Mumeo Oku was an important Japanese social worker. After World War II, she was elected a member of the House of Councilors twice and belongs to the Ryokufukai group in the Upper House. She was a president of the Federation of Housewives Associations, which engages in such campaigns as reduction of prices.
Background
Oku Mumeo was born the eldest daughter of a third-generation blacksmith in October 24, 1895 outside of Fukui. Her father disliked being a blacksmith and urged her to continually further her education. Her mother died of tuberculosis in November 3, 1910 when she was still too young to remember much of her mother.
Education
She graduated from Nihon Women's College (1916).
Career
In late 1919, Oku Mumeo received a visit from Hiratsuka Raichō who asked if she would be interested in co-founding a new organization, the New Women's Association, with the intention of petitioning the 42nd Diet on reforms to Article 5 of the Police Safety Regulations and also a petition to prevent men infected with a venereal disease from marrying. Following the failure to revise Article 5, Ichikawa left for America, resigning her position as the head of the organization, and Raichō suddenly moved to the foot of Mt. Akagi in the Gumma Prefecture, leaving Oku as the head of the New Women's Association. Finally, in March 25, 1922, Oku Mumeo and the New Women's Association would succeed in revising Article 5 in the last day of the 45th Diet.
Oku Mumeo would go on to dissolve the New Women's Associate in December 8, 1922 and form the Women's League on the seventeenth of that same month. With her growing fame in the women's activist circles, she was asked to move to Nakano in order to assist with the Nakano Consumer Union Movement in 1926. Working in the consumer movement she found the area of activist work that would drive her, but she would go on to lead, or at the very least be associated with, various women's activist movements and organizations, such as: the Association of Households, forming the Cooperative Women's Consumer Union, opposing the dissolution of the proletarian parties, and starting women's settlements with the Women's Settlement Movement.
Achievements
Connections
Oku Mumeo married a man named Oku Eiichi, a poet who never really had much success and was employed in the translation department of Sakai Toshihiko's Baihunsha. She is survived by her son, Kyoichi Oku, and her daughter, Kii Nakamura, who, like her mother before her, served as chairman of the Housewives' Association.