I had an illuminating conversation one day with the leading feminist of Japan. She was beautifully true to type, with her hair scraped into a loose, untidy bun, longtoothed, and dressed in a shapeless tweed suit and flatheeled shoes. Except for the deference with which she instinctively treated the male interpreter, serving him with tea before anyone else and bowing him out of the room in front of her, she might easily have been one of our own veteran Suffragettes. One could imagine her, without difficulty, lecturing a Women's Institute on the iniquities of female circumcision in the Sudan, or at the head of a chalking-party, demanding equal pay. Her life had been spent in trying to improve the status of her fellow countrywoman, and to bring them into Japanese political life. In 1921 she had been arrested for demonstrating against a law which forbade women to attend any political meeting, lest `the harmony and peace of the home be destroyed', and she had been repeatedly dragged off platforms by roughs and bullies while speaking in favour of women's suffrage.

Now, if ever, was the time for her to come into her own and to lead Japanese women, emancipated by law at the direction of the Allied authorities, to a new sense of their civic responsibilities. They were sadly backward in political matters. When an election was to be held, she said, they might perhaps give a moment's consideration to public issues, or, more likely, to the personalities of the candidates. Men went up and down the villages beating drums and summoning them to vote, and they streamed down to the polls with a confused idea of thereby giving pleasure to General MacArthur; but, once there, they would often remember that they could not write and so could not name their candidate, or else it might be that they had forgotten his name: and so came streaming back again.

Much, then, remained to be done, but she could take no part in it: she had been purged. She was debarred from holding any public position whatever. The reason was that during the war she had held an important post in the propaganda section of the Imperial Rice Assistance Association, an organization for welding the nation together in support of the militarists. She had accepted it because it was more important work than had previously been offered to a woman. For several years she had worked busily against all she professed and believed in, for the sake of feminine prestige. It seemed to her then, and did still as she explained it to me, the most natural and reasonable thing to do, to make this sacrifice of principle for an immediate advantage, and the purge had greatly embittered her. She refused indeed to believe that it was simply a decision of the tribunal, and put it down to the machinations of another prominent feminist, with whom she had often disagreed in the past.

Tracy, Honor. "De-mok-ra-sie." Ch. 3, Kakemono: A Sketch Book of Post-War Japan. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1950, 31-32.