“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 Kokichi

(1886–1971) The famed writer, journalist, and feminist Hiratsuka Raicho was born to a middle class family in Tokyo in 1886. In her youth she found herself critical of women’s place in society. She pressured her skeptical family into allowing her to obtain higher education. She enrolled at Japan’s Womens University where she became introduced to anarchism through the writings of Henrik Ibsen and Max Stirner.

When she graduated, she founded Bluestocking, Japan’s first women’s magazine in 1913. Started as a literary collective, the magazine quickly became a platform for her anarcha-feminist ideas, with concepts such as abortion, homosexuality, and free love openly discussed. Though it only lasted a couple of years, it deeply influenced the women’s movement in Japan. Raicho caused public outrage when she and her Bluestocking co-contributor Otake Kokichi openly had a queer relationship with one another during their years in the collective.

She would later form the New Women’s Association, which succeeded in getting the ban on womens participation in political meetings and organizations in Japan scrapped in 1922. Settling down with artist Okumura Hiroshi, the pair would spend their later years involved in the cooperative and anti-nuclear movements in Japan.

Further Reading:
-In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist by Raicho Hiratsuka