“Hiratsuka-san and I were bound by a love that was a step beyond the ordinary, so I can no longer see her objectively. People say she is like a man, but they are wrong. She is kind and gentle, a woman of strong emotions." - Otake Kōkichi
Born perhaps a century too soon, Otake Kōkichi was a defiant and free-spirited feminist, author, painter and activist whose life and legacy offer profound insights into the complexities of gender identity and expression in early twentieth-century Japan. During her lifetime, Kōkichi defied societal norms by dressing in masculine attire, openly discussed her love of women, advocated for sex workers and actively rejected any traditions she deemed oppressive, particularly the long-held ideal that Japanese women should exist simply to be “Good Wives, Wise Mothers.” Much of the literature surrounding Kōkichi focuses on her brief same-sex affair with the more well-known writer, Hiratsuka Raichō, but Kōkichi’s entire being was highly radical for her time, and her courage to live authentically during a period marked by rigid gender roles was altogether groundbreaking. The story of Kōkichi thus highlights the rich–but often overlooked–history of gender diversity in a non-Western context. As a rather unique but vital queer figurehead, Otake Kōkichi deserves far more recognition than she has previously been awarded.
Otake Kōkichi was born Otake Kazue in Osaka, Japan in 1893. Her father, Otake Etsudo, hailed from a Jōdo Shinshū family and was an established painter and woodcut printing artist who wanted his daughter to learn the practice. Meanwhile, her mother was a Sōtō Zen Buddhist who educated her in what was then considered to be the feminine arts, which included the shamisen (a three-stringed musical instrument) and dance. Kōkichi’s mother, however, passed away when she was still fairly young, and her father then converted to Christianity and changed his name to Francisco Otake. While she was growing up, Kōkichi would often sneak into the library to devour books that would expand her perspective on life, and some of her later ideological influences would stem from early experiences reading the likes of Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer and Tolstoy.
After graduating from the Yuhigaoka Girls’ High School in Osaka, Kōkichi moved to Tokyo to attend Japan Women's University. She eventually withdrew from the school and began residing with her Christian aunt and uncle, the latter of whom was a famous painter named Otake Chikuha. While there, Kōkichi first learned about Bluestocking, a literary magazine created in 1911 by a group of five women: Haru Raichō Hiratsuka, Yasumochi Yoshiko, Mozume Kazuko, Kiuchi Teiko, and Nakano Hatsuko. The group of women called themselves Seitō-sha, or the Japanese Bluestocking Society, and created the magazine as a means to promote the equal rights of women through literature and education. The Seitō-sha, a group that would now be considered ‘proto-feminist,’ emerged during a period of rapid industrial change in Japan, when men were encouraged to modernize and take up Western fashions, while women were expected to don traditional Japanese garb to maintain a culturally reassuring visual image. The Society’s publication, which ran for five years, featured contributions from hundreds of forward-thinking women throughout its duration.
Otake quickly became a fan of Bluestocking, and joined the Bluestocking Society that same year, serving as both an illustrator and writing contributor to the magazine. It was at this time that she took on the pen name, Otake Kōkichi, and her controversial contributions to the magazine helped break new ground, covering taboo issues like abortion and sex work. Kōkichi also wrote openly about her love for women, and she concurrently became particularly infatuated with Bluestocking cofounder Hiratsuka Raichō. Raichō, a pioneering writer, political activist and feminist in her own right, is responsible for much of what we know about Kōkichi today.
Hiratsuka Raichō wrote significantly about Kōkichi, remarking on both her gender-non-conforming appearance as well as about her same-sex infatuations. Using contemporary Western queer vernacular, in today’s terms Kōkichi might appear to have the gender presentation of someone who would identify as butch lesbian, genderqueer or transmasculine. Early into knowing each other, for example, Hiratsuka described Otake thus: “My first impression of Kōkichi was of a boyish young girl with a nicely rounded face. She wore a serge hakama, a matching kimono, and a haori of dark blue Kurume cotton, a man’s outfit that became her tall but well-fleshed figure.”
Elsewhere, Hiratsuka, who in today’s terms would at least be considered bisexual, wrote of Kōkichi: “She looked dashing in her man’s kimono and hakama, and sometimes she wore a man’s kimono, with a narrow sash tied low on her waist, and a pair of leather-soled woven sandals. Striding into the office, her arms swinging, she would say whatever was on her mind, burst into song, and laugh out loud in her big voice. She was absolutely uninhibited. You would have thought she was born that way, and just watching her was a pleasure.” Hiratsuka also documented the early beginnings of what would develop into their intense relationship with one another: “Kokichi and I became much closer after the May 13 meeting. I knew she…had a number of other male acquaintances, but she did not seem to be attracted to them as men and instead directed all her feelings toward me, charging full tilt, as it were.” Indeed, from 1911 to 1912, Otake and Hiratsuka became involved in a rather publicized one-year relationship with each other, at a time when lesbianism in Japan was highly pathologized.
