Shidzue Katō was a Japanese activist, politician, and writer. When women received the vote in 1946, she became one of the first to be elected to the Diet of Japan, serving first in the lower house and then in the upper. Also, Katō was the first woman to promote the birth control movement in Japan.
Background
Shidzue Katō was born on March 2, 1897, in Tokyo, Japan. She was born Hirota Shidzue into a privileged samurai family. Her father, Hirota Ritarô, was a mining engineer, and her mother, Tsurumi Toshiko, who educated at a missionary school, brought Western ideas into their home during the period in which Japan was changing from a feudal to more contemporary society. Although women were afforded equality under the law, in reality, their lives had not changed significantly.
Education
Shidzue Katō graduated from the Peeresses School. In 1919 she enrolled in a secretarial school in the United States.
After graduating, Shidzue Katō married Baron Keikichi Ishimoto, like her father, a mining engineer. She was appalled on viewing the small mining town to which they relocated - the poverty and the unhealthy conditions under which people were living. Katō and her husband worked for social reform and to improve the lives of the laborers who spent twelve hours a day in the mines, and particularly the women, who then went home to care for their large families.
In 1919 Shidzue Katō came to the United States. While here, she met Margaret Sanger, founder of this country's family planning movement. This first meeting inspired Shidzue to bring birth control to Japan, but on her return, she caused a great stir for being a woman of the samurai class involved in social causes. Birth control was an unpopular idea, as the country wanted higher birth rates to produce the boys and men needed for war.
Shidzue Katō also owned a woolen shop and sold clothes and held knitting classes. It was unheard of when a woman of her status involved in the mercantile trade. But her movement within communities allowed her to promote the idea of birth control to Japanese women. In 1922 Katō hosted Sanger's visit to her country, made possible by the press coverage that overrode government policy. The Japan Birth Control Study Group resulted, which published a Japanese-language version of Family Limitation, Sanger's controversial pamphlet on contraception.
The earthquake of 1923 destroyed Shidzue Katō's shop, but the movement was growing fast, and she established the Women's Research Institute, which studied women's issues. She was, as yet, unable to offer methods of contraception, and so she spent time in the United States and studied under Sanger. In 1932 she founded the Birth Control Consultation Centre, which staffed with doctors and nurses, and which she stocked with contraceptive creams and jellies, the manufacture and distribution of which she arranged.
Now an international figure dubbed the "Margaret Sanger of Japan," Shidzue Katō was asked by American publishers to write her first autobiography. It became a bestseller, and following World War II, it was used by the American occupation forces as a textbook on Japanese culture. The right-wing Japanese government arrested Katō in 1937 for her promotion of "dangerous thoughts," and she spent two weeks in prison. The records of the Birth Control Consultation Centre had confiscated, and the clinic shut down, temporarily ending the birth control movement in Japan until after World War II.
Over the next years, Shidzue Katō divorced her husband and lost a son. She remarried, and to take an active leadership role, she ran for and was elected to the lower house of the Japanese Diet, or Parliament, in 1946, the year after women had the right to vote and the right to hold political office. Her husband, Kanju Katō, was also elected, although they represented different wings of the Socialist Party. Katō was elected to the upper house, or senate, in 1950, where she served until her retirement in 1974.
In 1950 Japan legalized the manufacture and sale of contraceptive drugs, and family planning was encouraged by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Sanger visited Japan in 1952. In 1954, Shidzue Katō co-founded the Family Planning Federation of Japan, which became affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Tokyo hosted the International Conference on Planned Parenthood in 1955, which supported the movement in Japan and the idea of smaller families.
Shidzue Katō's leadership was not limited to family planning. At a conference in the Philippines in 1957, Katō and Nirō Hoshijima, chairman of the Japan-Korea Society, won the confidence of Korean delegates by apologizing for Japan's harsh treatment of their country during more than thirty years' occupation. On their return to Tokyo, they persuaded Nobusuke Kishi, the prime minister, to revoke Japanese claims on Korea, paving the way for fresh negotiations towards a peace treaty between the two countries. As a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Katō offered opposition support to Kishi if he would apologize on behalf of the Japanese people as he traveled to other countries promoting trade. Katō herself apologized to England and The Netherlands when she visited London in 1971.
After her husband died in 1978, Shidzue Katō left the Socialist Party so that she could speak more independently, and she was active in public life until she was 100 years old. She published Kato Shidzue Hyakusai, another autobiography, in her centennial year. Her more active period was during the turbulent Showa Era, and her later and more settled life was during the present Heisei Era.
Shidzue Katō died in 2001 at the age of 104. Her life was itself a celebration of the power to make a change. In an obituary at the website of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, said that her efforts "have continued to bear fruits for Japanese society, bringing down the number of abortions, infant mortality, and maternal death rates, while increasing contraceptive usage to 80 percent. Japan's family planning model has been so successful that it attracts attention from other countries as a working model."
Being a senator at the Diet of Japan, Shidzue Katō actively stood for reforms regarding women's rights and family planning. She also defended many bills such as birth control legislation, the lifting of the feudal family code, the creation of the Women's and Minors Bureau of the Department of Labor, and environmental issues.
Views
Shidzue Katō was a feminist, and all her life, she strongly advocated a women's rights.
Quotations:
"In a sad moment, let yourself be saddened deeply. In a joyous moment, let yourself explode in celebration."
Membership
Birth Control Movement
,
United States
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Alexander Sanger: "Madame Kato and my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, worked for the betterment of the status of women in Japan, America, and around the world."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Margaret Sanger
Connections
Shidzue Katō married Keikichi Ishimoto in 1914 and divorced in 1944. Then she married Kato Kanju in 1944. Shidzue Katō had three children: two sons from the first marriage, and one daughter from the second marriage.