Kanno Sugako and Kōtoku Shūsui
This image depicts Kanno Sugako with Kōtoku Shūsui. Although it is not certain which year this photograph was taken, it must be taken between 1908 when Kanno and Kōtoku started living together, and 1910, when they were arrested as conspirators of the Great Treason Incident.
Kanno was born in 1881 as one of the five children of a mine worker. She had a distant relationship with her father but a close relationship with her mother.[1] Her mother advocated for her intellectual growing but unfortunately died in 1892 when Kanno had just finished her mandatory four years of elementary school.[2] Her father remarried a woman Kanno never got along with.[3] When she was about thirteen years old, according to Arahata, another socialist thought to have been in love with Kanno,[4] her stepmother arranged a miner to rape Kanno to alienate her from her father and drive her away from the household.[5] This incident seems to have changed the course of her entire life. In fact, she got interested in socialism after having read Sakai Toshihiko’s essay “in which [Sakai] counseled rape victims not to be burdened with guilt.”[6] She arranged to marry a merchant from Tokyo to escape from home, got divorced in 1902 and returned to Osaka where she eventually got a job at a newspaper.[7] By 1903, she had started covering women’s issues in her articles. By 1906, “[Kanno] was moving from reform to revolution...and socialism was increasingly attractive.”[8]
In the meantime, Kōtoku became one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party in 1901 and advocated for radical action through socialism, anarchism and communism.[9] Kanno and Kōtoku met when Kanno started working at a small paper in Tokyo through other activists Sakai Toshihiko and Arahata Kanson, who she was living with before the Red Flag Incident, which refers to a socialist-anarchist rally in 1908 with hoisted red flags.[10] Arahata was imprisoned for this act but Kanno was released. She got closer to Kōtoku after her release.[11]
[1] Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1983), 140.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 141.
[4] Ibid., 140.
[5] Ibid., 141.
[6] Sugako Kanno, "Reflections on the Way to the Gallow," Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan, ed. Mikiso Hane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 51.
[7] Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1983), 142.
[8] Ibid., 148.
[9] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 133.
[10] Sugako Kanno, "Reflections on the Way to the Gallow," Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan, ed. Mikiso Hane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 53.
[11] Ibid., 54.