awanderingcoyote

Varvara Bubnova was born in 1886 in St. Petersburg, where her father was a bank clerk. Her mother believed that the only way for women to express their ability was through the arts, and taught her three daughters languages, music, and painting. Marya, the oldest, and Anna, the youngest, were both musically gifted, but middle daughter Varvara’s skills ran to the visual arts; at twenty-one she entered the prestigious St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a painter in oils. There (along with artists including Mayakovsky, Natalia Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich) she met the painter Voldemārs Matvejs, a Latvian who was studying African art; they spent their summers traveling Europe, visiting museums of art and ethnology and discovering local folklore. In 1914, just after their engagement, Matvejs died; not long after, Varvara’s father followed him.

In response, Varvara buried herself in her work. In 1917, as the Russian Revolution broke out, her sister Anna fled to Japan with her Japanese husband Ono Shun’ichi. Varvara chose to move to Moscow and continue Matvejs’ work, learning lithography and working among others with Kandinsky, Lyubov Popova, and Rodchenko. She published a book on African art in Europe in 1919, under Matvejs’ name.

In 1922, she and her mother made the six-month trip to Japan in order to see Anna and her family. She enjoyed the new landscapes and unfamiliar customs, but found the art world unsatisfying (“they have inherited nothing from the past and have not yet formed anything modern,” she wrote to a friend), although she was fascinated by traditional Japanese painting. Varvara’s own work at first failed to find an audience when it was exhibited. After publishing an essay on Russian art in one of the leading literary journals, she was invited to join an exhibition held by the young avant-garde, who adopted her as one of them. Some theories suggest that her name was the V in MAVO, the name given by the playwright and artist Murayama Tomoyoshi to his journal in 1924.

For an independent income (so as not to be a drag on her sister’s household forever), Varvara took a post as lecturer in Russian at Waseda University and later at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, where many of her students later became well-known translators and scholars (at least one, Yonekawa Masao, admired her intelligence and erudition so much as to write that he would have proposed to her if he hadn’t already had a family). In 1927 she married Vladimir Golovshchikov, who was over a decade younger than she (and seems to have no historical existence except as her husband, I’m not even sure I’ve transcribed his name right). She continued to exhibit her lithographs and to discuss art with her colleagues, such as the left-wing satirical cartoonist Yanase Masamu, who shared her admiration for the painter Käthe Kollwitz. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1932, focusing on depictions of laborers such as farmers, fishers, ex-servicemen, and ama divers. The artist Onchi Koshiro, a longtime friend, wrote that her work was “full of extremely realistic detail, cleaving closely to everyday life and yet holding a sense of mystery of a sort.” She went on to provide illustrations for the translations from Russian published by her students, and acted as interpreter for the visionary German architect Bruno Taut when he visited Japan.

During the war, her nationality made her suspect and she was constantly under surveillance, but her friends and students stayed by her. Her mother died in 1940 and her husband in 1946. She continued to ride the tram to her work at the university and teach her students to read Pushkin, a distant relative on her mother’s side. In 1958 she returned to the Soviet Union, where she held several solo exhibitions, settling in Sukhumi (modern-day Abkhazia/Georgia) on the Black Sea along with her older sister Marya. She died in 1983 at the age of ninety-six.

Sources
Mori 2008
https://jp.rbth.com/arts/82711-bubnova-shimai
https://note.com/bunkertokyo/n/nb7d17d92dedd (Japanese) Articles illustrated with Varvara’s works

Hiratsuka Raicho was born in 1886 in Tokyo, the daughter of a well-to-do senior government official who had studied in Europe; her birth name was Haruko. She graduated from Japan Women’s College (developing a lifelong interest in Zen meditation while a student) in 1906. The next few years were spent studying English and Japanese literature at various schools (including the Eigakujuku founded by Tsuda Umeko), where she studied writing with Ikuta Choko and Morita Sohei. In 1908 Haruko and Morita plunged into a rapidly developing love affair, culminating in an attempt at a love-suicide which it turned out neither of them could bring themselves to go through with. This created an enormous scandal (causing Haruko’s father to lose his job and estranging them until her children were born years later), especially when Morita wrote a novel about it.

