Golden Week
Claire Maree and Marou Izumo
“I know. Let’s go to the Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum,” JJ said as if she’d come up with an amazing idea.
It was the holiday week in May. Golden Week, stretching from the end of April to the first week of May, is the biggest vacation period in Japan next to New Year. North to Hokkaido, south to Okinawa, even overseas; theme parks, concerts, theatres, cinemas, sports grounds, shopping centres and restaurants are crowded with flocks of Japanese people.
JJ had commenced as a research student at the classical Japanese language department of a Tokyo university, and WHAT to do during these holidays was her current concern. A year away from Japan, refreshing weather; JJ was bursting to go somewhere. As for me, book preparations had lulled and it wasn’t as if I didn’t have time to play. Still, I didn’t especially want to walk around and participate in the infamous Golden Week crowds.
“But we’ve just come back to Japan, I want to go somewhere over the break.”
“Over Golden Week? Everywhere’s crowded.”
“Hey, so what.”
“The trains, they’re all full.”
“Hey, that’s ok.”
“No way. There’s masses of people everywhere.”
“Hey, so how about the Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum?”
My determination not to go anywhere over the holiday was swayed by JJ’s one comment.
Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973) is the most famous and successful closeted lesbian writer in Japan. From 1915 to 1924 she wrote serials for the girls’ magazine Shojo gaho (Girl’s pictorial). Her early representative work Hana monogatari (Flower stories), first serialised in Shojo gaho (1916-1924), was wildly popular with adolescent girls in the Taisho era and created a new genre in popular fiction known as “girls fiction.”
An extremely popular writer, Yoshiya Nobuko and her secretary Monma Chiyo are, so to speak, the Japanese Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
It was one day of the holiday.
JJ and I took the JR line from Tokyo station about an hour to Kamakura, transferred to the Enoshima Dentestu line and got off at a rustic station called Nagatani. The weather was clear. It was the beginning of a lovely day. Crowds of people formed a line extending from the Buddhist temple Hasedera continuing to the famous Giant Buddha at the temple Kotokuin. Walking off from the road to the Giant Buddha, which had been transformed into a target destination for the mass relocation of Japan’s heterosexual, coupled population, we breathed a sigh of collective relief. Presently, a splendid gateway appeared enclosed by a wooden fence. Inside was the former Yoshiya residence. Middle-aged men formed a belt cleaning around the entrance. They wore suits with name bands which made them look like tired public servants.
“Ah-hum. The Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial House is presently open for special inspection. Welcome. All are welcome.” One or two called out and approached tourists trying to pass by the gateway. A few of the straight couples they approached stopped with a “Hmmph.” “Well, shall we go in,” they whispered to each other, then passed through the main gates of the museum.
A bad feeling grazed somewhere across my mind. My eyes met JJ’s. “Ahh—” A sigh leaked from her lips, JJ had a similar hunch. We hadn’t counted on such a huge crowd of straights-on-dates.
A Japanese style timber house stood majestically through the wooden door of the main gateway, deep in the interior of a vast Japanese garden. The straight couples sitting along the long semi-enclosed verandah facing onto the garden looked like tiny beans. On the other side of the verandah was a living room separated by a transparent glass door. Another wooden gate led to the garden at the end of a stone path running immediately from the entrance. JJ and I stood peeking onto the landscape through a gap in the wooden gate.
“Ah-hum. You can’t enter the garden through there. Don’t stop, follow the route directly ahead to the entrance. At the entrance please take off your shoes.” A public service worker raised his voice at the main gate. He’d been waiting to seize that one brief moment when JJ and I stopped at the small gate to view the interior garden.
Looking closer I saw a message posted on the gate. “No entrance from this point.”
“I understand. I can read. We’re just looking. Don’t hassle me just because I’m a gaijin.” JJ’s voice was rough. The public service worker’s head disappeared behind the main gate.
The entrance was a storm of caution signs.
“Take off your shoes here. No removing shoes elsewhere.” “Here” was the point before the entrance where a plank had been laid down to form a path.
“Under all circumstances place your shoes on the shoe racks.”
“Please wear slippers.”
“Toilet this way.”
“There is enough paper stuck up here to make a book.” Exasperated I stepped into the building. Inside the living room, rows of photo panels covered the walls. In the photos Yoshiya Nobuko was smiling with the crown prince, with the prime minister, with army officers, politicians, a movie director, film stars, famous writers of the period. Nobuko looked very much like a butch dyke with an unflattering bob hair style. Dressed in suits with huge shoulder pads and skirts which didn’t suit her, she stood firmly with feet apart, mouth wide open, laughing freely.
