Itō Noe

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Itō Noe

Itō Noe ( Japanese 伊藤 野 枝 ; born January 21, 1895 near Fukuoka ; † September 16, 1923 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese feminist and anarchist of the Taishō period . From 1916 she was the second wife of the anarcho-syndicalist Ōsugi Sakae . She was murdered by police officers in 1923 with him and a nephew. The bloody act is known as the Amakasu Incident .

biography

Itō Noe came from a poor family. She was the eldest daughter of the brick maker Ito Yokichi. After completing the state primary school, she worked for the post office for a year in 1909.

She succeeded in April 1910 in Tokyo in the Ueno jogakkō (Ueno girls' school) to be accepted. While she was still in school, she was married to a man named Fukutaro under the direction of her uncle , with whom she hoped to go to America . However, they soon separated again, also because Fukutaro did not support their further educational intentions, which had been part of the marriage agreement. Immediately after graduating in 1912, she became the lover of one of her teachers, Tsuji Jun . When this affair became known, he was released immediately. The couple officially married in July 1915.

Noe had two sons with Jun, Makoto (born Jan. 20, 1914) and Ryūji (born Aug. 10, 1915).

In November 1912 she began to work with Seitō magazine, which had been founded 10 months earlier . Itō wrote socially critical articles and short stories. Two years later she became editor and editor-in-chief. She led the administration and the study groups associated with the magazine. From January 1915 she was practically responsible for everything. The founding editor and owner of Seito - Hiratsuka Raicho - planned to separate the financial and editorial aspects of the magazine. Itō did not claim to pretend any particular line within the magazine, in fact her name and her anarchist views became synonymous with the magazine.

Ōsugi was known to the circle around the Seito and their feminist views, which agreed with his own on the liberation of humans. The two were likely to have met for the first time at a meeting of the Seitō-sha kōen kai in February 1913. Ōsugi reviewed in his Kindai shisō (Sept. 1913) a translation of an article by Emma Goldman made by Itō very positively.

Itō, apparently non-conformist from adolescence , followed an independent lifestyle. The two were officially introduced to each other by Watanabe Masatarō on the occasion of a visit by Sakae to the Tsuji-Itō's house in September 1914. Ōsugi was impressed by her vigor, she appreciated his appreciation, which she did not receive from her husband. To her first child Makoto, who grew up with her paternal grandparents, she had little bond, in contrast to Ryūji, whom she looked after.

From December 1915 to November 1916 Ōsugi Sakae practiced his kind of "free love", which was based on mutual non-interference and economic independence of all involved and which he already mentioned in articles 1906 ( Dōbutsu no ren'ai ) and 1913 ( Shuchi to teisō ) had set out when, in addition to his wife, he still had open affairs with the feminist journalist Kamichika Ichiko - a member of the radical Seito-sha - and at the same time with Noe probably from February, at the latest since May 1916. She separated from Tsuji in April and moved to an apartment in Onjuku ( 御 宿 町 ), Chiba .

After her relationship with Ōsugi Sakae became known and the associated "scandal" within left circles, her damaged reputation led to the fact that no successor could be found in the editorial team of Seitō, which ceased its publication in February 1916. The theoretical concept of free love was inconsistent with the practice of jealousy, and Kamichika, who financed much of the foursome relationship through loans to him - and had obviously not parted with petty-bourgeois values ​​- wounded Ōsugi in the trachea with a knife. The mass media, which had already scourged the "anarchist immorality" in articles in Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun as well as Yorozu Chōhō , used the incident to attack the anarchist movement and especially the people involved because of their immorality. This led to problems in the anarchist group of Itō and Ōsugi, and many comrades turned away.

Sakae and Noe, who were under constant police surveillance, now lived together in frequently changing apartments. Ideologically she subordinated herself completely to Ōsugi Sakae. Their daughter Mako was born in September 1917.

Noe was a co-founder of the socialist women's group Sekirankai in 1921 .

On September 15, 1923, when there was still chaos as a result of the earthquake , Sakae and Noe visited his younger sister Tachibana Azume and returned to their apartment in the Tokyo district of Kameido with her 6-year-old son Munekazu. The following day they were arrested and murdered by a military police force led by Captain Amakasu . Their corpses, wrapped in straw mats, were found in a well on the 20th. An autopsy report found that all had been strangled, the adults after being severely ill-treated.

literature

  • Ito Noe; Kamichika Ichiko; Lenz, Ilse; Women in the revolution; Berlin 1978 (Kramer)
  • Stanley, Thomas A .; Ōsugi Sakae, anarchist in Taishō Japan: the creativity of the ego; Cambridge (Mass.) 1982; ISBN 0-674-64493-X (especially chapter: "Scandal and Eclipse")
  • Ito Noe; Feminism and anarchism in Japan ; ISBN 978-3-87956-081-3
  • Pauline C. Reich; Atsuko Fukuda; Japan's Literary Feminists: The "Seito" Group; Signs, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Autumn, 1976), pp. 280-291.

Movie

Yoshishige Yoshida shot Eros + Gyakusatsu (German: "Eros and Massaker") in 1969 about Sakae Ōsugi, in which Itō appears as the central figure.

Web links

Commons : Itō Noe  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the Japanese school system of the time cf. Hermann Bohner ; Japan Education; in: Ev. Pedagogical Lexicon 1929 ( Velhagen & Klasing ) full text ( memento of the original from March 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / zenwort.lima-city.de
  2. ↑ KI jiden… 1972 in the chapter Buta ni nageta shinju ( Eng . Pearls before swine).
  3. ↑ (en) Revolutionary portraits: Ito Noe - organize # 59
  4. ↑ first published in the Asahi Shimbun on August 26, 1976, p. 22.
Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Itō is the family name, Noe the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Itō Noe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 伊藤 野 枝 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese feminist and anarchist of the Taishō period
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Fukuoka Prefecture
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1923
Place of death Tokyo