The flight of the sparrow ought to start from the nest. This chapter follows Tokiko’s early years as a daughter, bride, mother, peddler, poet in training, tutor, and divination specialist while keeping her native home at the center of the narrative. More than just a descriptive survey of Tokiko’s life through the 1850s, this chapter also attempts to situate the individual at the intersection of the small and the large scale. It does so in two ways. The first is by seeing how the choices Tokiko made within her microcosm measured up against the gyrations of history writ large. Inscribing...

As the previous chapter has shown, the school and the Hōjuin enabled Tokiko to square theory with reality and formed the core of her identity as a mediator between the heavens and the everyday. At the same time, these spaces also played a social function: the bonds Tokiko created in and around them integrated her within the community and the surrounding area. Tokiko’s nest was thus a nexus not for one but for two reasons: along a vertical line, it linked the cosmic and the commonplace, and on a horizontal plane it connected Tokiko to peers, like-minded individuals, teachers, mentors,...

Between the fall of 1858 and the spring of 1859, the small world of Kurosawa Tokiko came within full sight of big history. Transitioning from one to the other required a coherent plan with gradual shifts and logical steps. The ordinary individual, in other words, could not hope to alter the course of history unless some important premises were met and some endorsements obtained. This was especially true for a woman—a point, as we will see in the pages that follow, not lost on Tokiko. Like poets in training and like Shugendō practitioners preparing to enter the mountains, the...

Much has been made in twentieth-century works of Tokiko’s “solitary” mission to Kyoto, particularly in light of her gender. In Gunji Atsunobu’sUnparalleled Now and Then: The Woman Loyalist Tokiko(Kokon musō retsujo Tokiko, 1900), a fellow (male) loyalist praises Tokiko because “with the body of a woman you have faced, alone, the blizzard and you have traveled across mountains and rivers.”¹ In 1936, Takamure Itsue and Nunomura Yasuhiro hailed Tokiko for having acted with no help from others.² More recently,The Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Women(Nihon josei jinmei jiten, 1993) also specified that she went to Kyoto alone.³...

Tokiko chronicles her arrest and incarceration in a long, two-part memoir titledLetters from the Kyoto Incarceration(Kyotō toraware no fumi, 1859).² The memoir contains extensive recollections, in the form of direct quotations, of the conversations that occurred between herself and the magistrates in Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo. In the modern era, prison diaries would become a veritable literary genre,³ although precedents had already been established in the Edo period, for example by Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859). From a literary and historical standpoint,Letters from the Kyoto Incarcerationmakes an important contribution to the genre not simply by adding the...

Starting with the Ansei Treaties and the purges, Tokiko’s world had plunged into chaos. Her arrest, the relentless accusations, and the threats of torture only exacerbated her impression that madness pervaded society. Tokiko speaks of her day and age as one of turmoil (literally, “tremors”) and of subverted order: “they turned everything upside down,”¹ she writes in reference to the events that triggered her ordeal. However, in the midst of such turmoil Tokiko still saw the universe as beautiful, harmonious, and worthy of admiration. More than that, she saw it as the place out of which the rectification of the...

This chapter deals with the ordinary individual and history writ large by examining transitions large and small, public and private, historical and personal. The story it tells is one of changes and adjustments. The first part, “Clipping Wings,” covers the one-year span between the seventh month of 1859, when Tokiko entered Tenmachō prison, and the eighth month of 1860, when the lord Nariaki passed away. Along with Nariaki, in the course of that year the other iconic figure at the center of Tokiko’s political awakening, Ii Naosuke, also died, and Tokiko’s foray into engaged activism came to a close. Her...

At a time when many, beginning with the Meiji government itself, were looking forward, Tokiko was also looking back. Transitions, as it turns out, come at a cost: pushed aside by the new, what was once meaningful, immediate, and inspiring loses its punch and starts gathering dust. The past, once vivid and fresh, is consigned to the shaky hands of memory. In a world that had changed, Tokiko felt displaced:

Toshi furebaAs the years pass

yo o ukimono toI think of the world as a wretched [place].

yamazato niIn my mountain village

mukashi o shinobuI reminisce...

Like the ghost of Sugawara no Michizane, the ghost of Kurosawa Tokiko also came back from the dead. Two factors, one local and one national, facilitated her return beginning in the early twentieth century. At the local level, Mito natives resurrected Tokiko and heralded her as a symbol of their former domain’s contribution to the birth of the Meiji state. On the national stage, the promulgation of an 1899 law requiring the establishment of higher schools for girls in every prefecture prompted the creation of a gender-specific curriculum that would provide new and appropriate models of femininity.¹ Both local and...

In 1930s Mito, Tokiko’s accomplishments remained a source of great local pride. In a former domain that had no shortage of connections to iconic figures of the Restoration, to lack one’s hometown hero (or heroine, as it were) was unthinkable. Boosterism and a quest for distinction motivated local historians and bureaucrats, who had been the first ones to advertise Tokiko’s feats, to carry on with their mission in increasingly grandiose ways, writing hagiographies, erecting monuments, and founding societies named after her.

Many of the goals and methods of the Mito bureaucrats and sympathizers coincided with those expressed in publications that...

The past is not the exclusive domain of historians and ideologues. Novelists and cinematographers, among others, poach in the preserve of history, if not in the name of accuracy, in the name of action; if not for study, for spectacle; if not to educate, to entertain. The cuts and angles they select, the filters they deploy, the poetic and creative licenses they invoke make for good stories, not necessarily for rigorous history. Though beyond the scope of this study, it is worth mentioning briefly that creative renditions of Tokiko’s saga did not end with the conclusion of the war time...