Katō Shizue (often spelled Shidzue, her perferred romanization in English), married at age 17 and soon the mother of two sons and much later of one daughter, became Japan’s foremost advocate of family planning and reproductive rights in prewar 20th century Japan. She has been given the major share of credit for gaining acceptance of birth control among the Japanese, especially women, in the postwar era. She also was a leading politician in the postwar era. Katō is her surname from a second marriage to in 1944 to Katō Kanju, a socialist labor leader and father of her daughter. Her first husband in 1914 was Baron Ishimoto Keikichi, who essentially abandoned her and his family in the early 1930s after earlier encouraging his young wife to become more liberated. He did however agree that she was the better parent and never claimed the sons as was his legal right under the Civil Code of 1898. One son would die from tuberculosis during World War II, and the other, though drafted into the army, survived.

Of privileged ex-samurai background, Ishimoto Shizue’s life was forever altered after meeting American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger in New York, where she had joined her husband in 1919. It was the beginning of a friendship which would last both their lifetimes. Sanger was to make in all six trips to Japan, spanning the 1920s to 1950s and Katô would visit the United States. As Baroness Ishimoto, she founded a birth control clinic in Japan in the 1920s and a family planning federation. Though she supported the movement for suffrage, this was her primary form of women’s liberation. She has been dubbed a new woman of Japan. Given the financial problems of her own marriage, she stressed the importance of women’s economic independence. In 1935, she published an autobiography in English and gained an American following, Facing Two Ways. She had already met and fallen in love with Katō Kanju, but marriage was not possible until his wife died in 1941. Even then, it was difficult to arrange a divorce until she became pregnant at age 46 with their daughter. Militarist Japan was hostile to birth control, calling instead for a many babies as possible and rewarding productive mothers, and the baroness was briefly imprisoned in the late 1930s. The outrage expressed by American friends was in part responsible for her quick release. This friendship was tested when she translated a popular wartime novel which idealized the Japanese soldier into English. Another question about her earlier positions is the extent to which her birth control advocacy extended in those years to support eugenics.

Perhaps because of her connections with reformers in the United States, the newly remarried Katô Shizue was among those who were thought to be sympathetic to the goals of the Occupation. As she has told the story (no corroborative US documents as yet), GHQ sent a jeep to transport her to a meeting with Occupation officials in the fall of 1945. The support of her husband too was solicited. She joined in the campaign to encourage women to vote and successfully ran for the Lower House herself in April 1946, taking to the streets to gain votes. She believed in the equality of men and women and give strong backing to the draft constitution during the House debates in the summer and fall of 1946. She was much courted by the delighted head of the women’s bureau of the Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E), GHQ, as the right kind of woman to promote democracy in Japan. In return, Katō helped to organize the Women’s Democratic Club in 1946 but split from it in 1948 when it drifted toward communism. Subsequently, she had husband, both socialists but of the moderate sort which the Occupation considered to be safe, supported many liberal causes. Katō backed changes in the Civil Code, 1947, which ended the legal servitude of married women. She resumed her work for reproductive rights and supported revision, unsuccessfully in 1947-1948, of the National Eugenic Law of 1941. She became unhappy over the association of her 19 year-old stepdaughter with a G.I., and began to question her overly close association with the Occupation. Nevertheless, she remained a trusted friend of democracy in the eyes of Americans. She became involved in the Moral Rearmament Movement (MRA) in 1952. After a defeat in the Lower House, Katō successfully shifted to the Upper House of the Diet and continued her political career.