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