Ameyuki-San No Uta: Yamada Waka No Satsuki Naru Shōgai

Abstract

Yamada Waka was a leader in Japan's feminist movement during the 1920s and 1930s. The wife of a well-known professor, she had access to the most progressive social and intellectual circles in Tokyo at the time . While Japan moved through the post–World War I decades with an upsurge of democratic thought and then a slow march toward the militarism that was to result in World War II, Yamada labored to raise the consciousness of Japanese women about their potential to contribute to the building of a better world and about the narrow roles society had decreed for them. She published a number of books, lectured widely in Japan and the United States, and opened a half-way house for the rehabilitation of prostitutes.