01/01/2020
This is my favourite post from 2019, hope you liked it too-
The Japanese Suffragette
When you read about the suffragettes it very much tends to be American and British ones. However, the movement for universal rights was an issue that affected 50% of all of the people on planet earth.
Step forwards Komako Kimura, a young woman who was raised in the stiflingly traditional world of imperial Japan. She was educated in the arts from a young age, training in traditional kabuki theatre from the age of five. So far so “normal” for a Japanese girl in the late 19th century. However, in her teens she started reading Japanese translations of philosophers like Goethe and Emerson as well as Ellen Key, a Swedish feminist. She even enjoyed 19th century English poets like Byron. Now we start to see a young Japanese woman having VERY different ideas to her peers. It was around this time that her parents nearly married her off as a concubine, she forcibly declined the concept.
She became an actress, but this was made more difficult when in 1908, aged 21, she had a child out of wedlock. Shocking in western countries at the time, but in Japan, it made a virtual outcast. The afther was Kimura Hideo and they moved to a different city and were married a year later- problem solved. She started to write about equality in various left-wing magazines and newspapers but also had a keen commercial mind as she also became a theatre manager.
In 1913 Komako Kimura created the movement entitled “The True New Women’s Association” (in Japanese Shin-shinfujinkai) with two other women. They began a lecture tour and a magazine for those women who couldn’t attend the talks.
By 1917 she had toured America talking about women’s suffrage. However, in 1918 the Japanese had, had enough. The talk and the magazine were banned for eroding the institution of marriage and also talking about birth control. She responded by distilling her main points into a play called “Ignorance”. The authorities banned it so she ignored them and then kept the show running with all tickets being free. So, the government arrested her. When she was put on trial, she acted as her own defence. This was the government’s biggest mistake because she was now on a national stage talking about ideas that they wanted to suppress. So now her fight for women’s rights and suffrage was known throughout Japan.
While the trial didn’t immediately lead to a change in women’s rights in Japan, it is seen as the start of the process. Komako Kimura would see these changes happened as she lived to 93, dying in 1980.
