Well before World War II and the Allied Occupation of Japan, Ichikawa Fusae was a prominent activist in Japan for women’s political and legal rights in Japan and had forged strong relations with American and European women’s organizations. Her roots were rural, and her highest level of education was at a teacher’s school for women. After briefly writing for a local newspaper in the city of Nagoya, she came to Tokyo, 1919, to work in the women’s section of the Federation of Trade Unions and joined Hiratsuka Raicho and Oku Mumeo in founding the short-lived New Women’s Association, 1919-1921. During a journey to the United States in the early 1920s, shortly after the 19th Amendment to the Constitution enfranchised American women, she met Alice Paul, a key figure in the American suffragist movement and founder of the Women’s Party. Back in Japan, Ichikawa founded the Women’s Suffrage League in 1924 and together with other women’s groups worked for women’s suffrage and improved legal status. The Universal Manhood Suffrage Bill in Japan, 1925, which granted the vote to all men age 25 and over who were not on public relief roles, acted as a decided spur. Ichikawa also represented Japan as a delegate at international women’s meetings. Although the Lower House of the Japanese Diet voted in 1931 to allow women’s suffrage in local elections, the Upper House of appointed peers refused to approve the legislation. In addition, Ichikawa was active in the League for Protection of Motherhood. In militarist Japan after 1937, the suffragist and other women’s causes had to be temporarily abandoned.

During the Asia/Pacific War, Japanese women were asked, indeed mandated, to join patriotic associations, which were almost always controlled by men, and were increasingly tapped to perform service on the homefront in neighborhood and ward associations. Many years later, Ichikawa expressed anti-war feelings but at the time her views were more ambiguous about expansionism and Japan’s role in China. As did other women leaders, in speeches and articles she exhorted Japanese women, including housewives, to assume public responsibilities. From 1940-1945, she had the ill fortune to be named as a director of the Great Japan Literary Patriotic Society, a wartime writer’s propaganda organization; she also served, perhaps reluctantly, as a councilor in the Central Federation for Mobilization of the National Spirit. As air raids intensified, she left Tokyo for a farm village. When the war officially ended in 1945, Ichikawa quickly resurfaced as an activist. In late September, just as General MacArthur was establishing his headquarters in Tokyo and making his earliest statements on behalf of women’s liberation, Ichikawa was once again calling for women’s suffrage and in November founded the Women’s League for New Japan. Ever since, there has been considerable confusion over the relative roles of Japanese women themselves and MacArthur in accelerating women’s emancipation in Japan. In December 1945, the Japanese Cabinet recommended and the Japanese Diet approved legislation to grant women the vote and lower the voting age for men and women from age twenty-five to twenty. Before and after, Ichikawa together with other women leaders lobbied strenuously for the vote, and in the first postwar elections of April 1946, Ichikawa took to the stump and to the radio to help urge women to exercise their new rights at the voting booths. As is generally know, women responded in large numbers and elected thirty-nine women to the Lower House, a high point in postwar Japan. Ichikawa offered her own assessment on the issue during an interview many years later, 1964: "Without the Occupation or the defeat of Japan, the realization of women’s constitutional rights would not have been achieved so quickly."

When the House of Peers was replaced by the House of Councillors under the 1947 Constitution, Ichikawa made plans to run for a seat in the first election to the new upper house. To the shock of her followers at home and her friends overseas, she was purged from public life for her wartime role in the propaganda association. No amount of letter writing could convince Occupation authorities to overturn the ban. She was not, declared Lt. Ethel Weed, the American officer who headed the women’s bureau in GHQ’s Civil Information and Education Section, one of our kind, whatever that meant. She remained on the political purge list until October 1947. Not until the Occupation had ended was Ichikawa, who by then had acquired a legion of sympathizers, able to run for office. From 1953 to 1981, she compiled a spectacular electoral record. After winning a six-year term in the House of Councillors on her first try, she was re-elected in 1959, 1965, failed in 1971, but was elected again in 1974 and 1980. She was even invited to the United States on a prestigous intellectual exchange program in late 1952 and was introduced to famous Americans, including Eleanor Roosevelt. Ichikawa, who remained single throughout her life, was non-partisan and was identified with clean government or pure politics. She would not take large political contributions, for example. In the 1980 election, one year before her death, she won the largest number of votes from the national constituency. During these post-Occupation years, she remained true to her original cause of elevating the status of Japanese women. She joined others to promote the anti-Prostitution Bill in 1956, and supported the International Women’s Year Conference in 1975. She is honored and remembered today by the Ichikawa Fusae Memorial Association, which houses the Fusen Kaikan (Women’s Suffrage Center), an exhibit hall and library in tribute to her life and achievements.