Background
Itsue Takamure was born on January 18, 1894 in Kumamoto, Japan. Takamure was born into a lower-middle-class family. Her father was a schoolteacher.
(Takamure Itsue, a young woman of 24 set off alone in 1918...)
Takamure Itsue, a young woman of 24 set off alone in 1918 to walk the 1400 kilometre pilgrimage route around the island of Shikoku. Her dream of a solitary journey ended when an old man of 73 insisted that he accompany her as servant and protector because he believed that she was an attendant of Kannon Bosatsu. The 105 newspaper articles that she wrote while making her pilgrimage made her an overnight sensation in Japan. These were compiled and published in book form as Musume Junreiki.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007F81I74/?tag=2022091-20
逸枝 高群
ethnologist historian writer poet
Itsue Takamure was born on January 18, 1894 in Kumamoto, Japan. Takamure was born into a lower-middle-class family. Her father was a schoolteacher.
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.
Before moving to Tokyo in 1920, she worked briefly for a newspaper in Kumamoto City and undertook the Shikoku pilgrimage in 1918, her newspaper dispatches from which were collected after her death as Musume junreiki (1979).
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.
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, apparently having attracted the attention of the Thought Section of the Criminal Affairs Bureau of the Special Higher Police 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.
(Takamure Itsue, a young woman of 24 set off alone in 1918...)
(Japanese Edition)
1995Despite her anarcho-feminist beliefs, during the war years Takamure wrote a number of polemical articles in support of Japanese imperialism in Asia and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. 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).
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.
She undertook the pilgrimage 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.