24 Facts About Yamakawa Kikue

Yamakawa Kikue was a Japanese essayist, activist, and socialist feminist who contributed to the development of feminism in modern Japan.

In 1916, she married the communist activist and theoretician Yamakawa Kikue Hitoshi, who, in 1922, founded the short-lived pre-war Japanese Communist Party and was a leader of the Labor-Farmer faction.

Yamakawa Kikue is famous for "her position in debates on prostitution and motherhood, in which she consistently challenged liberal feminists on the possibility of women achieving full rights within a capitalist system".

Yamakawa Kikue was born as Morita Kikue on November 3,1890, in Kojimachi, Tokyo.

Yamakawa Kikue's father, Morita Ryunosuke, was born to the family of samurai of the lowest rank in the Matsue Domain and worked his way through language school in Yokohama City in Kanagawa Prefecture.

Yamakawa Kikue's mother, Morita Chise, was the daughter of Aoyama Enju, who was a Confucian scholar in the Mito Domain.

Yamakawa Kikue's siblings were accomplished in languages; her older sister Matsue was a pioneer of female esperantists, and older brother Toshio was a scholar of German Literature in Japan.

In 1908, Yamakawa Kikue attended the private women's college Joshi Eigaku Juku in Tokyo.

From 1915 through 1916, Yamakawa Kikue made a debut as Aoyama Yamakawa Kikue in the world of criticism within the larger debate on the abolition of prostitution with a Japanese feminist Ito Noe on Seito, the first female literary magazine in Japan.

However, on the one hand, Yamakawa Kikue agreed with Ito's argument about the movement of Christian women's organizations in that the movement divided women into two categories: "clean" and "unclean" women.

Yamakawa Kikue mentioned private prostitution and contended that the system of prostitution was based on the disparity between the rich and poor produced by the establishment of the private ownership system and the domination of women by men.

Yamakawa Kikue partly agreed with Yosano but criticized her opinion for thinking only about the female bourgeois.

For Hiratsuka's opinion, Yamakawa Kikue argued that it was more advanced than that of Yosano in that it took a more critical attitude towards capitalism.

However, Yamakawa Kikue criticized Hiratsuka for too much emphasis on motherhood.

Yamakawa Kikue said that Hiratsuka viewed women's ultimate goal as childbirth and parenting, and that it led women to obey male-centered society's idea that women should sacrifice their work in compensation for completing the ultimate goal.

Yamakawa Kikue summarized these arguments and argued that financial independence and protection of motherhood were compatible and natural demands of women.

Furthermore, Yamakawa Kikue was distinct from Yosano and Hiratsuka in that she mentioned welfare for the elderly as rights.

Therefore, Yamakawa Kikue submitted the following eight -point demand for equal gender rights:.

Yamakawa Kikue shared much with the leadership of the Women's Suffrage League in that both "argued throughout the prewar period that Japan's legally codified family system, which designated a usually male head-of-household and excluded other family members from owning property, denied women legal decision-making capacity".

In points three, four, and five, Yamakawa Kikue was substantially different from her Suffrage League colleagues who did not take issues of equality and inclusion for Japan's colonized peoples into consideration of suffrage or other rights for Japanese women.

Communist male boards disagreed the third proposal Yamakawa Kikue questioned why they approved of educational restriction for residents in colonies which was obviously the part of imperialistic policies whereas they, as Communist, disagreed to imperialistic policies.

Not only did Yamakawa Kikue criticize the military police and vigilantes for these actions, but she denounced the Japanese who internalized anti-foreignism as a result of imperial and colonial education.

Yamakawa Kikue continued to criticize the government, but the onset of the Pacific War made it impossible for her to openly criticize the government.

Yamakawa Kikue died of a stroke at the age of 90 in 1980.