Takamure Itsue

was a Japanese poet, activist-writer, feminist, anarchist, ethnologist and historian.

Biography

Takamure was born into a poor family in rural Kumamoto Prefecture in 1894. Her father was a schoolteacher, and educated his daughter in classical Chinese, among other subjects not standard in Japanese women's education at the time. Despite higher academic ambitions, after failing to complete her post-secondary education and working for a time in a cotton-spinning mill, she returned home in 1914 and taught in the same school as her father for three years. In 1917 she met her future partner and editor Hashimoto Kenzō, with whom she lived sporadically after 1919 and who became her legal husband in 1922. Before moving to Tokyo in 1920, she worked briefly for a newspaper in Kumamoto City and undertook the Shikoku pilgrimage in 1918. Takamure's articles on her experiences and the fact that she undertook the pilgrimage as an unmarried woman alone made her something of a celebrity in Japan at the time, and her notoriety only grew after she left her household and husband in Tokyo in the company of another man in 1925. A public scandal ensued despite her speedy reconciliation with Hashimoto, to which Takamure angrily responded in the poem ''Ie de no shi'' ("Poem on leaving home"), which was published in her book ''Tokyo wa netsubyō ni kakatteiru'' at the end of the year.

In 1926 Takamure met and became friends with the pioneering Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō, herself the famous editor of the defunct feminist journal ''Bluestocking'', and published the first systematic elucidation of her views in ''Ren'ai sōsei''. Her status as her household's primary wage-earner led her to publish a great many articles in various journals and magazines during these years, as well as to engage with other prominent Japanese feminists in print. The most prominent of these exchanges was a debate on marriage and motherhood with Yamakawa Kikue through 1928 into 1929, mostly in the pages of the women's journal ''Fujin Kōron''. Against Yamakawa's standard Marxist critique of marriage as a bourgeois institution of economic oppression, Takamure articulated an anarchist, community-oriented vision of a post-revolutionary future that would preserve the role of mothers in childcare and place the concerns of women and mothers at the center rather than the periphery of society.

Takamure's deepening commitment to anarchism led her to join the anarchist-feminist group Proletarian Women Artists' League (Musan Fujin Geijitsu Renmei) and, in 1930, to found the anarchist feminist journal ''Fujin Sensen'' (The Woman's Front). ''Fujin Sensen'' lasted for sixteen issues, until it was shut down in June 1931, as part of deepening fascist repression by the government. In response to these developments and to an affair on Takamure's part, Takamure and Hashimoto withdrew to suburban Tokyo in July 1931. From her "House in the Woods" (''Mori no ie''), named in homage to Henry David Thoreau's ''Walden'', Takamure embarked on the most influential phase of her career, that of a pioneering historian in the field of Japanese women's history.

Despite her anarcha-feminist beliefs, during World War II, Takamure wrote a number of polemical articles in support of Japanese imperialism in Asia, although she also penned criticisms of the sexual violence committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. She also began to research and publish on women's roles and matrilineage in ancient Japanese society, ancient marriage institutions, and the right of women to own and inherit property in earlier times. Only one of these books, ''Bokeisei no kenkyû'' (1938), appeared before the end of the war, but it was followed in the postwar period by ''Shōseikon no kenkyû'' (1953) and ''Josei no rekishi'' (1954).

Takamure's death in 1964 largely predated the uptake of her scholarship into the academy as well as the rediscovery and criticism of her prewar and wartime writings by feminist scholars beginning in the 1970s. Her scholarship and method were heavily influenced by the nativism of Motoori Norinaga, which led her to conclude, against the folkloristic (''minzokugaku'') conclusions of Yanagita Kunio, that marriage in the Heian period had been largely uxorilocal. Takamure's work was later endorsed by William McCullough, in his classic article on Heian marriage in 1967, and has become the standard position in the field.

Selected works

* (, "Tokyo is Feverish")
* (, "Genesis of Love")
* (, "Study of Matrilineal Systems: Women's History of Great Japan, 1")
* (, "Studies in Uxorilocal Marriage")
* (, "A History of Women")
* (, "An Unmarried Woman's Pilgrimage")
* (, "A Collection of Examples of Japanese Marriage from Ancient Times")

See also

*Hiratsuka Raichō
* ''Bluestocking''
*Yamakawa Kikue

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Takamure, Itsue
1894 births
1964 deaths
20th-century Japanese historians
20th-century Japanese poets
20th-century Japanese women writers
Anarcha-feminists
Japanese activists
Japanese anarchists
Japanese ethnologists
Japanese feminists
Japanese women activists
Japanese women historians
Japanese women journalists
Japanese women poets
People from Kumamoto Prefecture