“Hmph. So what?” In spite of myself my lip curled up. Chiyo wasn’t even in the private photo taken with a group of close women friends.
“It can’t be ....” JJ hurriedly read the people listed at the bottom of the photo panels name by name. “Here.” At last she found Chiyo’s name. She was at the edge of a group photo of about ten or more people. Positioned far away from Nobuko, who was grinning in the middle of the group, it was as if Chiyo had no close relationship with Nobuko whatsoever.
“Great writer and her secretary, huh?”
“Huh!”
“Nobuko and Chiyo didn’t do women’s rights campaigning or participate in ideological activism but they sure were special,” JJ almost whispered, as if to regain composure.
True, Nobuko hadn’t participated in any form of political activity. Yet, in an era when it was difficult merely for women to work, with Chiyo’s cooperative efforts, Nobuko became a highly successful writer who received great public support - especially from young women.
Yoshiya Nobuko and Monma Chiyo first met in January of 1923. Yamataka Shigeri, a well-known suffragist, introduced her close friend Chiyo to Nobuko, who was negative of “women’s friendships.” Shigeri thought highly of her friendship with Chiyo, a young woman who had chosen to remain unmarried and worked to support her elderly parents in what were difficult circumstances for a woman at that time in Japan. Yoshiya Nobuko, then twenty-seven years old and the author of Hana monogatari (Flower tales; serialised 1916-1924), Yane ura no ni shojo (Two girls in the garret; Rakuyodo: 1920) and Chi no hate made (To the end of the earth; serialised in Osaka Asahi Shinbun during 1920), and Chiyo, a twenty three year old mathematics teacher, soon became lovers. In 1925, two years after of their initial meeting, they commenced a collaborative working relationship as writer and secretary. Nobuko went on to publish Onna no yujo (Women’s friendships; serialised from 1933 in Fujin Club, Onna no kaikyu (Women’s social class; serialised in Yomiuri Shinbun during 1936), and Otto no teiso (A husband’s chastity; serialised in Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun during 1936) and was recorded as the highest income tax paying woman writer in 1935 - a ranking which indicates her phenomenal success.
Nobuko successfully produced popular fiction throughout the pre-war, war and post-war years. She continued to express sincere thanks for the great happiness her life partner Chiyo had brought to her, and for her continuous love and support. The following is a segment from Nobuko’s diary:
“Chiyo, on your birthday, I give thanks to fate which gave this person to me.”
“Life happiness because of Chiyo.”
(as quoted in Yoshiya Nobuko: Kakure Feminisuto (Yoshiya Nobuko: closeted
feminist) Komashaku Kimi, Repotokan; 1994 )
The relationship which made possible the voluminous work Nobuko and Chiyo left to Japanese popular fiction, differs markedly from the two other famous same-sex-love incidents which occurred during the same period in Japan.
These other famous women couples are Hiratsuka Raicho (1886-1971) and Otake Kokichi (Kazue) (1893-1966), Nakajo (Miyamoto) Nobuko (1899-1951) and Yuasa Yoshiko (1896-1990), two historical and famous literary love relationships between women in modern Japan.
The love affair between Hiratsuka Raicho, the so-called founder of the Japanese women’s rights movement and author of Genshi, josei wa taiyo de atta (In the beginning, women were the sun; Otsuki Shoten, 1971), and the hope of Japanese art, Otake Kokichi, is so famous that in her later years Raicho desperately glossed over it in her autobiographical writings. Despite Raicho’s efforts, however, it lies unerasable, merrily decorating one page of Japanese women’s history.
Raicho and Kokichi first met in April of 1912. Raicho, twenty six years old at the time, had studied as one of the elite of the elite at Japan’s first women’s university. As it was fashionable for young intellectuals in the early 1900’s to read philosophical works and the bible, Raicho too was training in Zen and working daily towards self enlightenment. Striving for self-improvement through Zen and philosophy on the one hand, Raicho was nonetheless deeply troubled by her social inferiority as a woman. She eventually began publishing the women’s only magazine Seito (Blue-stocking) with the purpose of “urging an awakening, and displaying women’s individual natural talent with the aim of one day giving birth to woman genius. (Seito Vol.1 No. 1 1911.)” This art and literature magazine became the pioneer of modern Japanese women’s rights.
