florineseexpert

It is kind of cheating to include Buwei Yang Chao here—she spent only a few years of her life in Japan, and didn’t think much of it when she was there—but I really can’t resist. She was born in 1889 in a cultured, well-to-do family in Nanjing, and had numerous childhood names, Lanxian, Chuandi, and finally Yunqing; she was unofficially raised and educated as a boy for most of her childhood. In 1904 she was sent to the Lüning School for Girls, where she made friends, learned to play the piano, and went to parties with boys. In 1908, after a win on the lottery, she entered the McTyeire School in Shanghai and learned to speak (some) English. At twenty she took steps to break her childhood engagement to a cousin, achieving success by getting her grandfather on her side.
Yunqing spent the 1911 Revolution in Shanghai with her schoolfriend Lin Guanhong, who died of scarlet fever in the same year, leaving Yunqing with the nickname “Buwei,” which she adopted from then on as her name. A year later, through family connections, she was made principal of a vocational school for girls, where apart from supervising their education she drove away ghosts and mutinous soldiers.

In 1913 Buwei arrived in Japan, where she began to study medicine, focusing reluctantly on gynecology and obstetrics (at the school run by Yoshioka Yayoi and her husband) in a language she could read but not speak, facing assorted prejudice against Chinese. Qualified by 1919, she returned to China upon the death of her father. She and a friend opened a hospital in Beijing (Beiping) where she delivered numerous babies, lost her mother, and met the cousin of a friend of a friend, Chao Yuenren, a penniless student who had just returned from America. After a series of mutual misunderstandings and circumlocutions, they were married in 1921, a revolutionary wedding without a traditional ceremony.

They took a “honeymoon” in America, where Yuenren studied at Harvard, and their daughters Iris (Rulan) and Nova (Xinna) shortly arrived. (Yuenren had been Bertrand Russell’s interpreter upon the latter’s visit to China in 1920; when he informed Russell of the births of their daughters, he received a letter saying “Congratulations! Now you are among the causes of the present Chaos in China,” the kind of pun Yuenren adored.) In 1924 they returned to China, via a year in Europe; Yuanren taught linguistics at Tsinghua University and Buwei ran a birth control clinic. Lensey (Laisi) was born in 1929 in Nanjing, and Bella (Xiaozhong) the following year. As Japan encroached on Chinese territory, they returned to the US, lived in Washington for a while, went back to China again, and became internal refugees, fleeing to Changsha and then to mountainous Kunming. In 1938 they left for Hawaii, and then eventually settled in New Haven where Yuenren taught at Yale and Buwei wrote a Chinese cookbook, translated—like her autobiography—humorously by her husband, along with their oldest daughter. All four daughters had successful careers: Rulan, a polymath like her parents, was an ethnomusicologist, Xinna (the only one of the four to return to China to live) a professor of chemistry, Lensey (using her husband’s name, Namioka) a children’s author, and Bella a physicist.

Buwei died in 1981. Of herself, at the head of her autobiography, she wrote “I am a woman with an unusual experience. I had four parents. I broke my engagement at a time when engagements were never broken. I was principal of a school before I went to college. I joined revolutions and took refuge from wars. I healed grownups and brought a few hundred children into the world. When I was married, I was married without a wedding. …But, above all, I am myself and not somebody else. I am five feet one and not five feet four, though I wouldn’t mind if I were. I was once ninety pounds and wished I were a hundred twenty; now I am a hundred thirty-five pounds and still wish the same. …I eat what I like. …I have the voice of a second alto. When I say “Hello” over the telephone and the other party says “May I speak to Mrs. Chao?” I say “This is Mrs. Chao.” My voice carries well. When I argue with someone, and our reasons are equally good, I usually win. … I like to move; I like to act. …I want to do things just for the fun of doing them. There is too much to do in the world to sit around and waste your time.”

Sources
https://read01.com/OADya45.html (Chinese) Pictures of Buwei with her family at various ages

Kawasaki Natsu was born in 1889 in Nara, the daughter of a watchmaker. She lost her mother shortly after her birth, skipped grades in elementary school and entered the Nara Girls’ Higher Normal School at thirteen (having apparently fudged her birth records to appear two years older). After graduation, she taught for three years at her hometown elementary school and at nineteen went to Tokyo to enter the Tokyo Girls’ Higher Normal School. There she discovered Hiratsuka Raicho’s Bluestocking and the poetry of Yosano Akiko, volunteered at Noguchi Yuka’s Futaba Kindergarten, scandalized her professors by writing essays in the style of spoken rather than literary Japanese, and only just avoided expulsion as a dangerous element.

Natsu graduated in 1912 and went to teach at a girls’ high school in Hokkaido, where she encouraged her students (she was in charge of essay-writing for all 500 girls) to write freely and with imagination, about themselves as well as the texts they read. She returned to Tokyo in 1916 for graduate study on the psychology of creativity, at the same time teaching writing at her alma mater the Girls’ Higher Normal School, and later at Tokyo Women’s University upon its founding.

In 1921, the well-to-do architect Nishimura Isaku asked her to recommend a school for his daughter Aya, but she couldn’t think of one that would do. The Yosanos, who happened to be there, suggested that they start one, and so Natsu found herself in charge of the newly established Bunka Gakuin (Culture Academy), the only professional educator among teachers who also included Nishimura himself, the Yosanos, and the composer Yamada Kosaku (Tsuneko Gauntlett’s little brother) among other notable figures. The school, like theJiyu Gakuin started in the same year by Hani Motoko, focused on individual creativity and freedom; students wore their own clothes (Western-style clothing was recommended, giving the school a name for high fashion), and girls and boys were educated together for the first time in Japan’s history. It was to produce a long line of accomplished alumni, largely in the arts and humanities. [I haven’t found much in English about Nishimura himself, but he was a pioneering architect and iconoclast and had nine children, of whom Aya, the reason the school was founded, was the oldest; she eventually succeeded her father as principal of the school herself. I also came across a fascinating obituary for Aya’s sister Sono.]

Natsu’s classes were popular; she would begin a geography class by asking her students to imagine themselves on a train headed north from Ueno Station, following the map to Nasu where they would encounter a nine-tailed fox spirit or to Nakoso where they would fight a historical battle alongside warlords. Eating oysters and admiring horses, they would take ship (in imagination) to Hokkaido, at which point Natsu would pause to promise her students she would take them to Hokkaido for real some day and they could all go skiing. She also taught them about feminism and the proletarian revolution, and argued that the goddess Amaterasu was a human being like the rest of them, all topics which at the time could have been grounds for jailing.

In 1943 the school was closed down for sedition. In response Natsu devoted herself to the support of her friends who were down on their luck or imprisoned for their left-wing sensibilities, giving houseroom to fugitives hiding from the authorities, as well as continuing to work for women’s rights and women’s suffrage. (Biographies of more prominent activists tend with clockwork regularity to include lines like “…and Kawasaki Natsu brought her food and clothing when she was in prison” or “…Kawasaki Natsu on the left in the photo of the covert gathering.”) After the war she became a Diet member representing the Socialist Party, remaining in office for six years; she also taught intermittently (at schools now run by her own former students), demonstrated in the Anpo Riots, and worked to bring together the Japan Mothers’ Union as a force for social change. She died in 1966 at the age of seventy-seven.

Sources
Mori 1996