Books: Madame Control

FACING TWO WAYS—Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto—Parrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

When Shidzué Ishimoto was born in Tokyo at the turn of the century, the life of a woman of the samurai class was confined to a rigid pattern, from which deviation was instantly punished. She could expect to lead a sheltered life, become accomplished in penmanship, drawing, ethics, the three forms of bowing, the elaborate and agonizing rules for entertaining at dinner, the equally elaborate rules for serving tea, the subtle and difficult art of arranging flowers in vases. She could expect her parents to arrange her marriage, to be dominated throughout it by her husband and her mother-in-law, to have no interests outside her family. But by the time Shidzué Ishimoto was 30 she had broken most of the conventions of her class, had married a reckless, unstable aristocrat who changed from an extreme radical to an archreactionary, had studied stenography in a New York business college, successfully operated a yarn shop in Tokyo, helped to introduce the first birth control clinic in Japan.

Last week this rebellious Japanese lady, in the story of her life, seemed to look back upon her own varied activities with a mildly gratified air of astonishment, offered a book at once quaint and informative, packed with matter-of-fact political and social data and naïve little feminine disclosures.

Daughter of a successful engineer who had adjusted himself to Westernization, Shidzué was educated at the Peeresses’ School, where little Japanese princesses, even in their games, never forgot their rank or the distinction of their families. Shidzué’s mother played the part of a samurai’s wife as if giving a theatrical performance. Training her daughter in ancient Japanese graces, she made Shidzué study the difficult tea ceremony, saw to it that she mastered the intricate technique of flower arrangement. Shidzué felt about these instructions much as a Western child might feel about her music lessons.

Western influences pulled powerfully at her. Her liberal, widely-read Uncle Yusuke fired her imagination with tales of Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale. When Shidzué, at 18, was married, she found that her husbandwas far more deeply dissatisfied with feudal customs and restraints than she had been. Head of a wealthy and powerful family, a Christian humanist, young Baron Ishimoto became a mining engineer, took his inexperienced bride to the grimy coal fields of western Japan. There they lived for two and a half years on an equal footing with other employes, housed in a miserable thatched hut, on the Baron’s salary of $25 per month. Shidzué saw a gas explosion, went into the dangerous mines where naked men and half-naked women crawled like animals, watched sick children left alone until they coughed themselves to death.

The young aristocrats were profoundly influenced by their experiences.When they returned to a life of ease after the Baron’s health broke down, Japan had entered a post-War period of great social unrest. The Baron’s desire to help the poverty-stricken masses became intense, urgent, permitted him no peace. He moved rapidly around the U. S. and Europe, while his wife left her two children to follow him. He lived in squalid Manhattan rooms, insisted that his wife study stenography, was inspired by William (“Big Bill”) Haywood and other radicals, set his heart on going to Russia despite the civil war. But after he had been turned back from that country, his fanaticism suddenly cooled. While his wife became a feminist and radical, he became a passionate imperialist, even reverted to the customs of his feudal ancestors.

Shidzué Ishimoto returned to Japan, went into business, saw the great earthquake of 1923, made enemies by preaching equality of the sexes and birth control, drew more opposition when she aided struggling trade unions.

The climax of her birth control campaign came in 1922, when Margaret Sanger arrived in Japan, creating a greater sensation than any U. S. visitor since Commodore Perry. Japan’s population had more than doubled within 76 years of modernization. Birth control propaganda reached receptive listeners, encountered no open religious hostility from non-political Buddhists. The Government’s attempt to repress Margaret Sanger on the ground that she would introduce “dangerous thoughts” succeeded in publicizing her teaching more widely than birth control advocates could have done. Allowed to enter Japan on the condition that she would not discuss birth control, Margaret Sanger was nevertheless questioned by eager audiences, talked freely at private meetings, while Baroness Ishimoto watched at the door for police spies. Modifying her first enthusiastic acceptance of birth control as a cure-all for social evils, the Baroness nevertheless carried on her work, established a clinic, addressed working-class mothers who listened with “deep curiosity and blank amazement” to her message. She was nicknamed “Madame Control,” caricatured, sometimes hissed, considered mildly insane by the people of her own class.

Speeches before trade unions were like a complicated and dangerous game. Police sat behind the speakers on the platform, listening for some remark that would break one of the many restrictions, tagged the speaker as soon as he was guilty, whereupon another took the floor. Whenever a speaker got away with some oblique and subtly subversive observation for which the police could find no law, the audience cheered as at a brilliant play in a football game. Nowhere displaying resentment or a hysterical desire for martyrdom, Shidzué Ishimoto writes calmly of her persecution, gives the impression of having carried on her agitation with the same composure and grace she had once devoted to arranging flowers and pouring ceremonial tea.