Kaneko Fumiko: 1923

Kaneko Fumiko and Park Yeol, newspaper image

For every morning of the last week, I sat enthralled by Kaneko Fumiko’s memoirs, published in an English translation in the 1990s as The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman. Despite the ill-fated events of her brief life – an upbringing full of abuse and neglect and an early death in prison – her work is powerful and uplifting. Her fervor and desire for knowledge is inspiring, and it creates a portrait that, despite its age, still resonates with working students who lack family support. Her account lets the reader see just how common it has been throughout modernity for the majority to pursue their path toward education in morse code, in dashes and dots, always interrupted but never dropped. Although she is alternately described as an anarchist, nihilist, or early activist for Korean independence, she rejected all movements and systems in favor of maintaining her own independence of thought.

              In her early childhood, she was consistently denied access to formal education because she was an unregistered person. Her mother and father were not married, so she was not listed on her father’s family registry, essentially making her a non-person and non-citizen. Her father came from a samurai family, but he was degenerate, and her mother was a village woman from a humble family. As a child, she suffered developmentally due to the failures of a restrictive state system: as a non-person, if she was allowed to attend school, she wasn’t allowed to be recognized, she couldn’t get a diploma or a certificate. Although she showed academic promise, she was not rewarded for her performance, which confused her. She was also constantly being taken out of school by her dysfunctional family. Her father abandoned the family to move in with Kaneko’s aunt, her mother’s sister, when she was very young. Though Kaneko’s mother was wronged, she made her bad situation worse by taking up with a string of alcoholics and wife beaters. In Kaneko’s short childhood, she married three or four different times, and it never worked out.

              When she was still in elementary school, her paternal grandmother offered to raise her in Korea, where she lived with her daughter and son-in-law, so she moved to Bugang, where she lived from age nine to sixteen. Although she was promised to be sent to school and treated like one of the family, she was treated more like a servant, and her schooling was erratic. Because of her positioning, she became sympathetic towards the local Koreans, who she saw being abused and taken advantage of by the Japanese colonists. Her life in Korea was full of abuse and suffering; she longed to be treated with kindness and respect by others, but she also noted how the constant abuse stunted her healthy psychological development and perverted her, leading her to lie and cheat in order to escape unjust punishment. She felt that she was being stripped of her dignity.

              She returned to Japan at sixteen years old, to her mother’s family’s village. She still wanted to go to school, and there was no chance of that in the village, so, with nearly no money in her pocket, she moved to Tokyo. She was able to live with a distant relative’s family for a short time, but they refused to offer any support for her to go to school when she refused to be married off. She found a job that offered room and board selling evening newspapers. They also offered her an advance on tuition so that she was able to sign up for courses at a private school, studying subjects like history and English. The hours were long, the pay was low, and she found that she didn’t have much energy to attend classes, do course work, work every evening, and also watch her boss’s kids.

              However, it was her experience hawking papers on the street at night that introduced her to newly popular social movements in Japan: socialism and Christianity. Both the Salvation Army and various socialist organizations canvassed mercilessly at night, and Kaneko took their free reading materials. They both made promises of mutual aid and charity, so she did try to take them up on their offers, but neither group provided much in the way of material support. She left her news job to try her luck with the Salvation Army, but she made even less money in the job she was set up with, as a street vendor, and ended up back with her relative’s family.

              She did find some time to socialize, and after dating a Japanese socialist, Segawa, that she met in a movie theater, she started dating a Korean student, and both relationships ended badly. She ended up meeting Park Yeol because of a poem he wrote for an anarchist publication, seeking him out and taking him on a date to a Chinese restaurant where she paid the bill. They ended up moving in together for a couple years, living as common-law husband and wife. Their relationship seemed positive and supportive, with Park proposing that, instead of a honeymoon, they release a “secret publication.” Instead of forming a family through a registry, they formalized their relationship as a two person anarchist collective.

              It was at this point, the run-up to their relationship and Kaneko’s time in Tokyo, that she began to have slightly more time for her intellectual development. Books were hard to come by, and she borrowed most of them from her friend, a typist she met in English classes. She identified with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and Mikhail Artsybashev, works which elevated the individual and showed that there was no meaning in sacrificing oneself to an ideology or a system and that meaning was only derived from the exultation of the individual ego. This was important for Kaneko, whose life had been treated as a burden that she needed to make up for through self-sacrifice by everyone around her from birth, that her life was a debt owed to others. The focus on individual ego allowed her to proudly assert her own self-worth and rights as an individual.

