Yanagiwara Byakuren was born in 1885 in Tokyo, originally named Akiko, the child of Count Yanagiwara Sakimitsu and his concubine Okutsu Ryo. Her aunt Naruko was a concubine of the Meiji Emperor and the mother of his heir. In 1900 Akiko was pulled out of school to marry Viscount Kitakoji Suketake, but she found him both cruel and childish, and five years later, divorced at the age of twenty and leaving her son Isamitsu with her ex-husband’s family, she returned home.

She began to attend the Toyo Eiwa Girls’ School, where she became friends with Muraoka Hanako, as well as studying waka poetry with Sasaki Nobutsuna and his group, encountering luminaries like Ishikawa Takuboku and Yosano Akiko.

As a nobleman’s daughter and one of the famed “Three Beauties” of the period (along with Kujo Takeko, later a close friend of hers, and Hayashi Kimuko), Akiko was a desirable quantity even as a bluestocking divorceé. In 1917 she was married again to Ito Den’emon, a Kyushu coal miner turned self-made mine owner twenty-five years older than she, who paid her family a colossal bride-price. She found herself living with a collection of his and his relatives’ children as well as his mistresses in various guises, doing her best to have her stepdaughter Shizuko educated at her alma mater, but finding life there very difficult. Isolated, lonely, abused and bored in Ito’s luxurious residence in the Chikushi coal fields, Akiko threw herself into her poetry, adopting the pen name Byakuren or “white lotus.” Her first collection, Fumie (the name of the icons Japanese Christians were forced to tread on to prove they had given up the faith) had been published in 1915; by 1919 she had published two more collections and a play.

It was through her play’s serialization in the magazine Kaiho [Liberation] that she met its editor Miyazaki Ryusuke. Seven years younger than she, the son of the philosopher and social activist Miyazaki Toten, Ryusuke took after his father’s socialist tendencies. In 1921, Byakuren traveled with her husband Ito for a visit to Tokyo. Ito returned first to Kyushu; after seeing him off, Byakuren disappeared—but not before writing him a Dear John letter and having it published in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. (“This is the last letter I shall write to you as your wife… I have chosen this path through the dictates of the best of my rationality and bravery.” Outlining her efforts to make her marriage work and her misery in Ito’s household, she went on “Fortunately, I have been granted someone who loves me, and through that love I am trying to recover myself now… With all my strength I now bid farewell to you, ignorer of women’s personal dignity, and leave you in order to protect and develop my individual freedom and honor. PS: I am sending my jewels back to you by registered mail.”) She and Ryusuke had eloped. Sensational in all its aspects, the event became known as the “Byakuren Incident.”

Her birth family tracked them down and kept her prisoner in their home for some time, during which her (and Ryusuke’s) son Kaori was born. In 1923 she and Den’emon were officially divorced; she and Ryusuke promptly married. He was ill for some years with tuberculosis, during which time Byakuren kept the family afloat with her writing while her mother-in-law Tsuchi saw to the house and the children (Tsuchi, who had more or less eloped with her husband Toten and seen their family through the ups and downs incurred by his passionate activism, was an old hand at all this). After Ryusuke’s recovery, he returned to political activism while Byakuren continued to write and publish poetry and short stories, starting a poetry magazine in 1934. Their daughter Fuki was born in 1925; she and Byakuren’s son with her first husband, Kitakoji Isamitsu, both became poets in adulthood (Isamitsu, whose feelings about his mother remained complicated to the last, spent some of his adolescence living with her new family).

In 1945, four days before the end of World War II, Kaori was killed on the battlefield. In response, Byakuren formed a bereaved mothers’ association which developed an international reach in its work toward peace and international understanding. She died in 1967 at the age of eighty-two, tended in her old age by Ryusuke and Fuki. (The former Ito residence was opened to the public in 2007, featuring a ceremony in which Ito Den’emon’s grandson Dennosuke, Shizuko’s son, shook hands with Akiko’s grandson Koseki.)

Sources
Mori 1996
Nakae
https://www.fujingaho.jp/culture/archives/g33452089/fujingaho115-culture-200731/ (Japanese) Photos and materials from the time