Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Hanai O-Ume was born in 1864 to a minor samurai family in northern Chiba. The family moved to Tokyo in accordance with the Meiji Restoration, but life was not easy and when O-Ume was nine years old her father Hanai Sennosuke sold her/adopted her out to the merchant Okada Tsunesaburo, who had her taught dance and shamisen playing so that she could make a living as a geisha. At fifteen she entered a geisha house, becoming a full-fledged geisha three years later.

With both beauty and boldness, she became extremely popular, especially with dubious customers such as kyokyaku gangster samurai, speculators, and moneylenders. She is said to have met the Imperial doctor Erwin Baelz at the geisha house, striking him prophetically as “a woman who just might not balk at murder.”

At nineteen she removed her name from Okada’s family register and bought back her original family name of Hanai; she had been going by “Kohide” at that time. Of the three hundred or so geisha at her house she had become the top earner. Her birth father Sennosuke had fallen on particularly hard times and was working as a rikisha driver; in hopes of supporting him, O-Ume moved closer to his address, renaming herself “Hidekichi” (and becoming the butt of jokes about calling herself after Toyotomi Hideyoshi, written with the same characters). Her life was a complicated one, including a bank president who acted as her patron and a love affair with the kabuki actor Sawamura Gennosuke.

In 1886, she gave up life as a geisha and opened a teahouse called the Suigetsu, with her father’s name on the papers. Sennosuke kept the books, but they clashed frequently and O-Ume ran away for several days. On her return home, in June of that year, she encountered Yasugi Minekichi (or Minesaburo), an employee who had been tasked with carrying her shamisen and doing other useful tasks in her geisha days. (If the gossip of the time is to be trusted, Minekichi had started out as a servant of O-Ume’s would-be lover the actor Gennosuke. When still a geisha she had sent Gennosuke an elaborate kimono for him to wear on stage; however, after the show was over he gave it to Kiyoji, another geisha, which O-Ume learned from Minekichi. Furious, she called on Gennosuke with knife in hand. The matter went no further at the time, but the love affair was over and Minekichi lost his job as well, only to be hired by O-Ume herself.)

O-Ume asked Minekichi to help mend fences between herself and her father, little knowing that he was more interested in driving them further apart in order to get his own hands on the Suigetsu. “I can do that, but you have to do whatever I say,” Minekichi told her, and started to rape her. O-Ume pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death. (Or possibly the stabbing was less in immediate self-defense and more as a reaction to his machinations with her father; stories vary.)

At her trial in November, O-Ume was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. Released in 1903, fifteen years later, she started various small businesses, but all failed as soon as the initial rush of customers interested in her notoriety petered out. Like other dokufu of the time, she resorted to taking the stage in dramatizations of her own life story. She died in 1916 at the age of 53, attended (according to one story) by her fellow ex-geisha Kiyoji, formerly a rival over Gennosuke. Both in her lifetime and thereafter, her story became the basis for numerous popular songs, plays, and films.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.fujiarts.com/meiji-era-japanese-prints/yoshitoshi/1085056-hanai-oume-killing-minekichi-1887 (English) Painting by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi of the murder scene