Komako Kimura was a Japanese actress, dancer, and women rights activist. She is known as the founder of The True New Women's Association.
Background
Komako Kimura was born as the youngest of three sisters on July 29, 1887, in Tokyo. From a young age, she was trained in the traditional Japanese arts of dance and theater. At the age of three, she began learning Nihon Buyō and went on to train in Kabuki at the age of five. Her father, who worked as a chief clerk of a dealer fire-fighting pumps lost all of his money to a moneylender, had to flee to Taiwan to find work, and left his family behind when Komako was only eight years old. Using her dance and theater training, she began supporting her family at a very young age by joining a Kumamoto touring theater, which is where her suffragist path began.
Education
When she was 4 years old she took to the stage, training in traditional arts such as the shamisen, dancing, and drama. This element became crucial to her success later in life, as well as her endeavors in feminism.
Komako Kimura attended various schools in her formative years, notably Kumamoto Girls School. Komako drew great inspiration from Swedish feminist Ellen Key, a suffragist and staunch supporter of government-funded child support. The school headmaster, Takezaki Junko, also helped Komako form her fledgling feminist ideals. Not content with teaching them to be just mothers or wives, Takezaki encouraged the girls to nurture their personalities, explore their interests, and stand up for what they believed in.
At the age of 14, on her way to her marriage ceremony to a man she had never met, Komako thwarted her family’s matchmaking by escaping her carriage and hightailing it to the city of Nagoya. Once there, she sold her wedding clothes and accessories and started working as an apprentice dancer. For a young Japanese female to refuse marriage in this manner was considered a huge scandal in early 20th century Japan. This was only the beginning of Komako’s numerous challenges to Japanese cultural and societal expectations.
As if flaunting her rebellion in front of her family once wasn’t enough, she met and later eloped with the young doctor Kimura Hideo.
After Komako gave birth to her son Shouji in 1907, the young family headed off to Tokyo. The couple proceeded to the capital in the year Meiji, with Komako serving the role of Hideo’s spiritual assistant, where she garnered a reputation for her clairvoyant powers and the dangerous art of sticking needles in her arm.
The needles were related to acupuncture, sensible given the nature of Hideo’s mixture of yogi tradition, Indian mysticism, and other forms of spiritualism. While she supported him in this endeavor, Hideo also encouraged her to pursue her goals, and it was in Tokyo where Komako began her work as a feminist.
While Japan embraced modernization in industry and technology, its attitudes towards women turned towards a strict Confucianism, with women denied many basic rights, including a voice in political affairs. The government had a habit of suppressing whatever they didn’t like, and that included anything related to feminism. Some women put their reputations at risk to make their voices known. Kimura Komako was one of them.
In 1913, with fellow feminists like Nishikawa Fumiko and Miyazaki Mitsuko, Komako established the "New Real Women’s Society." They believed women should struggle against the patriarchy, instead of meekly living a dull life under man’s oppressive shadow. The society was established with the objective that women all across Japan should rise up and demand change for the betterment of themselves and their country.
Komako also helped edit and publish an accompanying magazine called "New Real Women." The name was a slight dig at members of another feminist society "Bluestocking," who called themselves new women, as Komako and company believed themselves to be the "genuine" new women.
When not trying to make feminism take root, Komako stayed busy with other endeavors. She managed two theatres in Tokyo, the Kimura Komako theatre and the Tokiwaza theatre. Her roles on stage, notably those from Shakespeare’s works, were frowned upon by the Japanese government. Komako responded to this criticism by throwing open the doors to her theaters and admitting people free of charge, an act which led to her arrest. Her arrest didn’t daunt her at all, and once released, she went right back to promoting the feminist agenda.
The feminist societies and their publications were constantly under threat of suppression by the government. Some of Komako’s fellow colleagues who began the society and magazine with her backed out due to pressures from husbands and employers. Komako, however, continued to work on the publication, stalwart in her determination. Finally, when funds slowed to a mere trickle and left her cast in self-doubt about her mission, Komako decided to broaden her horizons and travel to the United States, thinking that maybe American feminism would help her cause.
In 1917 Komako traveled to New York with her supportive husband and son with the intent of learning English and more ways to promote feminism in Japan. One of the most widespread photographs of her was taken during this time when she marched with other suffragists in New York.
Komako eagerly did numerous interviews with various American newspapers, no doubt hoping exposure would warrant attention to her pioneering efforts. One reporter noted how she spoke, "in the softest of voices, and with the most delightful accent imaginable, but the softness of the expression could not conceal the decisiveness of the convictions." Her profession as a stage actress drew great attention, so much so she even performed at Carnegie Hall and on Broadway to awed audiences.
After eight long years in America, Komako and her family returned to Japan in 1925. While I couldn’t find much on her feminist efforts post-homecoming, it’s clear she never stopped seeking to improve the lives of others. She refocused herself on the arts and her husband’s spiritual organization. She wrote a few books, notably A Textbook on the Art of Dancing, and one on breathing techniques for meditative purposes called The Art of Kannon.
Komako embraced the idea of starting an arts college and even built temporary school buildings on Mikawa Island, but that dream was never fully realized. From then on she continued to live a wild life until in November 1980, at the age of 92, her life story came to a close.
Kimura's literary and theater work influenced the rights of women in Japan and the Women's Suffrage Movement. In Japan, in the early 1920s, shortly after Kimura's ride, the Suffrage Movement peaked.
Views
Komako Kimura was giving speeches; her first in 1913 was titled "Love and Women's Self-Realization." She campaigned for suffrage in a society that did not acknowledge women’s issues. In the first publication of her magazine "The New True Women," Komako explained that she did not just want to change the law and give men and women equal rights on paper; she called for women to be educated, strong, self-reliant and thoughtful feminists.
On October 23, 1917, she marched in one of the largest suffrage parades in New York City, along with thousands of other suffragists.
Personality
Komako also proved to be an indomitable force. She rejected conventional Japanese norms and expectations, much to her family’s dismay.
Physical Characteristics:
Despite her small stature and demure looks, Komako Kimura possessed a fiery passion that wasn’t so easily extinguished.
Interests
theater, music
Philosophers & Thinkers
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Politicians
Ellen Key
Writers
George Gordon Byron, Maurice Maeterlinck, Oscar Wilde
Connections
Komaku Kimura was married to spiritual teacher and healer Hideo Kimura, and they had one son named Shouji, born in 1909.
Spouse:
Kimura Hideo
Also born in Kumamoto, Hideo had studied at Doshisha, the university that trend-setter Yamamoto Yae helped establish. Sources quote different timelines, but at some point, either before or after marrying Komako, Hideo traveled to the United States to study at the prestigious UC Berkeley in California. There, under the auspices of American yogi Pierre Arnold Bernard, he learned a "secret tantra" that he carried with him to his return to Japan, where he founded his own spiritual organization called Kanjizai-shuu, named after the Buddhist deity for compassion. Whatever the correct timeline, in the end, Komako became an integral part of this organization.
