Background
Yajima was born in 1833, in Kumamoto, Japan and was the sixth child and fifth daughter of an influential farmer's family. As a girl instead of a boy her parents had little interest in her.
Kaji Yajima in 1921, from the Library of Congress.
Kaji Yajima displaying the peace petition she presented to President Warren G. Harding in 1921; from a 1922 publication.
矢嶋 楫子
Yajima was born in 1833, in Kumamoto, Japan and was the sixth child and fifth daughter of an influential farmer's family. As a girl instead of a boy her parents had little interest in her.
Yajima Kajiko had a traditional female education.
In June 1886, the missionary Mary Clement Leavitt came to Japan. Her lectures were standing-room-only and influenced Yajima to start a union. In late 1886, Yajima helped create the Tokyo Woman's Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU) along with twenty-eight other women and was appointed president along with Sasaki Toyoju as secretary. Yajima maintained the presidency until an accident forced her to resign in 1889. Three years later she was able to be reelected and stepped back into her role until 1903 she was forced to leave position yet again, this time because she did not receive enough votes from union members. This only lasted a matter of months as the woman who replaced her died and Yajima took her place. It was not until 1921 that Yajima left the presidency permanently. She edited the Japanese temperance newspaper, lectured, led protest marches, raised funds and represented Japan at international conferences.
Her leadership position took her abroad in her seventies and eighties. In 1906, she spoke at the world convention of the WCTU in Boston; on that trip she also visited New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco, and went to the White House with other temperance activists to meet president Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1920, with her countrywomen Tsume Yamada Gauntlett and Michiko Kawai, she traveled to London and Geneva for international conferences on temperance and suffrage, respectively. In 1921, Kaji Yajima traveled at her own expense to the Washington, D.C. for the Conference for the Limitation of Armaments. She met with American suffragists, and with President Warren G. Harding, to whom she delivered a 300-foot-long peace petition signed by Japanese women.
Her 1921 visit to the United States was covered by many American newspapers and magazines. In her message to the "Christian women of America", Kaji Yajima assured her audience that "the women of Japan want education, not battleships or armies. They want the government to spend money, not on military establishments, but on schools."
The abuse at the hands of her husband and witnessing struggles of students with alcoholic fathers instilled in Yajima a strong dislike of alcohol and an interest in temperance. She pushed for the word temperance (kinshu) should be in the name of the Tokyo WCTU as a result of her past.
Yajima was more traditional in her views and believed that temperance was the most important problem the WCTU needed to address. She maintained that the members should "assist their husbands in the home [and] help gentlemen in society".
Yajima was married unhappily and had three children. She left her alcoholic husband by age 40, and converted to Christianity in midlife, she was baptized as a Presbyterian at age 45.
While in Tokyo, Yajima had a baby out of wedlock. Instead of marrying the father, she kept the birth a secret, giving the baby to a farming family before adopting the child back later and raising her as an adopted daughter on her own with her own salary. This part of her life was kept a secret until after her death. She survived the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, and died in 1925, aged 93 years.
Yajima Kajiko was twenty-five that she married a samurai named Hayashi Shichiro. Hayashi enjoyed sake and would become abusive when drunk. Yajima later left her husband and returned to her family, refusing to return and cutting her hair.