Kishida Toshiko

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Kishida Toshiko ( Japanese 岸 田 俊 子 ; * January 14, 1863 ( traditionally : Man'en 1/12/4) in Kyōto Prefecture ; † May 25, 1901 ), later Nakajima Toshiko ( 中 島 俊 子 ), was one of the first Japanese Feminists . Her writer's name was Shōen ( 湘 煙 ).

Life

Kishida Toshiko was born as the daughter of second-hand clothing retailers Kishida Mohē ( 岸 田 茂 兵衛 ) and Taka ( タ カ ). She grew up during the Meiji period (1868-1912), a time of the political restoration of the Japanese empire after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate , which ruled Japan from its capital Edo , today's Tokyo. The Western powers, above all the USA, had forced the opening of Japan to international trade by sending gunboats under the command of Commodore Matthew C. Perry from 1858 and thus ended a 300-year isolation of Japan from the outside world. In connection with the profound upheavals that followed in Japanese society, a Japanese women's movement was formed under the slogan “Women's rights from then until now”.

Kishida was the daughter of a wealthy merchant family from Kyoto and her mother provided her daughter Toshiko with the education that was possible for a girl of that time in Japan. At the age of 9, she passed a school exam intended for 15-year-olds. Her cleverness was joined by an extraordinary beauty. At the age of 16, the Japanese imperial family appointed her as literary advisor to Empress Haruko at the court in Tokyo. But already after two years she gave up her position ostensibly because of illness, because she did not want to continue to serve in a palace that was " a house full of beautiful women, full of boredom and a symbol for the exploitation of women as concubines - and an outrage ".

Afterwards, Kishida toured Japan with her mother and took every opportunity to meet activists of the Japanese civil rights movement and to encourage women to set up discussion and self-help groups as well as literary circles.

By the age of 20, Kishida had matured into a personality who had earned a reputation as an eloquent speaker. In 1884 Kishida married the liberal politician Nakajima Nobuyuki, and the couple converted to Christianity. Police measures directed against Kishida and the dissolution of the Liberal Party in 1884, of which her husband was deputy chairman, forced Kishida to stop speaking and to work mainly as a journalist. From around 1885 Kishida wrote mainly in the Christian magazine Jogaku zasshi . In her contributions, Kishida castigated the disadvantage of women in education and the male-dominated Japanese conventions, in particular the sexual double standards and the persistent concubine system. In 1887, she and her husband were expelled from Tokyo and settled in Yokohama. There she taught at the Ferris English Japanese Girls School ( フ ェ リ ス 英 和 女 学校 , today: Ferris Women's University ). In 1890 the couple returned to Tokyo after their husband was elected to the Japanese House of Commons. She got involved there in the Christian Kyōfūkai (English Tokyo Women's Reform Society ) founded in 1886 . In the light of increasing conservatism in Japan, the Japanese legislature passed Article 5 of the "Ordnungs- und Policeigesetz " ( 治安 警察 法 , chian-keisatsu-hō ) in 1890 , which prohibited women from all political activities. In 1892 her husband was appointed envoy to Italy, but both returned after just one year due to a pulmonary tuberculosis infection. She described her experiences there in the diary Shōen Nikki ( 湘 煙 日記 ). It was not until the Taishō period (1912–1926) that the women's movement in Japan revived in connection with the suffragette movement that originated in England , but Kishida Toshiko could no longer experience the success of her preparatory work, because she died of her at the age of 38 Illness.

Feminist engagement

In 1884 Kishida Toshiko wrote provocatively in the feminist magazine The Torch of Freedom, which she edited : “ If it is true that men are better than women because they are stronger, then I wonder: why are our sumo wrestlers not in government ? “Kishida Toshiko campaigned for the human rights of geishas and forced prostitutes, demanded unrestricted access for women to Japanese educational institutions and complained about the legal discrimination against women in public places.

One of the most provocative appearances of Kishida Toshiko was her speech at a congress of the Liberal Party in Otsu on October 12, 1883 under the title Daughters in Cages ( 函 入 娘 , hako iri musume ), which led to her immediate arrest for making this speech without the prior approval of the state authorities had maintained a statutory provision of the Japanese law of assembly dating from 1880, which forbade women from participating in political activities and making speeches. In this speech, Kishida referred to three “cages” in which Japanese girls were imprisoned: locking up in the family home, the obligation to absolute obedience, the restriction to the classical canon of education and its veneration of the “wise and holy men of the past”. She contrasted this conservative design with the idea of ​​well-educated women and mothers who confidently make their talents available to the progress of modern Japan.

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  1. ↑ a b c d 三 鬼 浩子 : 岸 田俊子 . In: 朝日 日本 歴 史 人物 事 典 . Asahi Shimbun- sha, Tokyo 1994 ( online at kotobank.jp ).
  • Progressive-Radical Women in Meiji & Taisho Japan; [1]
Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus, Kishida is the family name, Toshiko the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Kishida, Toshiko
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 岸 田 俊 子 (Japanese maiden name); Nakajima Toshiko; 中 島 俊 子 (Japanese); Shōen (writer's name); 湘 煙 (Japanese, writer's name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese feminist
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Kyoto Prefecture
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1901