Yosano Akiko (Shinjitai: , seiji: ; 7 December 1878 – 29 May 1942) was the pen-name of a Japanese author, poet, pioneering feminist, pacifist, and social reformer, active in the late Meiji era as well as the Taishō and early Shōwa eras of Japan. Her name at birth was . She is one of the most noted, and most controversial, post-classical female poets of Japan.
Early life
Yosano was born into a prosperous merchant family in Sakai, near Osaka. From the age of 11, she was the family member most responsible for running the family business, which produced and sold yōkan, a type of confection. From early childhood, she was fond of reading literary works, and read widely in her father's extensive library. As a high school student, she began to subscribe to the poetry magazine Myōjō (Bright Star), of which she became a prominent contributor. Myōjō's editor, Tekkan Yosano, whom she later married, taught her tanka poetry, having met her on visits to Osaka and Sakai to deliver lectures and teach in workshops.
Yosano was not allowed opportunities to interact with the opposite sex, which she cited as the cause for her latent sexuality. She was not allowed to leave her home unaccompanied and could count the number of times she crossed the threshold of someone else's home. After being married she reflects poorly upon her childhood, "I realized for the first time how jaundiced, unfair, and dark my childhood had been."
Yosano was married when she was 24, and went on to have 13 children, 11 of which lived to adulthood. The two poets started a new life together in the suburb of Tokyo and were married in 1901. Tekkan was married when he met Akiko, and left his wife for her a year after they met one another. Tekkan had extramarital affairs during their marriage, including with his ex-wife.
Midaregami
In 1901, Yosano brought out her first volume of tanka, Midaregami (Tangled Hair), which contained 400 poems and was mostly denounced by literary critics. Despite this critical reaction, it was widely read and became a sort of lighthouse for free-thinkers of her time. Her first book, by far her best known, brought a passionate individualism to traditional tanka poetry, unlike any other work of the late Meiji period.
The majority are love poems through which Akiko expresses her feelings towards Tekkan Yosano. It was through this particular collection that she set an image for herself as well as the stage for female voices in modern Japan. The poems tended to express femininity in a manner unconventional for her time, especially from a female writer.
In traditional Japanese values, women are perceived as (and are expected to be) gentle and modest. The domestic and societal roles of Japanese women were and are focused on procreation and raising children, especially boys. Midaregami not only expresses concepts and/or issues that pertain to women and are not normally voiced in such a public manner, but also created a new, revolutionary image of womanhood, as lively, free, sexual and assertive people, nothing at all like the conventional picture of the modest, demure young lady expected in Japan. Yosano's women were not passive, but active agents of their love lives. In a typical tanka, Yosano wrote: "Spring is short what is there that has eternal life, I said and, made his hands seek out my powerful breasts." The Midaregami posed a challenge to patriarchal values of Japanese society, as well as the accepted literary and cultural conventions of her time. Although Akiko Yosano's work was denounced and severely criticized, it served as a great source of inspiration to women of her day. The American scholar Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase noted: "The visual representations of flesh, lips and breasts symbolize women’s sexuality".
No poet had written of breasts in a tanka before, which led the poet Nobutsuna Sasaki to attack her in a magazine article for "corrupting public morals" and "mouthing obscenities fit for a whore". From the examples in the Midaregami, the idea of nudity changed the way Japanese people viewed eroticism and female sexuality. Up until this point women's breasts were a symbol for child feeding and motherhood. From then on they began to take on a different representation; that of natural beauty, and especially that of young women. A door was opened for Japanese women to imagine new representations of sexuality and the female body.