Although Yamakawa Kikue was able to trace her family heritage back to the lower ranking samurai class, her own life and writings were thoroughly radical. Her mother was born in the former Mito domain, a branch of the ruling Tokugawa family which generated one of the most famous slogans of the mid 19th century: sōnno jōi (revere the emperor and repel the barbarian). After the Meiji Restoration, when other slogans dominated the scene, such as kaikoku (open country) and bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment), that status was permanently lost when the entire samurai class was done away with in the 1870s. In 1877, lower level samurai received small payoffs and were forced to find employment. Many years later, Yamakawa in a loving tribute to her mother and family would publish a richly detailed work of the lives and experiences of ordinary samurai as survival on low fixed incomes became increasingly difficult in the rapidly changing economy and society of the 19th century. The work, published in 1943 and re-issued years later, has been translated as Women of the Mito Domain.

As a young woman, however, Yamakawa gave little heed to her conservative background. She was a graduate of the Tsuda English Academy in 1912. At age 17, Yamakawa (born Aoyama) married Kawakami Hajime (1880-1958), future professor of economics at Kyoto University, labor leader, and communist agitator who, along with his wife, was often in trouble with the law and the police. While other activist women of the 1920s, including the feminists were working for gender equality and asking for the vote, Yamakawa followed the socialist path. On May Day, 1921, she helped to found the Red Wave Society (Seiirankai), a group of Japanese socialist women. It was still one year before the Japanese Parliament would do away with the Police Bill preventing Japanese women from engaging in political activities. Nevertheless, women were consigned to women’s sections of parties, including the socialists, or to women’s divisions of trade unions. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Yamakawa was constant in intellectual growth as a socialist-feminist. She joined the motherhood protection debate but gave much thought to ways in which women could be seen by themselves and others as independent in life, thought, and work and not imagined solely as good wives/wise mothers or dutiful daughters. Expanding women’s identity from object to subject was as was as much a question on the left of the political spectrum as among conservatives. But after the widening of Japan’s war against China in 1937 and the West, in common with other women activists, she had less to say about the evils of war and war mobilization and more about the workplace as a site of opportunities for women. Also, her husband was jailed for dangerous thoughts in 1937. As historian Beth Katzoff has suggested:

In a harsher verdict, Yamakawa, together with other feminists in the period after 1937, was, though a leftist, more prone to interact with the increasingly authoritarian wartime state than to oppose or challenge it. Cooperation was seen as a way to make limited public gains for women. How, then, would she interact with the state as refashioned in Occupied Japan but still run by men?

In September 1947, when the new Labor Ministry was created to carry out fundamental reforms under new labor legislation, it included a Women’s and Children’s Bureau. Basic among the new laws, was the Labor Standards Act of April 1947. Following considerable debate among Japanese women activists over the choice of the historic first bureau head, Yamakawa Kikue, age 57, emerged as the consensus candidate. She was also acceptable to Americans in MacArthurs’s General Headquarters, in particular Lt. Ethel Weed, head of the Women’s Bureau in the Civil Information and Education Section. Yamakawa served three years, ably assisted by prewar labor inspector Tanino Setsu, who later took over the bureau, 1955-65. During Yamakawa's time, considerable attention was given to equal wages for women, a cause too soon not only for Japan but elsewhere in the industrialized world. Another issue carried over from the prewar and wartime years was protection of women workers and curtailment of child labor. It was apparent in some cases that women were capable or work denied to them by virtue of their sex. Yamakawa was also responsible for launching Women's Week, beginning April 1949.

Even for Yamakawa, the ideal of good wife/wise mother prevailed in the media. An interview with Yamakawa in the Tokyo Times, November 12, 1948, indicated that in the mind of the journalist, her “greatness and superiority lies in the fact that she performed her duties as a housewife and mother in parallel to her work as a pioneer.” She was described as “a lady less than five feet [dressed] in black, not very attractive and with a dark complexion without a trace of face power.” She was grandmotherly but also “not just any ordinary old woman.” When asked about the goals of the Women’s and Children’s Bureau, she said:

It is the duty of the Women and Children’s Bureau to protect and enlighten the women and minors and to do work that will benefit them. For that, we must know above all the actual situation of the women and minors. It is necessary, first of all, to make investigations into the actual situation of the daily life of the people in order to find out what is the most urgent problem of working women or war widows. (2)

As to the kind of work she intended to do in the future, Yamakawa answered:

In backward countries, the big work of the women is to find out the sort of laws which should be enacted. But in Japan, the laws have changed quite suddenly, and the people have been given equal rights. The present situation is that the people do not know the true value of this. We want all of the women to have common sense enough to go to the domestic relations court when a divorce case comes. It is desirable that laws disadvantageous to women be revised.(2)