Okada Yachiyo was born in 1883 in Hiroshima, the youngest daughter of a prominent doctor; her older brother was the innovative theater director Osanai Kaoru, and she was also a distant cousin of the painter Foujita Tsuguharu. When she was two years old her father died and her mother moved the family to Tokyo, where they frequently attended the theater and Yachiyo went to Kyoritsu Girls’ Vocational School, graduating in 1902. Encouraged by her brother and his friends, she began to publish her writing (both fiction and theater critique) in various literary magazines, including Yosano Akiko’s Myojo [Morning Star].

In 1906, she married the artist Okada Saburosuke (the marriage was arranged by Mori Ogai, husband of Shige), who used her as a model for several well-received paintings. Yachiyo herself continued to write and became a frequent contributor to Hiratsuka Raicho’s Bluestocking magazine. Her 1912 one-act play Tsuge no Kushi [The Boxwood Comb] is considered an answer of sorts to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; its heroine O-Tsuna, who has left her home and her husband, longs at one point to return. In addition to writing Yachiyo was, like her brother, involved in theatrical production; she ran a children’s theater which performed from 1922 to 1930, and later a troupe of young actors which was active from 1935 to 1939.

In 1926, the Okadas’ marriage broke down and Yachiyo walked out, briefly taking up with an actor in Osaka; although never officially divorced, she and Saburosuke lived separately until his death in 1939. They made up temporarily in 1930 and visited Paris together; Yachiyo remained there until 1934.

She was a close friend of the editor Hasegawa Shigure, working with her on the first, short-lived version of the Nyonin Geijutsu [Women’s Art] journal and later in the wartime Kagayaku Kai [Shining Group] which supported Japanese troops overseas (she also visited colonial China for this purpose in 1941).

After the war she continued to write essays and playscripts, as well as editing and directing; in 1948 she founded the Japan Women Playwrights’ Association. She died in 1962 at the age of seventy-nine.

Sources
Mori 2008

Kohashi Miyoko was born in 1883 in Shizuoka. (Wikipedia says Kohashi, my other source says Kobashi, it could be either.) She graduated from high school in Tokyo and in 1901 became one of the first entering class of the brand new Japan Women’s University, where she also converted to Christianity.

Upon graduation in 1904, she became the editor of the alumnae magazine, and subsequently also took on the editing of various other journals, including the Christian women’s magazine Shinjokai [New Women’s World], where she worked with Yasui Tetsu. In 1914, she became editor of the women’s page of the Yomiuri Shimbun, then as now one of Japan’s major newspapers, producing articles written by Yosano Akiko among others. The section’s focus on women’s issues and views of general news seen from a woman’s perspective, along with an advice column, became very popular. (Ichikawa Fusae, among its fans, wrote in about her longing to travel to Tokyo. The advice column also catered to readers who were not literate enough to write their own letters, having journalists interview them and formulate their concerns in writing.)

The following year, Miyoko founded Fujin Shukan [Women’s Weekly], expanding on the work she had done at the Yomiuri to address women’s lives from a variety of angles, and writing editorials calling for occupational training for women and the need to raise men’s consciousness in order to improve women’s status. Among her magazine’s writers was the businesswoman Hirooka Asako, who had had her eye on Miyoko since the latter’s college days; Asako also provided financial support for Miyoko’s work, and Miyoko published her autobiography in 1918. She also founded the Women Journalists’ Club and worked with the WCTU to ban prostitution.

In 1919 Miyoko traveled to the US to study journalism and women’s studies at Columbia University. Upon her return to Japan, she continued working as a journalist with a focus on women’s issues, also publishing a collection of interviews with Margaret Sanger. She died of a sudden illness in 1922, at the age of thirty-nine.

Sources
https://kajimaya-asako.daido-life.co.jp/column/43.html (Japanese) Photos and reproductions (scrolls right-left)