During this tempestuous period, both women dressed in men’s clothes, while Hiratsuka referred to the younger Otake as “her boy.” They also openly compared their relationship to nanshoku, or male homosexuality in Japan, as the term to refer to homosexual women (dōseiai) had not yet been normalized. Kōkichi at the time made no attempt to hide her own feelings, writing in her diary (vol.2, no. 6): “For this older woman…I am willing to become a slave (dorei), a living sacrifice, as long as I am favored by her embraces and kisses.” Early on, Hiratsuka also jotted down her own passionate emotions: “I wanted to make you part of my world, I held you in my arms, and oh, how violently I kissed you.” Meanwhile, the Japanese press sensationalized Otake and Hiratsuka’s unconventional relationship, mocking their masculine gender expressions and ridiculing their version of nanshoku. Articles from the time called Hiratsuka a sex-addicted bisexual and declared Otake to be a full-blown homosexual.
Much of this derogatory press stemmed from a series of scandalous “incidents” that caused Otake to be seen as a particularly controversial figure within the Seitō-sha. The first, called the “Five-Color Sake Incident,” occurred in the summer of 1912, when Otake was out at a restaurant gathering subscriptions for Bluestocking. While there, she was shown a new cocktail containing five different liquors, and out of excitement, she wrote and published a fictional story about Hiratsuka drinking the so-called "Five-Colored Sake" while out and about with a man. Newspapers presumed the story to be factual, and began admonishing Hiratsuka for publicly drinking alcohol (which was frowned upon for women), pejoratively calling her a “New Woman.” The press also took issue with the fact that Otake had written the story from a first-person male narrator’s perspective.
The second incendiary “incident” also took place in the summer of 1912, when Otake brought Hiratsuka and another woman from the Bluestocking Society with her to visit Yoshiwara, a famous red-light district in Edo (present-day Tokyo). Women did not typically visit Yoshiwara as patrons, and Otake took it one step further by hiring a geisha there named Eizan, interviewing her about how she felt working in Yoshiwara. Otake and company were the first documented women to ever patronize the pleasure quarters of Yoshiwara, thereby transcending both social and gender boundaries by explicitly invading a “forbidden” male domain. After this groundbreaking excursion, Otake bragged about the experience to her friends, and the story soon headlined multiple newspapers, which again lashed out at these radicalized “New Women.” In response to the story, the public subjected the women to significant verbal abuse and even stoned Hiratsuka’s private home. Meanwhile, several members of the Japanese Bluestocking Society called to expel Otake for both exploiting the women of Yoshiwara and for bringing negative press to their group.
The backlash from these incidents and the subsequent decline of her reputation deeply affected Otake, who left the Bluestocking Society shortly thereafter. She then founded her own magazine, whose format faintly resembled Bluestocking though it featured lavish illustrations and reflected Kōkichi’s own aesthetic sensibilities. Despite a successful debut, the magazine folded after just a few months. Deeply stressed and unknowingly suffering from tuberculosis at the time, Otake then attempted to harm herself, and was admitted to a sanatorium in the city of Chigasaki to recover. Hiratsuka visited Otake there quite often, and her writings from this period still relay her intense feelings for the younger Otake: “If you’re sick, I want to be sick, too. We’ll go to Chigasaki together…and on a starlit night, we’ll row out to an island, just the two of us.” Or later, after Otake had already been admitted to the sanatorium, Hiratsuka wrote: “I want to fly to you…embrace you with all my strength, kiss you until my lips bleed.”
Despite these clearly affectionate feelings, it is at the sanatorium where Hiratsuka met a man named Okumura Hirosha, a fellow artist who had also been visiting Otake there. Though her romantic entanglement with Otake never came to an official end, Hiratsuka went on to marry Okumura on New Year’s Eve of 1913, perhaps as a way to redeem her own reputation or to at least distance herself from the same-sex relationship she knew could have no longevity. Eventually, Hiratsuka would even backpedal on the nature of her relationship with Kōkichi, at one point writing: “There is no denying that Kōkichi was infatuated with me at the time. A third party who called this homosexual love may well have been correct. On my part, it is true that I was very fond of Kōkichi–she had practically thrown herself at me–but my affection had no sexual dimension. I was attracted by her emotional openness, her freshness, and her finely honed sensibility. Something about her stirred my sense of play. Kōkichi meant a great deal to me, but my deepening feelings for Okumura surely prove that my feelings for her were not homosexual.”