Otake (Kazue) Kokichi, aged nineteen, appeared before Raicho. Kokichi was the eldest daughter of Otake Etsudo, a great master in the Japanese art world. Without a traditional heir, Etsudo raised eldest daughter Kazue as a substitute son destined to take over his work and carry on the family name. Raicho wrote about Kokichi in Genshi, josei wa taiyo de atta, what was later known as a primary text of modern Japanese feminism.
“In complete men’s drag of patterned kimono and over trousers or stiff obi and
leather sandals, Kokichi, cutting the air as she walks, saying what she wants to
say, laughing and singing in a loud voice, displays a truly free and pleasurable
disposition. The feeling of a person free since birth. Merely gazing upon her
is pleasure.” (Hiratsuka 1971: 366)
Raicho called Kokichi “my boy” and their love apparently burst into flames immediately. Raicho and Kokichi’s relationship was common knowledge to the other members of Seito. Indeed, until the establishment of American army bases nationwide after the Second World War when an excessive hetero-couple culture was imported, there was an abundance of romantic crushes between women in Japan. Girl’s fiction, the new genre Yoshiya Nobuko established, was feverishly accepted as a result of this fertile soil.
Having found a wonderful lover in Raicho, Kokichi ecstatically took charge of design of Seito’s cover page and also began to produce essays. The cover of the Volume 2 Number 4 (April) edition of Seito features a wood block print designed by Kokichi. A large black sun rises above a jar printed with the words “Blue Stocking” in English. Kokichi explained that the black jar was from a magical land: “The holder of the jar could use any strength or weakness at their will. However, no-one knew what other powers the jar would bring. (Seito Vol. 2 No. 5 1912: 48.)” In the language of art criticism, the black jar symbolises the female sex organs; prior to Kokichi, no feminist in modern Japan had invoked the symbolism of “putting one’s hand in the jar.” Control of one’s sexuality as one’s own became an important feminist issue in Japan only in the 1970’s in Japan - sixty years after Kokichi had designed the jar cover page. Unfortunately, in the first decades of this century Japan no-one understood Kokichi as a pioneer feminist. Quite the opposite, in that feudalistic society Kokichi’s independent and magnanimous personality brought disaster not only to herself but also became the principle ingredient for attacks on the women of Seito.
When Kokichi and a few of her women friends entered a bar, drank alcohol and were entertained by courtesan women, newspapers wrote up the event as a scandal. The press instigated what were to be called the “Yoshiwara Toro” and “Multicoloured Cocktail” incidents. Entering a bar and drinking alcohol, calling geisha to your private room to perform nagauta songs and play the shamisen were forms of entertainment permissible only for men. Harsh criticism of the so-called “new women” boiled up and threatened the women of Seito’s lives as a result of the scandal. Former Seito member Ide Fumiko recalls in Seito no onnatachi (The women of Seito; Kaiensha 1975) that the magazine’s headquarters were bombarded with stones and a death threat made on one of the employees.
The more the newspapers fussed about “new women,” the more the concept became popular. Greater numbers of like-minded undoubtedly women hid from their families to secretly read Seito from cover to cover. However, in the midst of the journalistic frenzy when Raicho met Okamura Takeshi, a younger man, her protective attitude toward Kokichi suddenly altered. Raicho became obsessed with her affair with Okamura. Kokichi, in turn, became insanely worried about the change in Raicho. After briefly publishing the magazine Safuran (Saffron), Kokichi, eventually, broken hearted over Raicho, abandoned the man’s name she had adopted, threw away Japanese art and, in accordance with the stipulations of the feudal family system wore traditional bridal wear as she wed into ceramic artist Miyamoto Yoshikichi’s old Nara family.
Raicho’s whitewashing of homosexuality in her autobiography Watashi no aruita michi (The path I’ve walked: Nihon Tosho Senta 1994 (1955)), coupled with Kokichi’s silence upon marriage has pressured most scholars to ignore Raicho and Kokichi’s same-sex love. Mainstream Japanese feminism continues to ignore the political aspects of Kokichi’s existence, dismissing the love relations of her and other such women, as merely childish pastimes.
The other famous literary couple are Miyamoto (Nakajo) Yuriko - famous for novels such as Mazushiki hitobito no mure (The throng of poor; serialised in Chuo koron 1916) - and Russian translator Yuasa Yoshiko. Both met at writer Nogami Yaeko’s house in 1924. Yuriko was twenty five, Yoshiko twenty seven. Yuriko was a daughter of the upper class, who upon publishing her first serial novel, Mazushiki hitobito no mure (The throng of poor) at seventeen had been praised as a genius. She, however, considered herself to be stuck in a boring marriage and despite being of the higher social class, Yuriko envied Yoshiko who lived quietly by herself and received enough money from her uncle to study Russian without taking on other employment.
