Takamura Chieko

Takamura Chieko

Takamura Chieko , ( Japanese 高 村 智 恵 子 ; born May 20, 1886 in Yui , Adachi County (today: Nihonmatsu ), Fukushima Prefecture in Japan ; † October 5, 1938 in Japan) was a Japanese painter and poet .

Life

Chieko was born Naganuma Chieko, the eldest of six sisters and two brothers. From 1903 she attended the Nihon Joshi Daigaku , the Japanese Women's University. There she graduated in 1907. In the following years she worked as a painter and made colorful paper cutouts . Even today (2011) her poems are impressive depictions of her homeland near Fukushima with the Adatara and Iidesan mountains and the Pacific Ocean as a background.

In 1911, Chieko and other graduates of the women's university and members of the Seitōsha feminism movement founded the magazine Seitō , in German: blue stocking , for which she designed the first page of the first issue. The magazine began as a platform for female writers but soon became a forum where feminist issues were discussed. The magazine, which only existed until 1916, was published by upper-middle-class women who were referred to as New Women because they represented new ideas and a new lifestyle.

In February 1914, Chieko married the painter and sculptor Takamura Kōtarō after his return from France . The marriage broke up in 1929. In 1931 she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and in 1935 she was sent to an institution with that diagnosis. There she died of tuberculosis in 1938 .

literature

• Kōtarō Takamura (1883–1956): Chiekoshō. ( 智 恵 子 抄 ), (Selections of Chieko), 1941.
• Kōtarō Takamura: Chieko and other Poems of Kōtarō Takamura. translated into English, with an introduction and remarks by Hiroaki Sato . University of Hawai'i Press, 1986, ISBN 0-8248-0689-1 .
• Kōtarō Takamura: Chieko, kamie no bijutsukan , Haga Shoten, Tōkyō 1996, ISBN 4-826120176 .
• Kōtarō Takamura: The Chieko Poems. bilingual edition ja./en .: translated by John G. Peters. Green Integer, Los Angeles 2007, ISBN 978-1-933382-75-3 .

Web links

Commons : Takamura Chieko  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Website of the translator from Chiekoshō into English

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Takamura is the family name, Chieko the first name.