Hiratsuka Raichō: Feminism and Androgynous Sexuality

Abstract

HIRATSUKA Raichō 平塚らいてう (1886–1971) is known as one of the Japanese feminists and as the editor-in-chief of Seitō 青鞜, the first magazine for women by women in Japan, published in 1911 when Raichō was 25 years old. The opening line in the foreword to its first issue, “[I]n the beginning, woman was the sun” (Hiratsuka 1911), written by Raichō, came to symbolize her ideas or even her identity and was later adopted as the title of her autobiography. According to her autobiography, when she wrote this foreword, she had been practicing Zen Buddhism. Generally speaking, her devotion to Zen tends to be interpreted as a phenomenon of her youth, and her experience with Zen meditation is only mentioned to explain her inclination towards mysticism or spiritualism. It is quite possible that the trend towards Zen meditation among intellectuals at that time was connected in a profound way to the spiritualism modernized by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). It is interesting that, although Swedenborg definitely belonged to the Christian tradition where he was treated as heterodox, Buddhist thinkers such as SUZUKI Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 (1870–1966) and NISHIDA Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945) were intrigued by this movement, referring to it in Japanese as the “mysticism boom.” Suzuki introduced Swedenborg to Japan by translating his Heaven and Hell (1758) into Japanese as Tenkai to chigoku 『天界と地獄』. In this sense, a reexamination of Raichō’s Buddhism, as implicit as it may have been, helps us to understand the context and intellectual milieu of later prominent Buddhist philosophers.

HIRATSUKA Raichō¹ 平塚らいてう (1886–1971) is known as one of the Japanese feminists and as the editor-in-chief of Seitō 青鞜, the first magazine for women by women in Japan, published in 1911 when Raichō was 25 years old. The opening line in the foreword to its first issue, “[I]n the beginning, woman was the sun” (Hiratsuka 1911), written by Raichō, came to symbolize her ideas or even her identity and was later adopted as the title of her autobiography. According to her autobiography, when she wrote this foreword, she had been practicing Zen Buddhism. Generally speaking, her devotion to Zen tends to be interpreted as a phenomenon of her youth, and her experience with Zen meditation is only mentioned to explain her inclination towards mysticism or spiritualism.² It is quite possible that the trend towards Zen meditation among intellectuals at that time was connected in a profound way to the spiritualism modernized by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). It is interesting that, although Swedenborg definitely belonged to the Christian tradition where he was treated as heterodox, Buddhist thinkers such as SUZUKI Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 (1870–1966) and NISHIDA Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945) were intrigued by this movement, referring to it in Japanese as the “mysticism boom.” Suzuki introduced Swedenborg to Japan by translating his Heaven and Hell (1758) into Japanese as Tenkai to chigoku 『天界と地獄』. In this sense, a reexamination of Raichō’s Buddhism, as implicit as it may have been, helps us to understand the context and intellectual milieu of later prominent Buddhist philosophers.

1 Encountering Religion

HIRATSUKA Raichō––her original name was Haru 明––was born in a typical intellectual family of the Meiji period. Her father had been to Europe and the United States as a high-ranking official of the Meiji government and was instrumental in creating the Meiji Constitution. Thus, Raichō was accustomed to Western culture at an early age, as her father brought home books and artifacts from Europe and the United States. On the other hand, as a young child, Raichō was also influenced by her paternal grandmother, who lived a rather traditional life and spoke in the specific dialect of Kishū 紀州. Her situation at home, which juxtaposed her father’s western modernized culture and her grandmother’s pre-modern folk beliefs and tradition, was indicative of the actual predicament of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan. In particular, intellectuals felt the tension between both traditions that clearly coexisted. Raichō herself was not too familiar with her grandmother’s folk culture. Yet, she felt that the modernized culture from the West did not extend beyond their parents and was a masquerade at best. She could not deny the Japanese tradition as it surrounded her in every aspect of life. Whenever this fragile balance became unhinged, such as during wartime, she remembered her own native tradition.

Nevertheless, both Christianity and Buddhism provided an equal foundation for philosophical and religious questions about God in Japan at that time. According to her autobiography, Raichō first started to go to church when reading the Bible on her own nurtured in her an interest in Christianity. However, she increasingly felt uncomfortable with the message of chastity and with the compromise some Christian theologians made with the nascent nationalistic ideology in Japan. Ultimately she came to question the Christian idea of God altogether. She explained that

I had another objection to the idea of God defined by Christianity, that is, its positing of a transcendent being high above the heavens in opposition to lowly man, a creature conceived in sin and the embodiment of sin. If God were truly God, supreme and absolute, there should be nothing to oppose him. I preferred to think that God was not transcendent but immanent in the universe, that he was the ground of being for all of nature, including humankind, and that we all resided within God, the Absolute Being. (Hiratsuka 2006: 77)

At the same time, Raichō became interested in the practice of Zen meditation after she read and was stimulated by an article called “My Encounter with God” (Yo ga kenshin no jikken 予が見神の実験) written by TSUNASHIMA Ryōsen 綱島梁川 (1873–1907) in 1905. Raichō explained her enthusiasm for Ryōsen’s ideas in her autobiography as follows.