              However, her sacrificial streak remained impossible to shake off. The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake created massive upheaval in Tokyo, leaving more than a hundred thousand people dead and more than a million homeless after fires, worsened by typhoon winds, destroyed many buildings in the aftermath of the tremors. Many Koreans were targeted in the days after the earthquake, and Park Yeol and Kaneko Fumiko were arrested for a supposed plot to assassinate the emperor by bomb. The charges seemed cooked up and suspicious, since both of them were, frankly, ineffective people mainly caught up in the struggle for survival. However, they both eagerly confessed to the crime and were sentenced with execution, later commuted to life in prison. They were allowed to be formally married before beginning their sentences, and Kaneko Fumiko became Park Munja, officially gaining a family name at long last. She died in prison in 1926, a suicide that some have deemed suspicious. Park Yeol was released in 1945 and returned to Korea, ending up in what became North Korea after the war, and lived until the 1970s.

              Kaneko’s life story, minus the dramatic ending, feels somehow contemporary: a girl from a dysfunctional and abusive family moves out at a young age to try to work her way through school, encountering callous disregard by boys her own age who continue to treat her with the same disdain her own birth family had conditioned her to accept. She works hard to escape the same tragic fate of her mother, who jumped from man to man and destroyed any shred of stability in her life, but she looks for meaning in intellectual development instead of seeking it from a traditional family, which she has been thoroughly disillusioned with. In fact, being disillusioned with every standard life path society has to offer her, she throws herself into creating something new, so she can declare her own worth as a person on her own terms.

              However, despite the universality of her experiences, there are some unique historical features. Socialism and anarchism, as it was adapted and developed in Japan and Korea, has a variety of special features. Before its colonization, Korea had a rigid hierarchical class structure, which was modeled on that of imperial China, and included formal slavery/serfdom. Historically, Korea maintained the institution of slavery longer than any other nation on Earth.[1] Japan had an aristocratic system that included a caste of untouchables called burakumin, people who were responsible for dirty jobs such as slaughterhouse workers or dealing with human corpses. Based on a person’s family name or village of origin, it was easy to tell what class background a person came from. Both of these class systems which allowed legal discrimination were officially banished during modernization, but such a background influenced how the socialist message was received in Japan and Korea. The ruling class and underclass were well-defined categories, not based on money or behavior, but on family lineage.

Thus, Kaneko’s father could behave in a way that seems “low class,” – living in flophouses, gambling and drinking all his money away, leaving his common-law wife and children to starve – but he would still be able to rest upon his family name. No amount of bad behavior or poor money management would ever be able to take that from him. Despite harming many people around him, he faced no consequences and never suffered. In reverse, no amount of striving for a better future through education would be able to uplift Kaneko out of her social position. She was legally discriminated against from childhood as an “unregistered person,” a child who was not listed on a family register and was thus unable to receive formal schooling. Instead, she needed to cobble together an education made up of private lessons and various night schools.

Every person has a central preoccupation and challenge in their life (and even several throughout their lives). Kaneko’s preoccupation in her short life was gaining a family name and creating or becoming a part of a family. Despite being an anarchist and nihilist, her prison confession reveals that preoccupation, wishing to be a Saeki, like her father, or an Iwashita, like her paternal grandmother. It was only during her prison sentencing, when she was allowed to marry Park Yeol, that she was finally officially registered in a conventional family, becoming Park Munja. Park Yeol, a notable Korean anarchist and independence activist, came from a respectable scholar family in Korea, which is how he came to study in Tokyo.[2] His name was worth a lot there, as much as Kaneko’s father’s name was in Japan.

It probably goes against all principles of Kaneko’s nihilism to state that her deepest desire was for a family name, meaning, a legitimate place within a system that she was committed to destroying. However, after reading her memoir, I somehow found it touching to learn that she did have it granted to her during her sentencing, when she was able to marry Park Yeol. Though she was young when she died and left behind very little writing, that writing does reveal that she was striving to develop her own strand of thought by engaging with what was current around her. She was not a naïve hothouse flower trying to be a martyr for a movement; she was mainly trying to assert herself, first and foremost. While she was denied the protection and definition of a family name, it inversely liberated her to stand for one thing only: herself. She was a compassionate person who abhorred injustice and abuse, but her embrace of nihilism and anarchism displayed that she had no faith that any system could truly be free of those vices.

