On This Day in Herstory, January 21st 1895, Itō Noe (伊藤 野枝), a Japanese anarchist, social critic, author and feminist, was was born on the island of Kyushu near Fukuoka, Japan.
Itō was born on the island of Kyushu near Fukuoka, Japan on January 21st, 1895. She was born into an aristocratic family who paid for her education in Tokyo. While at school she developed a passion for literature, and was particularly fond of the progressive ideas from Western and Japanese writers. During the summer of 1910, Itō’s family pressured her into marrying a man named Suematsu Fukutaro. Despite this, she still wanted to continue her education, so she started to plot a way to escape and make her home in Tokyo. She soon ran away and began a romantic relationship with one of her former teachers, Tsuji Jun, and together they had two sons. They were officially married in 1915, though their relationship only lasted four years before Itō fell in love with Sakae Ōsugi.Sakae Ōsugi was already married while he engaged in relationships with Itō and the leading woman anarchist, Ichiko Kamichika. They all believed in the ideas of free love, and Ōsugi felt that he loved all three women equally and should not have to choose between them. However, the theoretical concepts of free love collided with human jealousy and each of the three women wanted him only for herself. Ōsugi continued to live with his wife while seeing both Ichiko and Itō until November 1916, when in a moment of jealousy Ichiko followed Ōsugi and Itō to a countryside inn and attacked Ōsugi with a knife as he emerged out of his room, stabbing him several times in the throat. Ōsugi was hospitalized as a result of his wounds and his wife left him during his stay in hospital. Itō and Ōsugi went on to have four children, and stayed together for the rest of their lives, though they never legally married. Their relationship was a political one as well; they worked together as publishing partners, and helped to further their ideas on anarchism through their writings. They both became targets of the state and critics through their unabashed loyalty to their cause.In 1913 Itō joined the Bluestocking Society (青鞜社 Seitō-sha), as producer of the feminist arts-and-culture magazine Seitō (青鞜). She was skilled in several languages, including English, and translated articles by the anarchist, Emma Goldman, on the situation of women. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Seitō from 1915 to 1916, during which time she assured the content of the magazine was as inclusive as possible. She “opened the pages to extended discussions of abortion, prostitution, free love and motherhood”. From 1914 to 1916, the pages of Seitō included a debate between Itō and another feminist, Yamakawa Kikue, about whether or not prostitution should be legalized. Itō argued for the legalization of prostitution for the same reasons that she favored the legalization of abortion, as she believed that women’s bodies belonged only to them, and that the state had no business telling a woman what to do with her own body. She also argued that the Japanese social system did not offer many economic opportunities to women and that most Japanese prostitutes were destitute women who turned to selling sex in order to survive, and they should not face punishment for it. Under her editorship, Seitō became a more radical journal that led the government to ban five issues for threatening the kokutai (system of government). As an anarchist, Itō was critical of the existing political system in Japan. This led her to call for people to practice acts of anarchy in everyday life; specifically to routinely undermine the kokutai in small ways. In February 1916, Itō published the last edition of Seitō, due to a lack of funds, as the government had prevented distributors from carrying the magazine.Because she continually challaned the kokutai, Itō was constantly harassed by the police to the point that she complained of feeling that her home was a prison, as she could not go out without a policeman stopping her. In the chaos immediately following the Great Kantō earthquake on September 16th, 1923, Itō, Ōsugi, and his 6-year-old nephew Munekazu were arrested, strangled to death, and thrown into an abandoned well by a squad of military police. Itō was only 28 years old. The killing of such high-profile anarchists and a young child, became known as the Amakasu Incident and sparked shock and anger throughout Japan. Itō and Ōsugi are buried together in Aoi-ku, Shizuoka.
