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Nakijin Nobuko was born in 1887 in modern-day Okinawa, the daughter of Crown Prince Shō Ten of the Kingdom of the Ryukyus (by the time of her birth, already deposed under Japanese rule and made a peer instead); her birth name was Shō Omito. She was a part of the first graduating class of the Okinawa Prefectural Girls’ Higher School in 1904, among the elite who were in the vanguard of the shift from Okinawan to Japanese (and later to Western) dress and from Okinawan to Japanese names.

Upon her marriage to the Okinawan nobleman Nakijin Choei, she took the (Japanese-style) first name Nobuko; in addition to their daughter Kazuko, they had a son, Choshu, who died fighting in the Battle of Okinawa. In 1944 Nobuko ascended as the 18th kikoe-ogimi or high priestess of the Ryukyus, inheriting the position after the death of her aunt Princess Amuro, although between Japanese colonization and the war, she was unable to carry out most of the traditional practices. The following year she was briefly a prisoner of war during the US invasion of Okinawa. She died in 1968 at the age of eighty-one.

Kujo Takeko was born in 1887 in Kyoto, where her father was the abbot of Nishi-Honganji, one of the largest Buddhist temples, and her mother was a concubine (she grew up calling his legitimate wife “Mother”); her maiden name was Otani (a family name still instantly identifiable with the senior Buddhist hierarchy). Intending to make her independent as well as beautiful, her father had her taught poetry and French from her early teens on.

In 1909 she married Baron Kujo Yoshimune [or Yoshitomo or Yoshimasa], a half-brother of then-Imperial Princess Sadako, who proved to be gloomy and unmotivated. They spent the first year of their marriage, along with Takeko’s older brother Kozui (an art collector and possibly a spy) and his wife Kazuko , traveling through Europe to observe the religious practices there; Takeko discovered not only Christianity but the prevalence of community good works. She returned to Japan while Yoshimune stayed in England to study at Cambridge; his original stay, planned for three years, lasted a decade with no signs of his coming home (and only two letters). Meanwhile, Takeko and Kazuko (who was both her brother’s wife and her husband’s sister) had been planning a new women’s project (which eventually merged with an existing school to become Kyoto Women’s University) until Kazuko’s untimely death in 1911.

Takeko continued to work for her Buddhist Women’s Association and to write poetry, which she studied with Sasaki Nobutsuna along with the rebellious fellow poet Yanagiwara Byakuren, who became a close friend. She made herself known in the provinces for her good works (“they say you can cure headaches by scratching your head with the chopsticks I used!” she told Byakuren mischievously). She published a collection of waka poems in 1920, which was also the year Yoshimune finally came home (transformed, apparently, into a good-natured, gentlemanly husband). Their happy married life, living in a temple in Tokyo while Yoshimune worked for a Yokohama bank, was disrupted when the temple burned in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Seeing the efforts made to support the displaced, Takeko resolved to commit herself further to helping the poor. In 1925, she used the royalties from an essay collection to open a free clinic as well as a rehabilitation center for delinquent girls.

She died in 1928 at the age of forty-two, with a play and two more volumes of poetry published posthumously.

Sources
Nakae; Mori 1996
https://www.fujingaho.jp/culture/archives/g33801797/fujingaho115-culture-200831/ (Japanese) Various contemporary photographs of Takeko