Scene from the film, Anarchist from the Colony

Her legacy is very different in Japan and Korea (and in the English-speaking world, for that matter). In 2017, a South Korean film called Anarchist from the Colony was released about the trial of Park Yeol and Kaneko Fumiko, and despite some initial misgivings, I found that it was a sweet portrayal of a very tragic event. Kaneko’s character is shown as boisterous and fun-loving, fiery and impulsive, maybe even ditzy, rather than bookish or thoughtful. Actually, based on her writing, which comes off as serious yet very close to the reader, I think portraying her character in this way is still respectful.

Unsurprisingly, the massacre of Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 remains a controverted subject within Japan and between Japan and Korea. It’s not difficult to find Japanese scholars and politicians who downplay or deny the event, but it’s equally easy to find Japanese scholars who probe it. Japan is an open society where grievances are allowed to be aired and debated publicly. This aspect of Japanese society is also displayed in the film, with many Japanese writers and lawyers shown in sympathy with the downtrodden. A Japanese film dedicated solely to Kaneko Fumiko is planned to be released in 2026, on the 100th year anniversary of her death.

One thing I found very rewarding about carrying out this very brief research on Kaneko Fumiko was that anarchism as an ideology is still cherished by its followers – meaning that any anarchist writing is typically available online for free and is not commercialized. Kaneko herself craved knowledge, not only books themselves but the time to study them. She had a sense that, though this was denied to her and presented as a luxury, it should be her right. So many works of anarchism continue to be made available for free and easily accessed online, or in bookstore distributions. I found Kaneko’s work so touching because I also felt this extreme hunger for knowledge and information that I felt I was denied, so I understand her desperation and frustration.

Kaneko’s final turn towards nihilism, that is, no longer looking toward formal education as a way to achieve a legitimate role in her current modern system, and instead, desiring a complete annihilation of that system, was fueled by this frustrated quest for knowledge. Because she was raised in a system with perverse incentives that lacked rewards (being obedient as a child only led to abuse, being hardworking as an adult only led to being taken advantage of, being loving toward men only led to exploitation), she had an extremely low tolerance for self-sacrifice and grew suspicious of the idea that her work could ever lead to any sort of reward. Yet she never stopped being hard working. My impression of her, based on her confession, was that she struggled very hard to escape the chains of her dysfunctional family, to strive for dignity and to be seen as an individual worthy of respect, but the structure of Japanese society did not allow her to be perceived that way, no matter what she did. So in this situation, her only option was to wish for its destruction. Yet despite this nihilist turn, I still see her as a virtuous person with a fighting spirit. She maintained compassion while also recognizing that she needed to be more self-interested for the purposes of self-protection and self-cultivation. I think, read in this way, her morality is exemplary, though taken as a whole, her struggle for achievement, her desire to overcome all the obstacles she faced, led to an unjustifiably absurd ending.

[1] Peterson, Mark A.; Margulies, Phillip (2010). A Brief History of Korea. Infobase Publishing. p. 47. ISBN 9781438127385.

[2] Hwang, Dongyoun. (2016). Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development, 1919–1984. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bibliography

Hane, Mikiso, ed. (1993). Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520084216. https://archive.org/details/reflectionsonway0000unse

Hwang, Dongyoun. (2016). Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development, 1919–1984. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kaneko, Fumiko. Trans. Jean Inglis. (2015). The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman. London: Routledge. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kaneko-fumiko-the-prison-memoirs-of-a-japanese-woman Note: Original Japanese title: 何が私をこうさせたか, Nani ga Watashi o Ko Saseta ka?; What Made Me Do It?

Raddeker, Hélène Bowen (1997). Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-17112-1. LCCN 97-23328 https://archive.org/details/HeleneBowenRaddekerTreacherousWomenOfImperialJapanPatriarchalFictionsPatricidalFantasies

Sugako, Kanno. (1911). Reflections on the Way to the Gallows. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kanno-sugako-reflections-on-the-way-to-the-gallows