On October 23, 1915, twenty-thousand suffragists marched on Fifth Avenue in New York City demanding the right to vote.
In the photo there is Komako Kimura (1887-1980), a prominent Japanese suffragist, who arrived from Japan to help out her sisters in America and joined in the parade.
Kimura came from a traditional Japanese family, who had arranged a marriage for her when she was 14 years old to a man she had never seen. Like many women in Japan during that time, she was expected to obey the traditional customs. She was expected to be obedient, she was expected to follow the same traditions that generations of her forebears had followed before her.
But, on the way to the marriage ceremony, Kimura had other thoughts. She would slip out of the carriage and go into hiding. She sold her wedding finery and bought a ticket to another city. There, she would make a name for herself as a dancer.
She then again defied Japanese convention by eloping with a young doctor. She would become a writer, publishing a novel, then edited a woman's magazine in Tokyo, called Shin Shin Fujin, the first publication in Japan of its kind asserting women's rights. It would be so controversial that the magazine would be suppressed.
The conservative government of Japan then started watching her and would refuse her to hold suffrage meetings in the streets of Tokyo.
She would also become a well-known actress in her country who would take on daring roles. Again, the government would step in, telling her that she needed to stick with nice and mild roles befitting of women at that time.
She responded to that edict by opening her theater to the public without fee. She would be arrested and put on trial. The government, however, never knew what they were truly dealing with: Kimura would defend herself, providing arguments that were so well thought out that her trial would receive much publicity. Because of her, the word "suffrage", previously unspoken before in Japan, would be carried into the remotest districts of the empire.
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