When I came to the following passages, I was overwhelmed with the realization that I had been searching for God in the wrong way.

“Verily have I seen God. Verily have I seen Him face to face…entered a realm in which I myself have become God. I give thanks for this, for this utterly confounding, utterly unexpected state of consciousness received directly from God, without the slightest mediation of the testimony or experience of people in the past…. My religious beliefs had been mainly formed by putting my trust in the person of Christ and the prophets, or again, by accepting the validity of their powerful spiritual awareness. Not based on what I myself had experienced, my beliefs were shallow and puerile.

…As I immersed myself more deeply in the life of the spirit, I resolved to cast aside all past testimony and rely on myself to hear the voice of God. My earnest quest to find Him was not in vain. Not once, but many times over, I felt His radiant presence in the deepest chambers of my soul. The God I encountered was no longer the God of old, a conventional timeworn image, an abstract ideal. And yet, I thought might there still not be a thin veil separating me from the God whose presence I felt so vividly?

…But this no longer is the case. The God of heaven and earth has manifested Himself, as glorious as the noonday sun. God is now a living reality, marvelous and wondrous. Oh, what a blessing!”

Reading the article, I realized the futility of filling my head with the words and ideas of others who had made the same quest, or of trying to find the true God, the authentic self, in a world of abstraction that lacked any personal experience. Yet concretely, what must I do in order to come face to face with the living God, to attain true faith and unshakeable peace of mind? It was all very well to say that one should get rid of preconceptions and excessive intellectualizing, “immerse oneself in the life of the spirit,” or “listen with earnest desire for the voice of God,” but to my great distress, I had no idea how to proceed. (Hiratsuka 2006: 82–83)

Ryōsen was a Christian, and he even rejected Zen teachings, claiming a difference between his experience and Zen meditation. In spite of this, Ryōsen’s article and the experience he described therein strongly fascinated Zen Buddhists. After reading Ryōsen’s article, Raichō found the way “to come face to face with the living God, to attain true faith and unshakeable peace of mind” in Zen meditation (Hiratsuka 2006: 83). Although she had never articulated it in this way, her search seemed to have been driven by the hidden, if not unconscious, influence of Emanuel Swedenborg’s ideas.³ Swedenborg was a Christian, albeit one viewed as heretical. In the boom of spiritualism in the West during the nineteenth century, Swedenborg had already combined Christian teachings with Buddhist ideas. In 1887, Philangi Dasa (Herman Vetterling) published a book called Swedenborg the Buddhist and the following year, he started the first Buddhist magazine The Buddhist Ray in the United States. In 1888, a portion of an issue of The Buddhist Ray that mentioned Swedenborg was introduced in the fifth issue of the Hansei kai zasshi 反省会雑誌 (Hansei kai zasshi 5: 4). In 1893, the year the first World’s Parliament of Religions was held in the United States, a Japanese translation of Swedenborg the Buddhist was published in Japan (Yoshinaga 2007: 79–103).

In 1903, an elite student FUJIMURA Misao 藤村操 (1886–1903) committed suicide and died at the age of eighteen. Intellectuals were extremely shocked because he had left a poem that attributed his death to a philosophical issue. Raichō explains the philosophical quest many Japanese intellectuals were engaged in at this time as follows:

Even as I read indiscriminately, my restless mind teemed with questions: What is God? What am I? What is truth? How should one live? I thought I was the only person obsessed with the ultimate questions of human existence, but to a greater or lesser degree, other young Japanese were also searching for a new philosophy of life. Indeed, from about the time of the war with Russia, a youthful vibrancy and romantic spirit had enlivened the world of thought as intellectuals were increasingly drawn to religious and ethical issues. Nietzsche’s philosophy was particularly popular. This was largely due to Takayama Chogyū, who wrote on Nietzsche’s theory of aesthetics of the instinctive life and glorified the medieval Buddhist monk Nichiren as the embodiment of the Nietzschean heroic ideal. The essays on religion by Tsunashima Ryōsen also had an enthusiastic following. Thinkers vied with one another to propound their ideas on religion and ethics and recent converts to Christianity also translated works like Tolstoy’s My Confession and What I Believe.

The shocked reaction of young people to the death of Fujimura Misao, the eighteen-year-old philosophy student who threw himself into the Kegon Falls at Nikkō, or the deaths of so many youths who followed his example, can only be understood in the context of this intellectual ferment. Caught between the dissolution of the old feudal ethic and emergent nationalism and militarism, racked with doubts and apprehension, young Japanese gravitated toward religion and philosophy in their search for the meaning of existence and for inner peace. (Hiratsuka 2006: 76)