In 1911, upon Ikuta’s suggestion that she found a literary magazine run entirely by women, she consulted with her sister’s friend Yasumori Yoshiko and formed an initial editorial board of herself, Yoshiko, Nakano Hatsuko, Kiuchi Teiko, and Mozume Kazuko. The funding for their first issue came from what would have been Haruko’s dowry, handed over by her resigned but supportive mother Tsuya. The magazine was christened Seito [Bluestocking], and Naganuma Chieko drew the illustration for the cover of the inaugural issue, which included a poem by Yosano Akiko and Haruko’s own essay on the theme of “In the beginning, woman was the Sun,” which became a classic of Japanese feminist literature on the spot. The essay called for women’s genius to be released from the strictures of a patriarchal society. It was at this time that she began using the penname Raicho, “thunderbird” or rock ptarmigan.

Other supporters included Hasegawa Shigure, Okada Yachiyo, Mori Shige, and Koganei Kimiko; contributors and assistants included Tamura Toshiko, Nogami Yaeko, Mizuno Senko, Otake Kokichi, Senuma Kayo, Kamichika Ichiko, Ito Noe, Mikajima Yoshiko, and Okamoto Kanoko. Raicho was the moving force, organizing an edition dedicated to discussion of Ibsen’s Nora and her ramifications as well as lecture series and other events. The Bluestocking women became notorious not only for their literary and activist work but also for the “Five-Colored Alcohol Incident” (in which Kokichi went out to a fashionable bar and drank fancy cocktails) and for their in-person observation of the Yoshiwara red-light district (where Raicho chatted with a woman who had attended the same elementary school), identifying them as “decadents,” modern feminists, New Women, distinct from traditional good girls. This era apparently saw a record number of “Noras,” daughters and young wives leaving home with no warning. Raicho took up the gauntlet without hesitation, adding translations of texts by Ellen Key and Emma Goldman to her magazine. Articles by the activist Fukuda Hideko and by Raicho herself earned publication bans from the government.

Raicho spent 1911 and 1912 in a relationship with the “boyish” Kokichi, who liked to affect masculine dress (there is relatively little to be found about this in histories of Raicho, especially in Japanese). In 1914 she moved in with the artist Okumura Hiroshi, nicknamed the “little swallow” because he was (gasp, shock, horror) three years younger than she was. She continued to insist on a common-law marriage until 1941, when wartime asperities made it more convenient to marry officially. In her eyes the relationship was a part of her refusal to engage in the “good wife, wise mother” style of marriage which restricted women’s freedom, but many of the older women in her vicinity, Akiko included, saw it as a feckless young artist leeching off the older and (somewhat) more together Raicho.

Distracted by pregnancy and Okumura’s illness, Raicho passed on editorship of Bluestocking to Ito Noe in 1915; the magazine lasted another year and a bit. Raicho herself later worked as a critic, raised two children (Akemi, born in 1915, and Atsufumi in 1917, both on Raicho’s family register rather than Okumura’s), and engaged in debates on motherhood with Akiko, Yamakawa Kikue, and Yamada Waka. In 1920, she founded the New Women’s Association along with Ichikawa Fusae and Oku Mumeo, fighting for women’s suffrage and greater support for mothers, specifically for an amendment to Article 5 of the Peace Police Law, which prohibited women’s political participation, and a law restricting marriage for men with venereal disease. The former demand was realized two years later (although the latter never came about). With the support of well-known male writers including Sakai Toshihiko, Mori Ogai, and Arishima Takeo, the new Association thrived and Raicho resorted to Western dress to save time amid lecture tours and articles. Three years later she cut her hair (or rather had Okumura cut it for her), becoming the image of the short-bobbed Modern Girl (although her original purpose was to cure her chronic headaches).

Raicho devoted herself after the war to working for world peace through women’s organizations, including opposition to the Vietnam War. She remained the main household breadwinner, albeit with financial support from her birth family. Okumura died in 1964, and Raicho followed him in 1971 at the age of eighty-five.

Sources
Mori 1996; Mori 2008; Tanaka
https://aaww.org/raicho-hiratsuka-beginning-woman-sun/ (English) Brief history of Raicho in comic form
[I can’t find a translation of her fundamental article online, but there is a lot of English material available concerning Raicho via a quick google]