Waka Yamada

Japanese-born activist

• Pronunciation: WAH-kah YAH-mah-dah
• Born: December 1, 1879
• Birthplace: Kurihama, Kanagawa (now Yokosuka), Japan
• Died: September 6, 1957
• Place of death: Iga-cho, Japan

Waka Yamada was a social critic and the author of several nonfiction collections. She lectured extensively on women’s rights in Japan and abroad, and founded one of Japan’s first shelters devoted exclusively to supporting homeless women and children. Overcoming her past as a prostitute, Yamada was among the earliest feminist intellectuals to advocate for women’s rights in Japan during the early twentieth century.

Birth name: Waka Asaba

Areas of achievement: Activism, social issues, women’s rights

Early Life

Waka Yamada was born Waka Asaba in Kurihama, a small fishing village near Yokahama, Japan, in December 1879. She was the fifth of seven children, and she received only a fourth-grade education before going to work on the family farm. In 1896, at the age of sixteen and through an arranged marriage, she became the wife of Hichijiro Araki, a local man who was ten years older. Seeking to escape the unhappy union, and due in part to her family’s financial difficulties, she was lured to the United States in the late 1890s after being convinced that she could work as a maid and find a better life there. Instead, she became what the Japanese idiomatically call an Ameyuki-san or karayuki-san, a woman who traveled abroad and was sexually exploited. On her arrival, Yamada Waka was forced to work as a prostitute in a brothel in Seattle, Washington, one that catered exclusively to white men. She was given the name the “Arabian Oyae” or “Oyae of Arabia.”

The following year Yamada was befriended by a Japanese American correspondent for a San Francisco–based Japanese newspaper. They were able to escape and evade thugs hired by Waka’s pimp, but when funds were depleted she was betrayed and again forced into prostitution, this time in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Escaping once more, she fled to the city’s Presbyterian Occidental Mission House for Girls (later known as Cameron House), and there she managed to better educate herself and become proficient in English. She married Kakichi Yamada, her teacher and a Japanese immigrant himself, sometime between 1904 and 1905. At the time it was very rare for an educated Japanese man to marry a woman who he knew had been a prostitute. Following the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the couple returned to Japan, where Kakichi taught foreign languages and became a supporter of feminist causes. Their home soon served as a kind of salon for like-minded people. Because of their fourteen year age difference, Waka often referred to her husband as “Daddy.”

Life’s Work

Throughout the early twentieth century in Japan, Waka Yamada was an active journalist, writer, and feminist, publishing her work through periodicals such as Seito (Bluestocking) and in the newspaper advice column Tokyo Asahi Shimbrun. For a time she published her own periodical called Women and the New Society. In the 1930s, Yamada became the chair of the Japanese branch of the Motherhood Protection League. She also helped to get a law passed by the Japanese legislature providing financial aid to poor mothers of young children.

In 1937, through the sponsorship of Shufunotomo magazine, Yamada traveled to the United States for two months to lecture on motherhood and other topics. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt received her at the White House during the trip. Some critics believed this trip served the cause of Japanese propaganda, as Japan was then engaged in a war with China. During the same visit, she returned to Seattle and lectured, only to be heckled by audience members who knew of her previous life as a prostitute. Yamada returned to Japan, and in Tokyo she founded a shelter for homeless mothers and children who were fleeing abusive homes—the first such institution ever established in Japan.

Although Waka Yamada’s prominence receded somewhat following World War II, in 1947 she founded a school for young women modeled on the Cameron House. She then devoted the last ten years of her life to the rehabilitation of prostitutes, many of whom had been war widows and lacked employment skills. Acknowledging her early life experiences, Yamada was quoted as saying, “Once I was not worthy of standing before you, but I have been reborn. Because I have been resurrected from hell, I have plenty to tell you.”

Significance

Although opinions about her effectiveness as a women’s advocate varied among her peers, Waka Yamada is still considered to be in the front ranks of Japanese feminists. As a member of the Japanese feminist community gathered around Seito magazine, Yamada helped to redefine the rights, roles, and responsibilities of women in modern Japan. Many of her essays, such as “Love and Society” and “Women Bow Down to Society,” were collected and published in the 1920s, and her newspaper columns were adapted into two books: Counseling Women (1932) and On Love (1936); another book of hers, The Social Status of Japanese Women, was published in Tokyo in 1935.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Gail Lee, ed. Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Print. An account of the treatment of women and the progress of women’s rights in a changing Japanese society; contains information on Yamada.

Sievers, Sharon L. Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1983. Print. An account of the rise of feminism in Japan, including passages about Yamada.

Yamazaki, Tomoko. The Story of Yamada Waka: From Prostitute to Feminist Pioneer. Trans. Wakako Horonaka and Ann Kostant. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985. Print. An abridged and translated version of the 1978 Japanese-language book about the life of Waka Yamada.