About a month and a half after their first meeting, Yoshiko visited Yuriko at her mountain home where, hidden away from her husband, she was working on a new novel. Yuriko was shocked at how strongly she was attracted to Yoshiko. A year later, Yuriko finally separated from her husband and began living with Yoshiko. Cohabitating with Yuriko, Yoshiko was able to devote herself entirely to her translation work. She published a translation of Chekov’s writing (Chekov shoseki shu, Shinchosha 1928) the culmination of one and a half years work and, having gained confidence from the translation, felt Russian translation was to be her life work. After three years of together, Yoshiko decided to study in the Soviet Union.
Fights between the pair became frequent from the time of Yoshiko’s decision to study abroad. Yuriko became the object of desire for male friends who dismissed the couple’s relationship as merely friendship; this sent Yoshiko mad with jealousy. Their personal letters also indicate that, much as the pair were in love, they avoided sexual contact. Inevitably, most of the emotional strain fell on Yoshiko. This suppressed sexual desire burst forth in violent jealousy and dangerously cornered their lives.
Yoshiko and Yuriko continued living together briefly after their return from the Soviet Union. Yuriko, however, had become a staunch believer in communism and was passionately consumed by highly fashionable revolutionary ideologies. One day, when Yoshiko traveled to Kyoto to buy Chinese herbal medicine for her, Yuriko, leaving all of her belongings behind, ran away to marry Kenji Miyamoto, later the president of the Japanese communist party.
After the second world war, when the ban preventing communist activities was lifted, Yuriko published Dohyo (Signpost; serialised in Tenbo magazine during 1947) and Futatsu no niwa (Two gardens; serialied in Chuo koron magazine in 1947), two novels about women who awaken to communism. She rewrote these semi-autobiographical works under the supervision of her husband Kenji. In these literary works, Yuriko refers contemptuously to lesbian sex as “sewerage.” Yuasa Yoshiko maintained her silence and withheld public comment on Yuriko’s insulting description of love between women. She did, however, throw her anger into her diary.
“As for that work Dohyo (Signpost) she wrote, it’s a downright lie. It’s
spiteful to whitewash the situation. What of the manifestations of her
bodily passion in the last days of my relationship with her? I will
not talk of this to another. I will keep it quiet, held in my breast. One
hundred years hence, however, this can be brought to light.”
(as quoted in Yuriko dasubidanya. (Goodbye Yuriko) Sawabe Hitomi, Bungei
Shunjusha, 1990)
For the remainder of her years, Yoshiko carefully preserved all Yuriko had left behind. Desk, memo, pen, letters, diary; all were kept as they were for fifty eight years after Yuriko had left without saying “goodbye.”
Walking through the huge grounds in the east garden of the Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum, I imagined the lives of lesbians in Japan seventy years ago. This magnificent Japanese style garden featured an artificial miniature hill and an aesthetic dry pond. Crossing over a little bridge to the opposite side of the pond there was a small arbor. I had a bird’s eye view of the garden and main house sitting on the bench in the arbor next to JJ. Yoshiya Nobuko and Monma Chiyo had built the spectacular house and gardens with their own strength. In order to keep the life and assets they had built together as their own, Chiyo, the younger of the two, was registered as Nobuko’s adopted daughter in their later years. Still today, many same-sex partners in Japan, at risk of having the relationships they have developed over many years swiftly erased by their family, formally register themselves in an adoptive relationship.
Chiyo and Nobuko remained together until Nobuko died in 1973. After Nobuko’s death, in accordance with her will, the magnificent house she had shared with Chiyo was transformed into the Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum. Chiyo, along with several of Nobuko’s friends were appointed as the board of directors for the museum. Apparently Chiyo resided as “caretaker” in one of the museum rooms until her own death.
Perhaps the the house itself, the gardens, and the rights for Nobuko’s work had passed onto her family? I don’t know. All I did knew was the Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum was symbolic of the legal rights, and served as a reminder of the way in which those rights are withheld people like me who are excluded from the institution of heterosexist marriage.
“Hey, one day let’s free this museum from herds of straight couples.”
Leaving the Yoshiya Nobuko museum behind, JJ and I, munching on famous hand made rice crackers, started home through the crowds of straight couples on Kamakura’s main street.
Marou Izumo has worked in women’s theatre and as writer. Claire Maree was born in Western Australia and is a translator and poet. They live in Tokyo.
From: Love Upon The Chopping Board
pp 78-89
Website: http://www.spinifexpress.com.au