In 1904, ARAI Ōsui 新井奥邃 (1846–1922), who studied under Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906), came back to Japan and opened his own school. Thomas Lake Harris was known as a mystic and spiritualistic prophet influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite his Christianity, Arai worshiped an androgynous God called Father-Mother God (J. chichi haha kami 父母神) (Takahashi 2007: 54–56). Arai also suggested that the notion “two-as-one” (J. niji-ichi 二而一) implies that the contradictory two figures should be found as one (Arai 2002: 509–512). This concept later is taken over by SUZUKI Daisetsu and NISHIDA Kitarō. The idea contains an implicit critique of dualism. Arai also emphasized the notion of “love,” explaining that people love people because God loves people (Kudo 2007: 57–62). Raichō does not mention Arai. However, her quasi-bisexual love affair and her commitment to “monism” (ichigenron 一元論) seem to reflect trends of the period that were given expression by Arai. In 1906, IWANO Hōmei 岩野泡鳴 published Mystic Theriantropism (Shinpiteki hanjushugi 神秘的半獣主義) (Iwano 1995). In this monograph, he argues his own theory of mystic individualism while introducing Swedenborg, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) to Japanese readers. Iwano suggested that the phrase “nature-and-yet-spirit” (J. shizen soku shinrei 自然即心霊) was inspired by Mahāyāna sūtras that advanced the “theory of dependent co-arising in the dharma realm” (J. hōkai engi setsu 法界縁起説) or the dictum that “every law is one, one is everything” (J. manpō wa kore ichi, ichi wa kore issai 万法はこれ一 一はこれ一切). He argues that beings are subjected to a Protean cycle and only appear as representations in a specific moment. Therefore, death has to be understood as the metamorphosis of form. Thus conceived, death does not mark an absolute end or indicate finality because, in death, one representation simply changes into another. In the above-mentioned monograph, Iwano proposed a revised version of mysticism that is based on Buddhist thought and challenges Western preconceptions. Ultimately, however, he does not reinforce the Orientalist dichotomy of Japan and the “West” but rather makes the case that both traditions share a common basis.

After Raichō left the Christian church, she found a Zen book called One Wave in the Sea of Zen (Zenkai ichiran 禪海一瀾) written by a monk of Engaku Temple 円覚寺 in Kamakura. During the Meiji period many Japanese intellectuals, such as the famous novelist NATSUME Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916), practiced Zen at Engakuji. Her friend, KIMURA Masako 木村政子, who achieved enlightenment or kenshō 見性 and received a Buddhist name, invited Raichō to a Zen Buddhist training hall, the Ryōmōan 両忘庵.⁴ Raichō wrote “As I understood it, the state of heightened awareness achieved in kenshō seemed the same as TSUNASHIMA Ryōsen’s epiphanic experience of God. At last, I knew what I had to do” (Hiratsuka 2006: 84). She started her zazen 坐禅 and kōan 公案 practice and continued this practice for most of her life. It appears that Raichō quickly grasped the core of Zen teachings. She writes her experience as follows.

Nor shall I ever forget Rōshi’s commentary on the Rinzairoku. Close to sixty years have passed since then, but I will try to set down the gist of his words: The Buddha has three types of bodies—the Essence body, the Bliss body, the Transformation body—but these distinctions are nothing but names and have never really existed. The true source of the Buddha is none other than the person who is actually listening to this talk. Look at the person, the True Man without rank, without shape or form, yet who truly exists. If you are able to discern this, you are no different from the Buddha. Do not ever release your grip on this. Everything that meets your eyes is this. There is no one among you who cannot attain enlightenment. Even now I can hear Rōshi’s clear, strong voice: “Upon this lump of reddish flesh sits a True Man with no rank. Constantly he goes in and out of the gates of your face. If there is anyone here who does not know this for a fact, look, look!” His voice pierced me like a jolt of electricity, and in that instant I said to myself, “I understand!” (Hiratsuka 2006: 93)^.

It was the summer of 1906, only half a year from when she started, that she finally attained kenshō. She writes “I had been reborn. I was a new being. (…) My second birth was of my true self, born from my efforts to look into the deepest level of my consciousness. I had searched and searched and at last found the entrance to the Great Way of True Life” (Hiratsuka 2006: 93).

Once she attained kenshō, Raichō was given the religious name Ekun 慧薫. The experience itself, however, made her realize the non-dual nature of the human predicament. This non-duality is not a truth that can be found externally but one that has to be discovered through introspection. Only when one sees the “true person of no rank” (J. mui shinnin 無位真人) that is, without distinctions inside, does one reach Buddhahood. This understanding of enlightenment is first described in the Records of Linji (Rinzairoku 臨済録). Raichō took this notion of the “true person” one step further and concluded that the true self, that is, the authentic person without distinctions, exists prior to all gender distinction and thus is truly non-gendered.

2 Non-gendered Androgynous Sexuality

In 1911, Seitō, the first women’s magazine by women in Japan, was published. It began as a literary magazine and gradually assumed a large role for the feminist movement in Japan. Raichō wrote the opening statement for the first publication.

• In the beginning, woman was truly the sun. An authentic person.

• Now she is the moon, a wan and sickly moon, dependent on another, reflecting another’s brilliance.

• Seitō herewith announces its birth.

• Created by the brains and hands of Japanese women today, it raises its cry like a newborn child.

• Today, whatever a woman does invites scornful laughter.

• I know full well what lurks behind this scornful laughter.

• Yet I do not fear in the least.

• But then, I ask, what are we to do about the pitiful lot of women who persist in heaping shame and disgrace on themselves?

