Hirooka Asako — The Woman Who Never Leaned on Anyone

Forbidden to Read

She was forbidden to read books. Any books at all.

It happened when she was about twelve. The grown-ups of the house told her so. A woman does not need learning. That was what they had always said to this girl.

The girl did not back down. The harder they pressed her down, the harder her heart pushed back. Later, in her memoir, she wrote down what she thought after the ban.

"Women are human beings too. There is no reason we should not need learning. And if we study, we have heads that can surely take it in. Somehow, I want to learn."

Hirooka Asako. She was born in 1849 in Kyoto, a daughter of the Mitsui family, a family of rich merchants.

Girls of that time were raised on one rule. When you are young, obey your parents. When you marry, obey your husband. When you are old, obey your son. It was a teaching from China, called Confucianism. Her brothers and cousins were taught never to neglect their studies, even for a moment. Beside them, only Asako was told that a girl needs no learning. She found it deeply frustrating, her memoir says.

So she listened. She listened to the Four Books and Five Classics being recited aloud, the basic books of learning that came from ancient China. As she listened, learning became too interesting to resist. It was after that that the adults of the house forbade her to read.

Every day she was made to practice sewing, the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and the koto, a Japanese harp. She got through all of them. But what she worked at because she liked it was writing and arithmetic, says a profile written in 1900.

Sitting still did not suit her, it seems. A magazine from 1916 tells this story.

When she was twelve or thirteen, she kept messing up her hair, and her mother often scolded her. If she had no hair, she would not be scolded. That, they say, was her thinking. One night she cut off the hair that had been tied up for her, and slept right through till morning. The nanny who found out in the morning made a terrible fuss. The girl herself just laughed, as if nothing had happened, it is said. They tried tying on a false hairpiece instead, but it kept falling off, the story goes.

The man she would marry had been chosen long before.

She was one year old. She could not yet say a single word. Even then it had been decided that she would marry into the Hirooka family of Osaka, her memoir says. The family ran Kajimaya, a great merchant house of Osaka. The groom was Shingoro, who was to take over a branch of the house. He was eight years older than Asako.

Families that were already related married their children to each other, again and again, over many generations. It was called a "double bond," and people were happy about this kind of marriage at that time.

As she began to understand how the world worked, she grew angry about this too.

"To hand a girl from her parents' hands to her husband's hands, as if she were a piece of furniture, is unfair."

That is what she came to think, the memoir goes on. Still, the arrangement did not move.

When the time to marry came, she felt even more sharply how sad it is to be a woman, whose fate is always decided by other people, she wrote. In 1865, at fifteen, Asako married into Kajimaya.

After she married, there was one more thing that bothered her.

The master of the house took no part in the family business. He left all the work to his head clerks. Every day he enjoyed chanting Noh songs and the tea ceremony. In rich families, this was common.

Seeing this, the teenage bride made up her mind, her memoir says.

"At this rate, I doubt the family business will keep thriving forever. If something happens one morning, I must stand up myself, with the fate of the whole family on my shoulders."

If something happens one morning. That phrase means: if the day ever comes when something goes wrong. Not by relying on the master of the house, not by leaving it to the head clerks. She would carry it herself. That was what the teenage bride decided.

She began to prepare, too. Bookkeeping, arithmetic, books about trade. She cut into her sleeping hours and read alone every night, trying to make them her own with all her heart.

The books that had been forbidden when she was twelve, the young wife took back with her own hands, night after night.

Three years after the wedding, in 1868, the age of the Tokugawa shoguns ended and the Meiji era began.

In that great shaking time, the rich merchants of Osaka ran into terrible trouble.

The "morning" had come.

Treated as Mad

Money lent does not come back. Money borrowed must be paid back.

That was the hole Kajimaya fell into in the early Meiji years. It was a shop that had lent and borrowed money with many daimyo houses (the lords of the old domains), starting with the Mori family of Choshu. When the times changed, the money lent to the lords stopped coming back. A profile published in 1900 says Kajimaya had fallen into a terrible crisis.

Asako stepped to the front.

"I rose up with all my spirit and threw myself into the world of business."

That is how she herself describes the time after the Meiji Restoration, when the shogun's rule ended, in her memoir.

The first thing she did was walk around, asking people to wait for the money she owed them. In Tokyo, she walked from Fukagawa to Koishikawa without taking a rickshaw. On trains and steamships, she always rode third class. Years later she looked back on this herself, in a newspaper.

At the mansion of the Uwajima han, a domain ruled by a lord, this is said to have happened.

The steward who answered the door hardly listened. Asako did not go home. She was sent off to the room of the foot soldiers, and spent the night among the rough men there. In the end she won a promise to wait for the repayment, and went home, it is said.

A letter also survives that Asako wrote in her husband's name, because she could not put her own name forward.

In it, the house begs a former lord's family, again and again, to wipe out more than half of a debt. Beside the sender's name is a signature and a seal: "Shingoro, by Asa." Asa, in Shingoro's place.

When the debts were settled, Asako began to think about the next thing.

Coal.

Around 1884, Kajimaya moved into the coal business. But the price of coal fell sharply, and the company was closed. Even the one mine left, in Kyushu, ran into a large fault underground, and in the end the digging stopped.

According to the 1900 profile, her relatives had been strongly against the mining work. They feared it was a gamble, work for speculators who could win or lose everything. Asako explained the gains and losses patiently and pushed it through. Her family found her a nuisance, and the world laughed at her. Even so, Asako did not let it go.

"The mining plot next to ours is thriving. There is no reason only ours should fail."

Asako cried out so, the reporter writes. In 1895 she started digging in a new part of the mining area.

This time she went to the mine herself. On the train to Kyushu she took the cheapest, lowest-class seat. She traveled alone most of the time, apparently.

At the site, she wore miners' clothes, went down into the pit even on rainy days, and often gave orders to the miners, so it is told.

A magazine article says there was a weaving corner inside the mine office. Whenever Asako had a free moment, she sat at the loom. When something came up in the office, she got down from the loom and settled the matter briskly, they say.

Among the local people, a saying lasted until long afterward. The one who started that mine was a "gokesan."

A gokesan is a woman whose husband has died. But Asako's husband was still alive then. Perhaps it was even harder for the local people to imagine: a woman with a husband, running a mine by herself.

Later, Asako looked back on this time in her memoir. In an age when it was rare even for a woman to work in society, she dared to take on work like an adventure, which even men had not yet touched. And so,

"I was treated as mad many times."

She also wrote that she had walked along dangerous places, like climbing a sheer cliff.

Around that time, through an acquaintance, a man appeared before Asako.

Naruse Jinzo. Japan needs higher education for women. That was what the man told Asako.

In front of the woman who had been forbidden books as a girl, the story of a university for women was laid down.

At the mine, there was still not one moment when she could sleep in peace. At home, even her husband leaned on her. Would she put one more load on those shoulders?