People

• Akamatsu/Maruki Toshiko, Artist/Craftsperson — 1912-2000
  Akamatsu Toshiko, together with her husband, Maruki Iri, became famous as a painter duo of large-scale murals on the atomic bomb and 20th century atrocities. She also became well-known in her own right as an illustrator and writer of children's books in the postwar period, including several on the atomic bomb.
• Ariyoshi Sawako, Writer/Editor, — 1931-1984
  Ariyoshi Sawako, raised and educated during the war and occupation, was among the most popular and prolific of post-1952 Japanese writers. Over a span of thirty years, this best selling writer received several important literary awards and dealt with such varied and complex issues as women’s sexuality, environmental pollution, missile testing, and aging. Her creative output is said to be 35 novels, 60 short stories, and 10 dramas.
• Hasegawa Machiko, Artist/Craftsperson, — 1920-1992
  Hasegawa Machiko, one of postwar Japan’s most famous creators of manga, or cartoons, attained fame as a woman cartoonist in a male-dominated profession. She launched her well-known and much-beloved cartoon character, Sazae-san, in a leading newspaper in 1948.
• Hayashi Fumiko, Writer/Editor — 1903-1951
  Hayashi Fumiko, one of Japan's most popular writers from the prewar and wartime period, continued her distinguished literary career in postwar Japan as a short story writer, poet, and novelist. She worked intensely, published widely, and died an early death in 1951, possibly from overwork. Her postwar fiction illustrates the lives of women and lower classes in the struggle for daily survival.
• Ichikawa Fusae, Politician, — 1893-1981
  Ichikawa Fusae, born near Nagoya to a rural family and one of the leaders of the Japanese suffragist movement, was a teacher and journalist before becoming a prominent political activist on behalf of women’s rights well before World War II. Although she was purged during the Occupation, she continued to hold the admiration of women’s groups and compiled a spectacular electoral record from 1953 to her death in 1981.
• Katō Shizue, Activist,Politician, — 1897-2001
  Katō Shizue, young wife of Baron Ishimoto and of privileged former samurai background, became a birth control advocate after meeting Margaret Sanger during a trip to New York in 1919 to rejoin her husband. Remarried in 1944 to a prominent socialist, she resumed her advocacy of family planning and birth control in Occupied Japan and was elected to the Lower House of the postwar Diet and later to the Upper House.
• Kurihara Sadako, Writer/Editor — 1913-2005
  Kurihara Sadako, born near Hiroshima in 1913, was an impoverished poet and housewife during the war and witness to the Hiroshima atomic bombing and its immediate aftermath. She was not only one of the first to depict or represent the bomb in poetry, but was also among the few creative artists publicly to express remorse for Japan's actions during the Asia-Pacific War.
• Masuda Sayo, Entertainer — 1925-
  Masuda Sayo, born to poor parents in the mountainous prefecture of Nagano in 1925, barely managed to eke out a living during her teens as a hot spring geisha, a calling much closer to prostitute than professional entertainer. Leaving the hot springs as the war ended and Occupation began, she took menial jobs, even falling into the criminal world, in order to support and help educate her younger brother.
• Misora Hibari, Entertainer, — 1937-1989
  Misora Hibari remains in the years after her death one of Japan’s most illustrious and legendary entertainers. She began her career at age 8 in Yokohama as a singer of popular songs and by the age of 15 was a famous recording and film star and made a tour to Hawaii and to California. Hibari’s popularity endured through her adulthood, when she continued to sing her old hits and introduce new songs to adoring fans.
• Nakamura Fumiko, Activist,Educator, — c1913-
  Nakamura Fumiko was born in an Okinawan village circa 1913. She grew up thorougly educated as a patriotic Japanese subject. Through her later experiences in wartime Japan and Occupied Okinawa, she became a pacifist and also a long time activist against U.S. military bases in her home island and violations of human rights by Japanese officials and the American military.
• Oku Mumeo, Activist,Politician — 1895-1997
  Oku Mumeo, born to a lower-middle class near Fukui City in western Japan and graduate of a Japan Women’s College, lived on the edge of poverty during the 1920s to 1945 in Tokyo as a political activist, editor of a women’s labor newsletter, and settlement house worker. In early Occupied Japan, she was elected to the new Upper House of the Japanese Diet in 1947, serving eighteen years, and became a prime mover in the creation of the Housewives Federation in 1948 and postwar consumer movement.
• Rama Rau, Santha, Writer/Editor, — 1923-2009
  Santha Rama Rau, born in Madras, India, to a prominent upper class family and educated abroad in England and the United States, was already a famous writer when she graduated from Wellesley College in 1944. She was an astute observer of the Japanese scene from an elite position, 1947-48, while acting as hostess for her father, head of independent India's diplomatic liaison mission to Japan. She continued her career, mainly in New York City, as a travel writer, novelist, and scriptwriter.
• Roosevelt, Eleanor, Activist,Politician, — 1884-1962
  Eleanor Roosevelt, famous in the United States and abroad as a politically active First Lady to her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and author of a daily newspaper column, was also known for her support of women's rights and racial equality. Her visit to Japan in 1953, as one of the most admired and important women in the world, was intended to foster democracy in Japan and reflected early Cold War cultural politics.
• Sakaue Toshié, — 1925-
  Sakaue Toshié, by birth a tenant farmer’s daughter who grew up in a village near Niigata, lived at the survival level in wartime and Occupied Japan, barely benefiting from the Occupation era’s land reforms. In common with other rural women, she also took construction jobs to help meet family’s needs, but over time, as Japan’s economy grew, would come to enjoy modest prosperity.
• Setsuko, Princess Chichibu, Aristocrat — 1909-1995
  Matsudaira Setsuko, born in England to a prominent Japanese diplomatic family with close ties to the imperial household, became the bride of Prince Chichibu, brother of Emperor Hirohito, at age 18, three months after graduating from the Friends School in Washington, D.C. Although the Imperial Family was reduced in size during the Occupation, she retained her title and became a strong advocate of humanitarian rights.
• Sirota /Gordon, Beate, Activist, — 1923-
  Beate Gordon Sirota was born in Vienna in 1923 to a musical family and educated in Tokyo in the 1930s when her father decided to pursue his career as a pianist in Japan. Educated during the war at Mills College near San Francisco, she returned in 1946 as a Department of the Army Civilian and played a prominent role in incorporating women's rights into a model draft constitution for Japan.
• Tamura Taijirō, Writer/Editor, — 1911-1983
  Tamura Taijirō, a professional writer before the Asia/Pacific War, was drafted in 1941 and spent the war years as an ordinary soldier on the China front. Repatriated to postwar Japan in 1946, he soon became famous as the leading author of literature of the flesh or body. One of his first stories, suppressed by Occupation censors, is believed to be the first work of fiction on young Korean comfort woman (military sexual slaves).
• Weed, Ethel, Military, — 1911-1975
  Ethel Weed, as a lieutenant in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WACs) and later as a civilian, served as the Occupation’s chief women’s information officer for almost the entire period, 1945-1952, drawing from prewar experiences as a publicist and civic worker. She worked closely with Japanese women in helping to revise the Civil Code and expand women’s rights.
• Yamakawa Kikue, Writer/Editor, — 1890-1980
  Yamakawa Kikue, descended from a samurai family closely associated with Japan’s ruling shoguns before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, was a convert to socialist thought at a young age and married Marxist Yamakawa Hitoshi. In 1947, she became the first head of the Women’s and Children’s Bureau, a high level post in the newly created Ministry of Labor and a significant milepost for women in government positions.