Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Kawakami Sadayakko was born in 1871 to a merchant family in Tokyo, where her original name was Koyama Sada. At age seven, when her family went bankrupt, she was adopted by (probably = sold to) a geisha house. Expected to become a success in the future with her promise of beauty, she was taught by a foster mother who adored her to dance and to play the shamisen (she also studied the less feminine arts of literacy, riding, billiards, judo and archery). She made her geisha debut at the age of fourteen under the name of Koyakko; her beauty, brightness and brains made her instantly popular, and the leading politician Ito Hirobumi (husband of Umeko) became her patron, when she began to call herself Sadayakko.

It was around this time when she was rescued during a horse-riding misadventure by a college student called Iwasaki Momosuke, with whom she immediately hit it off; unfortunately, he shortly married Fukuzawa Yukichi’s daughter Fusako. Sadayakko was still recovering from her heartbreak when she met Kawakami Otojiro, an actor and sometime liberal activist who had written a satirical song that became a runaway hit, and married him in 1894.

Otojiro, ambitious, idealistic, and by all accounts very attractive to women, was however not otherwise very good at life; when he built a theater it failed to flourish and was eventually taken by his creditors, when he ran for office he was not only not elected but ran up a huge debt. In search of escape and a new outlook, he and Sadayakko made their way from Tokyo to Kobe by the sea route (in a small boat, which Sadayakko tartly hoped would teach him responsibility), before leaving with his troupe for America in 1898. Unfortunately, it was an all-male troupe, and American audiences did not welcome men in female roles. When they lost one of their female-role actors, with nothing left to lose, Sadayakko filled in. Her early geisha training came to her rescue and she was a hit, with feminine beauty that seemed “exotic” to western audiences as well as expert dancing and singing. In this way she became, according to some, the first Japanese actress. Performing in Paris, she was hailed by Le Figaro as “more gifted than the Eiffel Tower is high”; the crowned heads of Europe applauded, the nineteen-year-old Picasso sketched her from the audience, everyone from Rodin to Klee to Puccini to Isadora Duncan became a fan, perfumes and clothing styles were named after her.

Back in Japan, she started a school for actresses (which faced vicious criticism, based on Sadayakko’s background and the low social position of the theater in general; unrelatedly, one of her students was the actress Mori Ritsuko and another the future writer Tamura Toshiko) and performed in Japanese productions of Western classic plays and operas, playing Ophelia, Desdemona, Salomé, and Aida among others. Hasegawa Shigure, founder of the women’s journal Nyonin Geijutsu, interviewed her in her dressing room for an admiring profile called “Madam Sadayakko.” Her career lasted only ten years or so, however; when Otojiro died in 1911, she gave up acting, but still refused to pay attention to nasty comments along the lines of “get thee to a nunnery” based on her widowhood (over three thousand people wrote in to a newspaper on the topic of “what’s to be done with Sadayakko,” and she ignored all of them).

Reunited with her old crush Momosuke (who said to Hasegawa “some people worry that I spend too much time taking care of Kawakami, but for a man, it’s all about having a woman you adore”), now a leading industrialist, she went into business with him, playing the stock market and building a silk spinning factory (where, very unusually for the time, the young women working there were treated humanely) with her gains. She died in 1946.

Sources
Nakae
Ishii
Mori 2008
http://easternimp.blogspot.com/2015/09/sadayakko-through-artists-eyes-part-1.html (English) Lots of illustrations and details about the plays in which Sadayakko appeared (click through also to parts 2 and 3)