• Is woman so worthless that she brings only nausea?

• No! An authentic person is not.

• (…)

• Are women so spineless?

• No! An authentic person is not.

• Nor shall I ignore the fact that Seitō, born amid the scorching summer heat, possesses a passion so intense that it destroys the most extreme heat.

• Passion! Passion! We live by this and nothing else.

Passion is the power of prayer. The power of will. The power of Zen meditation. The power of the way of the gods. Passion, in other words, is the power of spiritual concentration.

And spiritual concentration is the one and only gateway to the realm of mystery and wonder…. (Hiratsuka 2006: 157–158)

She continues:

Now I said mystery. But it is not mystery which is fabricated on top of reality or apart from reality by the tip of your fingers or by your head or by your mind. It is not a dream. I should say that it is the mystery which can be seen through meditation in the depths of the human, seen as the real itself within the bottom of our subjectivity. (Hiratsuka 1911: 39)

She concludes:

• I shall search for the genius to be found in the very center of this spiritual concentration.

• Genius itself is mystical. An authentic person…. (Hiratsuka 2006: 157–158)

Raichō declared that women (and even men) need to become authentic persons through “passion” as “the power of Zen meditation,” in other words, “the power of spiritual concentration”. Raichō indeed acquired the power of spiritual concentration through her Zen meditation practice. SHIMADA Akiko 島田暁子 suggests that Raichō’s words, “In the beginning, woman was truly the sun” or “an authentic person,” designate what the Rinzairoku 臨済録 refers to as “True Man with no rank” (Shimada 2000: 234–35). Raichō believes that the authentic person is non-gendered by one’s nature. She continues as follows:

• An authentic person is not a man, not a woman.

• Sexual difference in men or women belongs to one who is in the middle or lower level of spiritual concentration, one who is a mortal and breakable and temporal existence. It does not concern with one who is on the top level high above, who is deathless and immortal.

• I have never known that there are women in this world, and men in this world.

• Many men and women have appeared to the eyes of my mind. But I have never seen a man or a woman.

Hence, the many outrageous deeds that overflow from the excessive mental mind are hard to cure and make us feel irredeemably tired.

The waning of individuality! Indeed, it showed me woman for the first time at the same time, man. And I learned the word of death in this world.

Death! The fear of death! At once, I was born into heaven and earth. I was floating between life and death. But this time, alas, what stumbles in front of death, what is immortal, what is called woman. (Hiratsuka 1911: 39–40)

Like many mystics who deny that mysticism implies a monotheistic belief system, Raichō believes that one can only reach the truth if one descends into the depth of the self in Zen meditation. In that ultimate stage at the bottom of the self, there is no gender difference, there is only the “an authentic person” (J. tensai 天才). Raichō says that “Our savior is the genius within us. We no longer seek our savior in temples or churches, in the Buddha or God. We no longer wait for divine revelation. By our own efforts, we shall lay bare the secrets of nature within us. (…) We shall be our own miracles, our own mysteries” (Hiratsuka 2006: 159). This idea not to seek the savior in temples or churches reflects the mystic trend of this time, which included both Christian and Buddhist beliefs and practices. We can thus say that for Raichō mysticism constitutes the rebellion against the old conservative values and authorities in both Japan and the West. From her point of view, the only way to gain women’s freedom and liberation is to attain the full “expression of the genius” that appears once the inauthentic ego-self has been abandoned. She proceeds by asking

… That said, what is this true liberation that I most earnestly desire for women? Needless to say, it is nothing less than the fullest expression of the genius and enormous talents that are hidden within us. And in order to realize this, we must cast aside every obstacle that stands in our way. But when I say obstacle, do I mean external pressures or the lack of knowledge? No, this is not what I mean, though these certainly should not be discounted. What I am saying is that the main obstacle is ourselves—we, the possessors of genius, we, who are each one of us a sacred place in which genius resides.

Only when we cut ourselves loose from the self, will we reveal our genius. For the sake of our hidden genius, we must sacrifice this self…. (Hiratsuka 2006: 158–159)

Here, Raichō claims that in the primordial intact nature there is only the authentic person or genius, an authentic person who is not gendered as man or woman. Since woman only appeared with the impurity of spiritual power, she must seize her own genius hidden behind femaleness. This unique idea could be a bottleneck in some way for the older more archaic traditional woman’s movement, but it indicated a pioneering thought for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) issues.

Raichō did not hesitate to express her sexual impulses and did not see any conflict between her Zen practice and her sexual passions. For example, she writes that she shared her first kiss with a young monk, NAKAHARA Shūgaku 中原秀岳. After she finished her meditation in the late evening, she met Nakahara at the door. “On an impulse, I kissed him without moment’s hesitation. I stepped out into the cold wind and hurried home” (Hiratsuka 2006: 103). Raichō said this kiss did not indicate love but rather meant thank you and good-bye.

One year later, in 1908, she was involved in an attempted love suicide with the novelist MORITA Sōhei森田草平 (1881–1949). According to her autobiography, Morita was deeply influenced by The Triumph of Death (1894) written by Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) and sent her a letter: “Women, he wrote, are the most beautiful at the moment of death, and for this reason, he [Morita] intended to kill me [Raichō]. As an artist and a disciple of Beauty, he was determined to see me, the fairest of all, in my last moments” (Hiratsuka 2006: 109). She ran away from her home and went to the snowy mountains with Morita. Certainly she might have been curious, but it is not clear whether she intended to have a heterosexual love affair. Before going to the mountain, he tried to have sexual intercourse with her, but she refused, saying to him, “There’s no point in asking me. I am neither woman nor man. I transcend such distinctions” (Hiratsuka 2006: 108).

In the mountain, Morita suddenly said; “I am a coward! I can’t kill anyone! I thought if it were you, I could do it, but I just can’t.” When she heard this, she was disappointed by his cowardice. Morita refused to walk any further and they ended up spending a night in the snow. At that time, after Morita fell asleep, she had a spiritual experience. She recounts this experience as follows:

A full moon as bright as a mirror hung high in the deep blue sky. Illuminated by its rays, the chiaroscuro of glistening snow and dark folds of the mountains suggested a host of banners unfurling soundlessly from the heavens. Overwhelmed by the majesty of the scene, I thought I had entered the kingdom of the dead and was sitting alone in a palace of phosphorescent ice and snow, unencumbered by body or mind. I had not forgotten Morita. In fact, I shook him from time to time, but he merely blinked his eyes, oblivious to the sublime grandeur of nature. (Hiratsuka 2006: 116)

She states that her pen-name, Raichō, came from this experience of the sublime in the mountains. “Raichō” is the name of a bird that lives in the snowy mountains. It would be considered a great scandal for a well-born young woman to be involved in an attempted double suicide. However, Raichō herself was not committed to the idea of the suicide itself but was simply curious to see the depth of passion in Morita. Once, she yelled at Morita while looking at him kissing her hand and nibbling her fingers, “Sensei, can’t you be serious for once! I detest insincere behavior. Be more serious, will you!”(Hiratsuka 2006: 107). Morita novelized this incident in a 1909 novel Baien 煤煙, serialized in a newspaper. After this incident, she had her first sexual experience with the monk Nakahara. The relationship with him continued until she met her life-long partner, OKUMURA Hiroshi 奥村博史 (1889–1964). It is interesting that, despite her good social standing, she had no compunction about engaging in pre-marital sex as well as in a sensual, if not sexual, relationship with another woman. Just before the encounter with Okumura, she had been devoted to a romantic relationship with a woman for one year. She thus clearly defied the social norms and engaged in, if not promoted, counter-cultural behavior and values.

In Seitō, she expressed her feelings transparently to a young woman painter, OTAKE Kōkichi 尾竹紅吉 (1893–1966). According to Raichō’s autobiography, her first impression of Kōkichi was “a boyish young girl with a nicely rounded face” (Hiratsuka 2006: 175). In her essay in the August 1912 issue, Raichō recalls her memory of Kōkichi citing Kōkichi’s letters. Raichō commences her account by narrating her first impressions of Kōkichi.

• Again my mind is flooded with memories of the night of that meeting.

• I could not know how fervent were my hugs and kisses, trying to enwrap Kōkichi into my own world. I could not know. But, how could Kōkichi’s heart be burnt so instantaneously, how could it be so fiery. (Hiratsuka 1912a: 82–83)

At that time, Raichō and other members of Seitō were subjected to a malicious rumor due to Kōkichi’s essays published in Seitō. A newspaper reported of a scandalous night involving “the five colored liquor incident” (J. goshiki no sake jiken) and “visiting Yoshiwara incident” (J. Yoshiwara hōmon jiken). The latter event was scandalous because Yoshiwara 吉原was the place for licensed prostitution houses which served men exclusively and which limited the consumption of alcohol to men. In accordance with the moral norms of the time, the newspaper article found it immoral that young women drank alcohol and went to the brothel in Yoshiwara. The newspaper also mocked the “so-called new woman” by focusing on the love affair between Raichō and Kōkichi: “The July issue of Seitō reports the curious doings of Raichō and the good-looking young boy she has been “‘wooing with her left hand’” (Hiratsuka 2006: 178).⁵ This is because Kōkichi had written in an edition of Seitō that while “Raichō’s ‘From the Oval window’ has been cut due to page limitations, she actually seems to be very busy these days doing work with her right hand and making love with her left hand.”⁶ After those incidents, many withdrew or cancelled their subscriptions. Under these circumstances, Raichō decided to write and publish an essay defending Kōkichi, who had to resign from Seitō and was admitted to a sanatorium in Chigasaki with tuberculosis. In this essay, Raichō does not deny the rumor of the love affair but rather expresses her honest affection for Kōkichi. Raichō asks Kōkichi to undergo a medical examination for tuberculosis. If the diagnosis was tuberculosis, Kōkichi would be quarantined and they would be separated for at least a certain amount of time.

• “Hey, I feel it being together like this is only today.”

• Kōkichi raised her head and glanced at the farewell poem on the blackboard and immediately leaned on me and looked down.

• “Why only today?” I asked.

• “I will have an examination. And it will be determined which. Yes, which.”

