, as the Japan Christian Women’s Organization) against drinking, smoking, and prostitution, and in favor of women’s rights, monogamy, gender equality, and peace. She met Frances Willard of the WCTU in Japan the following year, and continued working in this field throughout her life, attending the Boston WCTU Conference in 1906 and the London conference in 1920; in 1921, aged 89, she visited Manchuria and Korea and went to Washington, DC to present President Warren Harding with a “300-Foot Peace Plan” signed by Japanese women. Tsuneko Gauntlett accompanied her, did her hair and makeup, and taught her a speech in English to give as they lay in their bunk beds on the boat. Kajiko died in Tokyo at the age of 93.

Her sister Hisako’s younger son, the writer Tokutomi Roka, felt the need to complain in print after her death about Kajiko’s secrecy regarding her children (three from her marriage in Kumamoto, one in Tokyo), perhaps peeved that in life she had told him flatly “You have no way to understand how I feel.”

Sources
Mori 1996, Nakae, Shimamoto, Tanaka
https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/e/datas/6039/ (various photos of Kajiko)

Profile

Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

June 2025

S M T W T F S
12345 67
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Custom Text

Icon is Uemura Shoen's "Self-Portrait at Age 16," 1891

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags