Seeking answers, the idealistic baron and his wife read widely, studying both the Bible and Karl Marx. They were excited by the Russian Revolution in 1917, but by then Ishimoto's health suffered, and the following year he moved his family back to Tokyo, where he took a new and less demanding job in a laboratory.
Bored with lab work, Ishimoto decided to travel to America to meet radical leaders. He left his wife and two sons early in 1919, but soon invited Shizue to join him, writing: "Don't come abroad if you seek pleasure and new fashions in clothes ... come to me if you will educate yourself."
It was unheard of for a Japanese woman to leave her babies in order to travel, but Shizue felt her first duty was to her husband. She left her sons with her mother and arrived in New York in September.
To Shizue's surprise, Ishimoto told her that she needed to be self-supporting, and enrolled her in an eight-month course to learn typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping. Then he left for Washington to attend a labor conference before sailing to Europe.
For three months Shizue spoke only English and avoided the temptation to meet Japanese people. Finally she had tea with a Japanese banker, and it was this man who introduced her to Margaret Sanger, the woman who first coined the phrase "birth control."
While talking to Sanger, Shizue realized that nothing would help the miners' wives back in Japan more than access to contraception. She was determined to help these wretched women win some control over their lives.
But at the moment Shizue found her purpose in life, her husband seemed to lose his. He tried again and again to enter the Soviet Union to meet Lenin and Trotsky, but Soviet officials had no interest in meeting a titled aristocrat and never gave him a visa. Disillusioned, the baron realized that his travels had accomplished nothing, and he and Shizue returned to Japan in the fall of 1920.
Ishimoto opened a bookstore in Tokyo and sold foreign works cheaply. In the same building, Shizue began selling imported yarn. A baroness working as a merchant was news, so the store had plenty of publicity and customers. By contrast, her husband's bookstore did poorly, and soon after the great 1923 earthquake Shizue tactfully decided she would close her store permanently.
Her real passion was birth control. In 1921 Shizue, Baron Ishimoto, a labor leader named Katō Kanju, and several others formed the Birth Control League of Japan to study fertility issues and contribute articles to newspapers and journals. The group later started a research institute and a publication, Small Family.
A few months later a magazine asked Margaret Sanger to speak in Japan. Sanger agreed, but when her ship arrived in March 1922, the government refused to give her a visa. The denial was front page news, and embarrassed officials finally granted a visa on the condition that Sanger not speak about birth control in public. What might have been an ordinary lecture tour was now a sensation. Sanger spoke at private homes overflowing with people, and usually Shidzue served as her translator.
Many Japanese were deeply opposed to birth control. Some said that using contraception was "like leaving a restaurant without paying the bill." Others hissed at Shizue when she walked by.
In the spring of 1923, union leader Katō Kanju invited Shizue to speak about birth control to miners and their wives at the Ashio copper pits in northern Japan. It was Shizue's first experience in public speaking, and the short, demure young woman spoke both gently and forcefully.
The following year Ishimoto decided to travel again, and once more Shizue left her children, six and five, with her mother. In Britain, the Ishimotos had lunch with the great economist John Maynard Keynes, and in America they noticed that even servants ate better food than most Japanese. Despite Marx's predictions, capitalism seemed strong in 1924, and the six-month trip marked the end of Baron Ishimoto's radicalism.
The baron lost interest in unions, birth control, and all other progressive causes. His new enthusiasm was for national expansion and empire. "My husband was always ahead of his time," Shizue said later. Ishimoto spent evenings in geisha houses with businessmen who flattered him, then financed their schemes for Manchurian railroads and Korean canals, almost all of which lost money.
To rescue their faltering marriage, Shizue did little political work in the late 1920s, but nothing changed. Ishimoto became even more conservative, and told a friend, in Shizue's presence, "Never shall I be weak enough to have to consult a woman." He also told Shizue her looks were "losing charm" for him.
Reluctantly Shizue realized that their marriage was over. Ishimoto was willing to give her a divorce, but it required the additional permission of two male relatives, and none would grant it. For a while the unhappy Shizue took solace in comic books.
In 1931 the Japanese army started occupying Manchuria. Ishimoto was joyous, and later moved to Manchuria, but Shizue was appalled. She shared her dismay with her friend Katō Kanju, and in October they began a secret affair.
Five years older than Shizue, Katō was born poor and studied law before leading miners, printers, and ironworkers in various strikes. After the occupation of Manchuria, he broke with most Japanese labor leaders and led a small group of antimilitarist unions. Katō's wife, who was unintellectual and often sick, never knew of his affair with Shizue, but Shizue's sons knew and liked Katō because he was warm, calm, and reliable.
As Ishimoto slowly squandered his entire fortune, Shizue decided to accept an invitation arranged by her uncle to earn money lecturing in America. For four months, during the winter of 1932-1933 she put on a kimono and talked to audiences across the United States about Japanese feminism, birth control, and art.
After she finished the lecture tour, Shizue spent three months studying Margaret Sanger's birth control clinic in New York. She learned how to make a variety of foams and jellies, and was especially impressed by the systematic way the clinic recorded the case histories of its patients. The information enabled the clinic to give women individual advice and options.
Using money she made from her lectures, Shizue opened Japan's first non-profit birth control clinic on March 1, 1934, operating from a doctor's office in Tokyo. She did not merely sell women contraceptives, as some doctors had already done. She explained how they worked, then sent each woman to a gynecologist to determine which method of birth control would best meet the woman's needs.
Shizue kept file cards on thousands of women. The most common reason women wanted a small family was to be able to save enough money to give their existing children a good education. Shizue also received thousands of letters from rural women, and later opened a clinic in a small town in northern Japan.
In addition to working long hours at her clinics, Shizue wrote her autobiography in English, at the suggestion of Mary Beard, an American historian, and in 1935 Farrar & Rinehart published Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life. The book was well reviewed and earned a substantial amount of money, but Shizue invested all of it in a small factory run by a young friend of Katō Kanju's, and the business failed completely.
Shizue soon had to close her clinics because a new government regulation made it difficult for physicians to discuss contraception. Shizue made plans with a courageous woman doctor to open a new clinic, but first went to America during the winter of 1937 to raise money lecturing.
Shizue came home in May and celebrated Katō Kanju's election to the national Diet. Katō was the only member of the legislature who was both anti-militarist and pro-women's rights.
Shizue opened her new birth control clinic on July 31, 1937, but war with China had begun July 7, and within five months the government arrested 473 left-wing leaders for having "dangerous thoughts." Policemen came to Shizue's house at six in the morning on December 15. As agents searched in vain for illegal publications, Shizue calmly packed a wool sweater and long underwear for the unheated jails of Tokyo.
Because Shizue was a baroness, the police interrogated her gently. They asked her many times whether she knew any Communists, and also asked her why she was trying to limit the population at a time when Japan needed more soldiers. The absurdity of encouraging large families at home so that bigger armies could conquer more living space abroad was not apparent to the detectives. Shizue told them that she was simply trying to help "poor Japanese mothers who could not afford to have more children."
The police released Shizue after two weeks, and warned her not to engage in any political activity. They also ordered Shizue to close her birth control clinic, and confiscated the confidential records of her clients. Shizue continued to answer letters from rural women, however, and often sent them contraceptives that her diplomat friends smuggled in from abroad.
Katō Kanju was not as lucky as Shizue. Though still a member of the Diet, he remained in prison for over two years.
Through her foreign friends, Shizue had access to overseas newspapers and knew the full horror of the rape of Nanjing and other Japanese atrocities. But there was nothing she could do but read, write letters, and wait. "I will live in this insane Japan ... while I await the return of law and order," she wrote Mary Beard.
Shizue's two sons shared her political beliefs. Tamio, her youngest, was intelligent, athletic, and popular, but died of tuberculosis in 1943. Arata, the oldest son, graduated in physics from Kyoto University in 1942 and was immediately drafted. Although two of his father's brothers were generals, Arata opposed the war and deliberately failed his officer's examination. He became a truck driver and spent the rest of World War II on the island of Sumatra, a safe place to be as it turned out. After the war he became a professor of mathematics and symbolic logic.
In 1944, at the age of forty-seven, Shizue became pregnant again. This prompted a brother and a brother-in-law to finally sign the forms that allowed Shizue to get a divorce. Shizue and Kanju married in November; Kanju's wife had died three years earlier.
When the United States Air Force firebombed Tokyo in March 1945, Shizue was eight and a half months pregnant, but she welcomed the B-29s as liberators. She recalled later that "the planes flew so low that often I could see the pilots, and wondered whether any of them might be a son of one of my American friends."
Miraculously Shizue's house was undamaged by the bombing, and a healthy daughter, Taki, was born on March 30. Milk was scarce, so Shizue pawned kimonos and other valuables.
One day in September, a month after Japan's surrender, Shizue returned home from the countryside carrying a sack of potatoes. She was astonished to see an American soldier in a jeep waiting to take her to Allied headquarters. Several American officers had read her autobiography, and they knew that an expert on women's issues who spoke English and liked Americans was a great asset. They consulted Shizue regularly on a wide range of issues.
General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in the Pacific, ordered Japan's wartime Diet, still in session, to pass a law giving women the right to vote, which they did on December 15, 1945. The occupation authorities scheduled new elections, and barred eighty-three percent of the members of the wartime Diet from running again. Japan's postwar legislature would be filled almost entirely with new people. Both Shizue and her husband announced their candidacies for the Diet, and Shizue joined her husband's new political parry, the Japan Socialist Party, which demanded a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and a forty-eight-hour work week.
Shizue campaigned on an even more practical agenda: more food, more clothing, more contraceptives, and more soldiers coming home from China and the Pacific. She talked to voters in school auditoriums, on crowded streetcars, and on radio programs such as Women's Hour and Round Table of the Air. Shizue also received a large campaign contribution from the young factory owner who had lost all of her investment of her book royalties ten years before. Finally, on April 10, 1946, thirteen million Japanese women voted for the first time in history. Shizue was one of thirty-nine women elected to the Diet that day, and her husband Katō Kanju also won a seat. Newspapers called them "the love bird representatives."
On June 20, the first day the new Diet was in session, the thirty-nine women legislators met with General MacArthur, much to the envy of their male colleagues. Shizue spoke for the group in English. She thanked the general for giving women the vote, but asked him to import "more wheat and soya beans for our people and milk for the babies," telling him, "we are all hungry in Japan now." She also promised that "we Japanese women will never vote for the militarists ... we shall never have war again."
Shizue was assigned to one of the Diet's most important committees, Constitutional Revision. She helped strengthen Article 24 of the new constitution, which says that
Laws shall be enacted considering choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance ... and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family from the standpoint of... equality of the sexes.
The Diet had been too busy in 1946 to think about birth control, but Shizue continued to write pamphlets and give speeches on the need for contraceptives. She also moderated a radio program, "Should Birth Control Be Legalized?" Contraceptives were still illegal under Japan's wartime laws, but after this broadcast a poll of listeners found that sixty-three percent approved of their legalization.
In 1947 Shizue and her husband were reelected and the Socialists took power in a coalition government. She and others introduced a bill in August that would have legalized abortion and provided for the distribution of contraceptives, but the bill died in committee because the government was more concerned with nationalizing coal mines. In addition, General MacArthur ordered allied officers to maintain a strict neutrality on abortion and birth control. He felt these were deeply personal issues that the Japanese should decide for themselves.
Shizue personally opposed abortion, but felt that legal abortions in a doctor's office were preferable to illegal ones elsewhere. Birth control was, of course, a much better alternative. Throughout 1947 Shizue continued to promote the use of contraceptives in articles, pamphlets, lectures, and radio broadcasts.
By 1948 even conservatives saw the need for some kind of population control. Millions of soldiers and civilians from the many territories that Japan had lost had come home, and food and medical supplies were so limited that thou-sands of Japanese women were having abortions without anesthesia.
Shizue and other Socialist women worked for a more moderate law in 1948, and had the bill cosponsored by several conservative doctors. The Eugenic Protection Law was passed by the Diet on June 28, but fell far short of what Shizue wanted. It legalized abortion and contraception only when a pregnancy endangered the life or health of the mother, and said that only licensed obstetrician-gynecologists could prescribe contraceptives. The bill also made no provision for birth control education or clinics.
The Diet was far behind public opinion on this issue, and by the following year most of its members knew it. In May 1949 the legislature amended the Eugenic Protection Law to permit abortions for "economic reasons." The amendment also permitted the manufacture and sale of contraceptives, and authorized hospitals and clinics to distribute them. There was still no effort to finance birth control programs, however, and doctors proved reluctant to give patients contraceptives because abortions were much more lucrative. By 1953 Japanese women were having over one million abortions a year. Even today the reported number is about 500,000; abortions in Japan have become a common substitute for birth control.
In 1949 a Conservative Party landslide caused both Katōs to lose their seats. The public was disillusioned by the Socialist Party's unfulfilled promises. Katō Kanju returned to the Diet in the next election and kept his seat for a decade '' and a half, but in 1950 Shizue decided instead to run for a seat in the much less powerful "upper" house, the House of Councilors. The Councilors can amend legislation passed by the lower house of the Diet, but the lower house is free to ' reject the amendment if it wishes.
For Shizue the chief advantage of being in the House of Councilors was that its term of office was six years, which meant she could campaign much less often than if she were in the lower house of the Diet. This was an important consideration because her daughter Taki was just five.
Shizue campaigned in 1950 for public financing of birth control education and contraceptives as the best way to reduce the high number of abortions, and received the sixth highest vote in Japan. Two years later the government finally agreed with her. It authorized over seven hundred health clinics to pro-vide counseling on family planning, though it did not give them enough money or manpower to make them effective, and few doctors participated.
By 1954 the government's birth control program had come to a standstill, so health officials helped Dr. Kunii Chojiro set up a private organization, the Japan Family Planning Association, to distribute educational materials and contraceptives. Once again the government failed to provide any funding. Shizue also started an organization, the Family Planning Federation of Japan, to coordinate the activities of birth control organizations across the country. It was short of money too.
In October, Shizue and Dr. Kunii came up with a novel way to raise funds. They approached the Okamoto Rubber Company and began buying millions of condoms at half the wholesale price. They resold the condoms to their clients at the wholesale price, making enough money to finance their organizations. By 1957 condoms were so widespread that Japan's birth rate was half what it was in 1947.
Today most Japanese couples use condoms as their chief method of birth control. This is partly because the Japanese government has never fully authorized the use of the birth control pill. Doctors can prescribe a high-dosage pill, though they rarely do, but the pill cannot be advertised and family planning workers are not allowed to furnish information about its use. Japanese officials claim to be worried about the pill's side effects, but their deeper fear may be that the use of the pill will increase premarital sex among young people. Recently, women's groups have pressured the government to allow the general sale of birth control pills, and early in 1999 the Ministry of Health gave the idea its preliminary approval. Meanwhile, to Shizue's deep dismay, her dream of modern clinics that offer women a full range of contraceptive choices based on the best medical advice is still well in the future.
In 1960 Shizue became the only Socialist in either house of the Diet to support the renewal of the Japan's security treaty with the United States. The treaty was extremely unpopular, and on June 15 twelve thousand students stormed into the Diet building, injuring almost six hundred people. The next day Shizue denounced the demonstration as a "dangerous attempt to throw out the government by violence," and apologized for the fact that the Socialists had failed to criticize the increasingly violent marches. Many Socialists were furious with Shizue, and her influence within the party shrank considerably.
During Shizue's fourth term, which began in 1968, she became chairman of the Industrial Pollution Committee, and helped strengthen five antipollution laws in the early 1970s. She also co-wrote a book, Protecting Japan's Environment, in 1972.
Two years later Shizue lost her reelection bid because she and a leading feminist split the women's vote. At seventy-seven Shizue retired from politics but not from public life, becoming president of the Family Planning Association of Japan. After her husband died in 1978, Shizue left the Socialist Party because it seemed to her to be out of date and incapable of changing Japan.
In her old age, once every six or weeks or so, if someone did "the right thing at the right moment," Shizue wrote a letter of praise. She used shocking pink stationary because, she said, "busy men are more likely to open a pink envelope, in hopes that it comes from an admirer."
To commemorate her one-hundredth birthday, Shizue wrote a short book called Living, in which she said that she stayed positive "by appreciating ten things a day." She also encouraged young women to enter politics, but hoped that they would join the newer political parties.
Despite Shizue's work, many Japanese men continue to have a feudal attitude toward women. Of Japan's top 8,500 officials, only o.8 percent are women, and the average Japanese man spends just twenty-four minutes a day in home activities.
In addition, birth control in Japan remains cumbersome, a matter primarily of condoms and abortion. But if Japan's methods of contraception are onerous, their results are solid. When Shizue founded the Birth Control League of Japan in 1921, the average Japanese mother had five children. Today she has two. Modern women not only have more time to develop personal interests, or a career, they also have more money to spend on their children's education. Japan's literacy rate today is over ninety-nine percent, the highest in the world.
Shizue never held much political power, and she did not lower Japan's birth rate by herself. But for eight decades she led more fights for women's reproductive freedom than anyone else in Japan. At the end of her life, she was still looking to the future.
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Reference
Weston, Mark. Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan’s Most Influential Men and Women. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha International, 1999.