• “Yes, it will be determined which. But I don’t know which will it be. Anyway, for better or worse, it is much safer if it is determined which rather than this precarious state where it is not determined.”

• “But if it is not good, I will not see you anymore. I won’t be allowed to see you.”

• I held Kōkichi’s big hand without a word.

• (…)

• “I hate being a human.”

• After a long pause, Kōkichi said that she learned what love is for the first time and learned what a heartache feels like for the first time.

• “No, I can’t. I’m stumped. Because I am a human.”

• “You won’t be stumped being a human.”

• “I am different from you. I can’t live without meeting you, I will be too lonely,” Kōkichi said in a weak voice. This is not the first time that she spoke of being lonely. I never know what to do in such cases. I couldn’t do anything to get Kōkichi to work on her own paintings. But at this time I didn’t feel like preaching with the attitude of a teacher or a senior as I usually do.

• Asking, “Are you lonely? Why?” I put both my hands on Kōkichi’s neck and pressed my breasts to her breasts.

• “No. No,” I murmured in her mouth. Kōkichi turned her head away from me, but she would not move.

• I spoke to her as if singing a song while listening quietly to her heartbeats resonating with my body.

• “Hey, say yes. I will be ill if you are ill. Let’s go to Chigasaki together. To my favorite place, Chigasaki, all right? At night under brightening stars, we will ride on a boat and row to Eboshi island, just the two of us. We will row a boat far to the offing. Hey, is it all right?” Kōkichi was facing downward for a long time. (Hiratsuka 1912a: 88–89)

When Kōkichi said she is lonely being alone in a sanatorium, Raichō kissed her passionately. Doing this, Raichō risked being infected with tuberculosis, but she accepted the possibility of this danger and promised to go to the sanatorium together in case she got sick. These emotions arose so suddenly yet naturally that Raichō could never have denied nor suppressed her affection. The spontaneity and integrity of her affection for Kōkichi was reminiscent of her first kiss with the monk after meditation as described above. Ironically, Raichō met her long-life partner OKUMURA Hiroshi in Chigasaki where she suddenly fell in love with him. For Raichō, homosexual and heterosexual desire are not mutually exclusive. She writes about her non-gendered sexuality as follows in a letter to her parents, which she wrote when she left home to live with Okumura. She published it as “To My Parents on Becoming Independent” (Dokuritsu suru ni oite ryōshin ni 独立するに就いて両親に) in Seitō of February 1914:

Generally, perhaps because I do not have a younger sister or brother, I have had the desire to take someone younger—whether man or woman—under my wing and treat him/her kindly. My feelings became clear in these two or three years, as anyone of the same age or older never attracted my attention, while my love interest was always for the younger. I have been giving kisses to him/her as a lover. This way, I was sometimes like his/her older sister or mother and sometimes like his/her lover. (Hiratsuka 1914a: 111)

Raichō rationalizes her affection toward younger people as her unfulfilled affection towards younger siblings. Therefore, her lover could be either a man or a woman. She describes her love as a motherly one; analogically, her “child lover” could be either a girl or a boy. Given her personal account of love, the literary trope of the kiss in her writing can be interpreted either as a metonymic expression of love or as the personal confession of her sexual desire.

Raichō encountered the idea of homosexuality for the first time when she read Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis (1859–1939). She published an abridged translation from it as “Sexual Inversion of Women” (J. Joseikan no dōsei renai 女性間の同性恋愛) in the April 1914 edition of Seitō. The excerpt was translated by Nomo野母but Raichō added an introduction. In this, she explains that her interest in this theory was rooted in her experience of being “an object of love by a woman who had near-inherent sexual inversion for a year” (Hiratsuka 1914b: 1). This article obviously refers to her love affair with Kōkichi. In 1914, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) by Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) had already been published and widely read. According to this, sexuality at that time did not mean one’s personal sexual orientation but rather indicated a person’s psychotic disease. Raichō was in danger of being considered as having the disease of sexual perversion. Until this time, homosexuality was viewed negatively and regarded as a crime. These books enabled Raichō to make sense of her sexual experiences and categorized her affair with Kōkichi as “sexual inversion.”⁷ She strove to suppress her homosexual desire. Later in her autobiography, Raichō again recalls her love affair with Kōkichi and writes as follows:

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 proves that my feelings for her were not homosexual. (Hiratsuka 2006: 186)

Apparently, Raichō felt compelled to use her heterosexual relation with Okumura to prove that her affections for Kōkichi had not been homosexual. However, according to her autobiography, it seems that the only way to stay in a relationship with Okumura, who is presumably monogamist, was to abandon her natural affections and emotions. She had to deny her love for Kōkichi as well as her love for the monk Nakahara. One day, she took Okumura to Kaizenji 海禅寺 to introduce him to Nakahara. She thought she could introduce the monk as her first lover but Okumura got so upset that she said nothing about her affair with him.

I thought he would enjoy the visit; instead, I had hurt his feelings and made him sad and angry.