Otake, too, eventually recovered and would force herself to move on as well. In 1914, she swiftly married Tomimoto Kenkichi, a gifted male ceramic artist from the Nara Prefecture. Regarding Otake’s sudden wedding, the seemingly hypocritical Raichō wrote: “I was aghast when I saw her [Otake’s] wedding picture. She was dressed in a formal long-sleeved kimono and had her hair arranged in the traditional bridal coiffure, just like an ordinary bride who had sacrificed herself on the altar of social convention. My disappointment was especially keen because I had once had such high hopes for her.”
After the wedding, Otake changed her name to Tomimoto Kazue, and the couple moved to Anzemara to live with the Tomimoto family. Otake soon gave birth to two daughters, Akira and Sue. During this period of young motherhood, Otake took a hiatus from writing but shifted her inherently defiant nature towards teaching her young daughters radical values, including the notion that they should reject the "Good Wives, Wise Mothers" construct. Eventually, however, Otake could no longer endure the mounting pressures imposed on her to perform the duties of a traditional wife and mother, and she left the Tomimoto household to live separately from Kenkichi and raised her daughters on her own. During this separation, Otake returned to her pen name once more and supported herself by writing children’s stories.
When World War II ended, Kenkichi officially divorced Otake, accusing her of ruining his reputation by wearing men’s kimonos and having lesbian tendencies. Seemingly, Otake had returned to her old ways, but she lived a primarily quiet life after the divorce and eventually passed away in 1966. Regrettably, after her passing not much posthumous attention has been given to Otake Kōkichi. Compared to many of her Bluestocking contemporaries, Kōkichi’s writings have not been highly valued, and to date there are no “Collected Works” or published compilations of her life’s work. Additionally, there has only ever been one full-length biography written about Otake Kōkichi in Japanese by Watanabe Sumiko, entitled Seitō no Onna: Otake Kōkichi den (Woman of Bluestocking: a biography of Otake Kōkichi).
On a smaller scale, however, Otake Kōkichi has come to be viewed as an early and important role model for Japanese women who love women, and is often regarded as a pioneer of lesbian feminism within Japan. In reflecting on both her life and legacy, it is evident that across every facet of her remarkable life–in what she decided to wear, in whom she chose to love, and in what she believed in and wrote about, Otake Kōkichi was unapologetically subversive. Her daily existence was marked by a radical defiance of gender norms, and for that alone she should be recognized far more than she currently seems to be. Additionally, Kōkichi wrote unabashedly about her same-sex attractions, and should be much more well known for her significant literary contributions to LGBTQ+ history, particularly in the ways in which her writings can help to further enrich our understanding of gender and sexual diversity within early twentieth-century Japan.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Craig, Teruko, translator. In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun. By Raichō, Hiratsuka, Columbia University Press, 2006.
Curran, Beverley and James Welker. “From The Well of Loneliness to the akarui rezubian: Western translations and Japanese lesbian identities.” Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan, edited by Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta, Routledge, 2005, pp. 65-80.
Gross, Corrina. “Rebel Girls: Radical Feminism and Self-Narrative in Early 20th Century Japan and China.” Bard Digital Commons, Senior Projects Spring 2019. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2019/203
Loop, Alexandra M. Literary Lesbian Liberation: Two Case Studies Interrogating How Queerness has Manifested in Japanese Value Construction Through History. 2020, McMaster University, Master of Arts Thesis. http://hdl.handle.net/11375/25980
Medhurst, Eleanor. Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion. London, Hurst & Company, 2024.
Nishihira, Nancy. “Featured Feminists: Otake Kōkichi 尾竹紅吉.” Center For Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. https://ii.umich.edu/cjs/portraits-of-feminism-in-japan/featured-feminists/otake-k_kichi-_.html
Tomida, Hiroko. “Hiratsuka Raichō, the Seitō Society, and the Emergence of the New Woman in Japan.” Japanese Women Emerging from Subservience, 1868-1945, Virginia, Global Oriental, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004213838_014
Wu, Peichen. “Performing Gender along the Lesbian Continuum: The Politics of Sexual Identity in the Seitō Society.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. English Supplement, no. 22, 2002, pp. 64–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42772182.