33 Facts About Yosano Akiko

Yosano Sho, known by her pen name Yosano Akiko, was a Japanese author, poet, feminist, pacifist, and social reformer, active in the late Meiji era as well as the Taisho and early Showa eras of Japan.

Yosano Akiko is one of the most noted, and most controversial, post-classical female poets of Japan.

Yosano Akiko was not allowed to leave her home unaccompanied and could count the number of times she had crossed the threshold of someone else's home.

Tekkan was married when he met Yosano Akiko, and left his wife for her a year after they met one another.

In 1901, Yosano Akiko brought out her first volume of tanka, Midaregami, which contained 400 poems and was mostly denounced by literary critics.

The majority are love poems through which Akiko expresses her feelings toward Tekkan Yosano.

Yosano Akiko's women were not passive, but active agents of their love lives.

Yosano Akiko followed this with twenty more tanka anthologies over the course of her career, including Koigoromo and Maihime.

Yosano Akiko's husband Tekkan was a poet, but his reputation was eclipsed by hers.

Yosano Akiko continued to publish his wife's work and to encourage her in her literary career.

Yosano Akiko could produce as many as 50 poems in one sitting.

Yosano Akiko wrote 11 books of prose, many of which neglected by literary critics and audiences.

Yosano Akiko helped to found what was originally a girls' school, the Bunka Gakuin, together with Nishimura Isaku, Kawasaki Natsu and others, and became its first dean and chief lecturer.

Yosano Akiko assisted many aspiring writers to gain a foothold in the literary world.

Yosano Akiko translated the Japanese classics into modern Japanese, including the Shinyaku Genji Monogatari and Shinyaku Eiga Monogatari.

In September 1904, Yosano Akiko had learned that Japanese soldiers at Port Arthur were being used as "human bullets", being strapped with explosives and sent to blast holes through the Russian barbed wire entanglements in suicide missions.

In Bushido, it was the highest honor for a man to die for the Emperor, and knowing of her brother's impulsive nature, Yosano Akiko was seized with the fear that he might volunteer to be a "human bullet", inspiring her to write a poem pleading with him to think of his widowed mother.

For calling the war with Russia senseless and stupid, Yosano Akiko made herself into Japan's most controversial poet, and the government attempted to ban her poem.

The Kimi was so unpopular that Yosano Akiko's house was stoned by angry people while she became involved in a rancorous debate with the journalist Omachi Keigetsu over the question of whether poets had the duty to support the war or not.

Yosano Akiko ended her article by calling militarism a form of "barbarian thinking which is the responsibility of us women to eradicate from our midst".

Yosano Akiko gave birth to 13 children, of whom 11 survived to adulthood.

The late Japanese politician Yosano Akiko Kaoru was one of her grandsons.

Yosano Akiko frequently wrote for the all-women literary magazine Seito, as well as other publications.

Yosano Akiko's opinions were rooted in the concept of equally partaking in child rearing, financial independence, and social responsibility.

Yosano Akiko disagreed with the concept of mothers seeking financial independence through the help of the government, claiming that dependence on the state and dependence on men are one and the same.

Yosano Akiko expressed worry that fully equating the identity of womanhood with motherhood prioritizes motherhood over the other aspects of a person.

Yosano Akiko believed that motherhood is something that shouldn't be controlled by the government, as even in a feminist light, there is no real difference from living for a man.

Yosano Akiko called the "scattered" body of the soldier "purer than a flower, giving life to a samurai's honor".

Unlike the Kimi, Yosano Akiko called for Japanese women to "unify in loyalty" for the "cause of the Emperor's forces".

Yosano Akiko's final work, Shin Man'yoshu was a compilation of 26,783 poems by 6,675 contributors, written over a 60-year period.

In 1942, in one of her last poems, Yosano Akiko praised her son who was serving as a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy, urging him to "fight bravely" for the Emperor in "this sacred war".

Yosano Akiko's death, occurring in the middle of the Pacific War, went almost unnoticed in the press, and after the end of the war, her works were largely forgotten by critics and the public.

Yosano Akiko's grave is at Tama Cemetery in Fuchu, Tokyo.