Yet Shūgaku and I were very fond of each other. But ours was no ordinary relationship. There were no conditions attached, and we asked nothing of each other. By its very nature and substance, my love for Shūgaku was totally different from the love I bore for Okumura. To me, there was no contradiction in loving two men at the same time, but I also knew that Okumura would never understand or accept this. Explanations would not do any good; he would suffer no matter what.

After the visit, I gradually withdrew from the temple. I wish things had turned out differently, but I could not bear to see Okumura suffer. I had to choose one or the other, and he had first claim. (I stopped seeing Shūgaku but continued to hear about him from Kimura Masako until he died in middle age. (Hiratsuka 2006: 229)

In this way, Raichō may have betrayed the genius of her authentic personhood that she had liberated in her religious practice insofar as she applied and transformed the traditional ideology of romantic love within the newly modernizing society. A consistent refutation of dualism would have implied a rejection of monogamous heterosexual marriage as well. However, Okumura would not have understood such an ideal and Raichō did not want to hurt him. She chose Okumura over her personal beliefs. However, it has to be noted that she never accepted the conservative Japanese marriage system. She lived with Okumura from 1914 on and they had two children. She finally did marry him the year her father died in 1941. In her later years, she left spiritualism behind and became an active feminist.

3 Raichō’s Feminism

The basis of Raichō’s feminism is the belief that women are human first and female second. When Seitō was discontinued in 1916, she joined the Association of New Women (J. shin fujin kyōkai 新婦人協会) in 1919. In 1920, in the opening statement of a newly published magazine called Woman’s League (J. Josei dōmei 女性同盟), she looked back at her own opening statement in the first issue of Seitō and admitted that there she had emphasized spiritual freedom and independence over social responsibility. In other words, the statement “In the beginning, woman was the sun” was designed to evoke the self-improvement of women in the sense of a spiritual or religious movement and did not serve as a call for social change. Raichō said that “woman should not only demand freedom or independence or rights in outer life, but rather, prior to demanding those, should return back to herself, understand the dignity of her inner self, possess the freedom of her inner self, and have the freedom and independence of the inner mind” (Hiratsuka 1920: 2–3).

Raichō first awakened to feminism when she read Ellen Kay’s (1849–1926) Love and Marriage (1911). While living with Okumura, she entered deeply into Kay’s thought. In some sense, Raichō’s feminism first addressed the everyday life of women and practical issues such as the difficulty of earning money while having and raising children. She, thus, put motherhood in the center of the role and responsibility of women. She writes in the same essay that “I believe that what turns everything evil to happiness is not something like “no-self” (S. anātman), nor the philanthropic love as conceived by religious people and thinkers but rather egoistic and also altruistic romantic love and maternal love by means of a woman’s instinct towards her own flesh and blood” (Hiratsuka 1920: 10–11).

Her beliefs led her to her involvement in a debate over the protection of motherhood and a salary for housewives. In this debate, her theory of motherhood was criticized by YOSANO Akiko 与謝野晶子 (1878–1942) as advocating the concept of domination and militaristic nationalism (Yosano 1980: 158). According to YONEDA Sayoko 米田佐代子, Raichō did not reply to Yosano on this point, but Yosano’s critique must have marked a turning point in Raichō’s thought. From then on, she rejected nationalism and thought of human beings first as “citizens of the world” (J. sekaimin 世界民) or “citizens of the universe” (J. uchūmin 宇宙民) (Yoneda 2002: 106–108). Even though she changed her focus from spiritual transformation to social change, she never lost sight of her religious experience and devotion she had as a young adult.

Therefore, the following question arises: did she ever really lose all her devotion to religion? Is it truly impossible to find any connection between religion and her later works? In her autobiography, she rarely writes about religious enthusiasm in the later part of her life. However, she mentions the name DEGUCHI Nao 出口直 (1837–1918), who was a guru of a new religious sect, Ōmoto 大本.⁸ Ōmoto is a sect founded in 1892 that originated from Shintō 神道 and conflicted with State Shintō (kokka shintō 国家神道). Deguchi acted as a medium who listens to the gods and writes down their sayings while under trance. It is said, because Deguchi was illiterate, her automatic writings (J. ofudesaki お筆先) demonstrated her spiritual power as a medium. Already in the early Taisho period (1912–1926), Deguchi had predicted that there would be a war against the United States and that Tokyo would be destroyed and reduced to ruins. Raichō’s sister, who was an enthusiastic follower of Deguchi, had evacuated from Tokyo. With the intensification of the war, Raichō moved to her sister’s house away from Tokyo and stayed with her sister’s family until the end of the war.

During wartime, the Japanese government repeatedly cracked down on the Ōmoto religion. With State Shintō as the ideology of the empire, the Japanese government thought it to be indispensable to impose its rule and took the policy of limiting religious activities. The government attempted to ban many religions to enable people to concentrate on State Shintō. Deguchi, however, was a traditional shaman and thus followed Japanese folk religion. During her possessions by a god, despite being illiterate, she wrote the god’s words of prophecy. With DEGUCHI Onisaburō 出口王仁三郎 (1871–1948), her associate, who also became a well-known spiritual medium, she started Ōmoto as a new religious movement. While founded in Kyoto, it quickly spread with the help of the mass media.

