sweettiramisu

Kubushiro Ochimi was born in 1882 in Kumamoto; her maiden name was Okubo. She was named Ochimi (“fallen fruit”) because her birth coincided with a bad period for her parents, while her sister, born when their fortunes had started to improve, was Okimi (“rising fruit”). Her mother Otoha had once worked at the Tomioka Silk Mill with Wada Ei and supported the family with physical labor for a long time, while her father was a ne’er-do-well who finally found his footing, more or less, as a pastor who worked as a missionary overseas. Ochimi was the great-niece of Yajima Kajiko, who upon meeting her in her teens judged that she would probably study seriously, since she wasn’t pretty.

After graduating from high school in 1903 (where she studied with Tsuneko Gauntlett, who recalled her being “bright, but unsmiling and without charm, just like her great-aunt”), she accompanied her parents to the United States and attended the Pacific Theological Seminary, graduating in 1909 (she was to receive certification as a pastor in Japan in 1966 at the age of eighty-three). During her time there, she experienced the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and served as an interpreter (including for Japanese prostitutes, whose situation triggered her lifelong drive to end prostitution) during the relief work.

In 1910 she married Kubushiro Naokatsu, also a pastor, and returned subsequently with him to Japan, where they set up a church in Tokyo (Naokatsu was to officiate at the wedding of Muraoka Hanako, the Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables). They eventually had three sons and a daughter, of whom two sons lived to grow up. In addition to her religious work, Ochimi was active in anti-prostitution—coordinating nationwide movements and fundraising—and temperance work with the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs (the Japanese WCTU), of which she was a leader for over forty years.

Naokatsu died in 1920. In 1924, Ochimi and Ichikawa Fusae founded the Women’s Suffrage League; their slogan was 婦選なくし普選なし, a pun meaning “no regular suffrage without women’s suffrage,” both pronounced fusen in Japanese. Ochimi traveled extensively to attend conferences and study abroad, including a trip to the US in 1935 to study sex education. In 1940, she was involved in promoting the “Christians Celebrating Year 2600” event, a piece of elaborate nationalist propaganda and remarkable cognitive dissonance, involving as it did both prayers in the direction of the Emperor and readings from the Bible (“I have seen a new heaven and a new earth”).

After the war, she continued to work against prostitution (influencing the passing of the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law) and for sex education, holding posts on several government committees, and running more than once for office, although without success; she also made efforts to clarify the issue of “biracial children” in postwar Japan (the children of American soldiers and Japanese women) and to support the single mothers who were often raising them. She died in 1972 at the age of eighty-nine.

Sources
Tanaka
https://www.city.yamaga.kumamoto.jp/kiji003121/3_121_40_010.PDF (Japanese) Lots of photos of Ochimi at various times in her life

Marie-Louise was born Aihara Miné in 1875 in Tokyo, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an Irish military attaché. In early childhood she enjoyed the life of a diplomat’s daughter, sometimes taken by her parents to balls at the British Ministry. After her father’s death in 1885 her mother struggled to support the family, and Miné eventually had to leave school because there was no money for fees.

In 1891, her father’s sister, who lived in Paris, offered to adopt her, a plan which Miné’s mother accepted reluctantly in order to give her daughter a better chance. Accompanied by the Minister Plenipotentiary’s wife, Mary Fraser (known to us as a friend of Yei Theodora Ozaki), Miné traveled to France and moved in with her aunt, where she was baptized as a Catholic, choosing the baptismal name Marie-Louise for the Virgin Mary and King (St.) Louis IX.

In 1894, feeling the need to learn a trade, she was inspired by the fashion of the women around her in Paris. It seemed unlikely that Western fashions would catch on immediately in Japan, but hair and makeup might give her a way in. She enrolled in a beauty school in Paris, learning about marcel waves, wigs, hair extensions, and cosmetology (she even rented an apartment in secret from her aunt and used it as a salon, offering free hairdressing to models who would let her practice on them). Eventually she became advanced enough to teach at the school herself.

Come her thirties, Marie-Louise started receiving more letters from her mother urging her to return to Japan. Accompanied by the Ambassador to France, Kurino Shin’ichiro, she returned home in 1911 for the first time in nineteen years. There, as Japan internationalized, she became the Imperial Household’s consultant on Western dress. Through introductions from Kurino’s wife Eiko, she also served as beautician to the nobility; Eiko also helped her reaccustom herself to the minutiae of Japanese life.

In 1913 she opened the “Pari-in” or Paris Shop, Japan’s first Western-style beauty salon, popular with the ladies of high society (thanks to whom Marie-Louise was able to polish her faltering Japanese). Among other innovations, she rescued women from time-consuming struggles with long hair with the “Louise hairpiece,” based on Parisian wigs, which could be easily reshaped and removed at night; it sold up to 150 a day. In the same year, Marie-Louise opened the Paris Beauty Academy, passing on beautician skills to the numerous women left widowed or otherwise adrift by the Russo- and Sino-Japanese Wars.

In 1923, the Paris Shop was destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake; Marie-Louise fled to a nearby park with a handful of tools, which she used to bring some comfort to the other women gathering there, before opening Marie-Louise Cosmetics and the Marie-Louise Beauty Academy in her home. The Academy later expanded to a total of five branches. A year later, Marie-Louise served as the beautician in charge at the wedding of Crown Prince Hirohito (shortly to become the Showa Emperor) and Princess Nagako, solidifying her position as a trendsetter and habituée of women’s magazine spreads. Her schools continued to expand, although she kept tuition low in order to enable more women to learn the trades they needed.

The main school burned down in the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo. Although it was an enormous blow to Marie-Louise, then evacuated to the Karuizawa resort, it was to be rebuilt by 1947; in the same year, an official beautician’s exam was established, and Marie-Louise was the first to receive a license.

In 1953, Marie-Louise was given an award by the French “Cercle des arts et techniques de la coiffure de Paris” for her work in bringing Parisian beauty culture to Japan. She admired her award and left in the middle of the ceremony, explaining that she had a class to teach. She continued to teach until shortly before her death in 1956 at the age of eighty-one.

Never married, she took Mukai Matsusaburo as her adopted son in 1916; he married her most promising student, Chiba Masuko, and their children and stepchildren continued to build the Marie-Louise empire (some taking “Marie-Louise” as their family name). (According to Mukai’s daughter Akiko, he and Marie-Louise were themselves lovers, but he was so much younger that they were not able to marry, and decided instead on becoming mother and son. Whether or not this is true, they apparently made the family work.) Among her best friends was Oguchi Michiko, a beautician and women’s rights activist who was also a friend of Nishikawa Fumiko.

Sources
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9E%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB%E3%82%A4%E3%82%BA (Japanese) Various relevant photographs