Although such a new religious movement was likely to be persecuted, especially given the political circumstance, shamanic beliefs were widely accepted at the time as a contemporary form of mysticism. Raichō even published a short story called “Evocation” (Kōshin 降神), which recounts a shaman’s possession by a god (Hiratsuka 1912b: 44–53). All protagonists in this story speak with the Kansai dialect. The character of the shaman seems to be based on the person of DEGUCHI Nao. In the story, the shaman enters a room and starts murmuring Shintō prayers as if she was in meditation. Since the story is told from the perspective of an anonymous narrator who participated in such an evocation, it is not at all clear if this was based on the experience of Raichō or that of her sister.⁹ In her own life, Raichō herself was alleged to have shamanic powers. Her biography recounts times when she touched the bodies of sick villagers and cured them (Hiratsuka 1972: 14–16).

After the Second World War, Raichō was involved in the peace movement. In 1949, she joined the World Federalist Movement and began the study of Esperanto. It is known that the members of Ōmoto appreciated Esperanto and even published a book in Esperanto in 1924 (Hiratsuka 1972: 59–63). Her involvement in the peace movement and her affiliation with Ōmoto were, thus, not in conflict.

From 1930 on, Raichō collaborated with TAKAMURE Itsue 高群逸枝 (1894–1964). Takamure devoted herself to the study of women’s history with a particular focus on the study of matrilineal systems: Women’s History of Great Japan, vol. 1 (Bokeisei no kenkyū: Dainihon joseishi 1) (1938) and Studies in Uxorilocal Marriage (Shōseikon no kenkyū) (1953). Matriarchy became an important issue for Japanese feminism to assert that the paternal system was not always fundamental to Japanese society. It is known that some groups like shamans and traditional performance dancers accepted the matriarchal system. In Ōmoto, this is also the case. The image of the historical matrilineal system is somehow connected to the image of the shaman. The movement of mysticism, it appears, should have accepted this shamanic tradition, which is not necessarily in contradiction to Zen meditation.

Let us reflect on the role of the maternal figure in the religious sphere. Shintō from the beginning included the notion of motherhood or shamanic motherhood as one of the central figures. As for Japanese Buddhism, while Buddhism prohibits monks from having sexual relations with women, it was consistently broken until finally a monk Shinran 親鸞 (1173–1262) married a nun Eshin 恵信 (1182–1268), after a dream in which Avalokiteśvara promised to incarnate in female form as an object of his desire. Since the Meiji period, the institution of priestly marriage has been very common in Japan. KAWAI Hayao 河合隼雄 (1928–2007), a Jungian psychologist very influenced by Buddhism, points out the function of the Mother archetype here (Kawai 1996: 119–120). He explains the function of the Father archetype as the function of cutting and the Mother archetype as the function of the lap. The function of cutting has to be understood in terms of the Freudian notion of castration anxiety. The Mother archetype refers to the origin of life. He even mentions the relationship between his work and Zen Buddhism: “I have felt that my work as a psychotherapist is somewhat similar to Zen” (Kawai 1996: 130.) According to Kawai’s explanation, priestly marriage is permitted in Japan because of the Buddhist emphasis on motherhood. Moreover, it is argued that the father’s power at home was weakened in Japan after the war. This is partly because many men died in the war, and there was an increase in the number of fatherless families. Furthermore, even if the fathers came back, they could not keep their dignity because they lost the war. In other words, the paternal system collapsed. During and after the war, the Japanese family inevitably became centered on the mother. The emphasis on motherhood is rather understandable in these circumstances.

Moreover, Japanese Buddhism contains the traditional images of female divinities, and the role of femininity or motherhood in Buddhism cannot be denied. It is mentioned that Raichō’s words, “In the beginning, woman was the sun” implies the image of the sun goddess, Amaterasu Ōmikami 天照大神who is believed to be the original ancestor of imperial lineage. One could further argue that the symbol of the mother goddess is present in the Meiji period, as the Meiji government utilized the image of Empress Jingū (J. Jingū kōgō 神功皇后) on a stamp in 1908 and on the one-yen bill issued in 1878. Empress Jingū figures in the tales of Hachiman 八幡 which emphasize her shamanic features and introduce her as the mother of Emperor Ōjin (J. Ōjin tennō 応神天皇). In addition, Empress Jingū was worshiped as a pregnant warrior who conquered the Korean peninsula. From the strong image of women as shamans or mothers in the Japanese religions of that time, Raichō developed the idea of motherhood as the necessary focal point of social relationships. In her own autobiography, her mother was not a strong enough figure to constitute the basis of the symbolic image of motherhood. Further, even in Raichō’s religious thought, motherhood does not derive from the male-female dualism but rather indicates a primal being prior to the male-female distinction. The most important influence on Raichō, however, is the trend of spiritualism in both the East and the West that functioned as a resistance movement against the conservative and authoritarian system. In addition, Japanese religion has always tended to accept diversity and syncretism. In the Japanese context, it is not difficult to reconcile Zen Buddhism, shamanic Shintō, or even Christian spiritualism. In this context, Raichō conceived of motherhood as something non-dual or mystical and used its concept to ground her religious philosophy.