On March 10,1922, the passenger ship Taiyo Maru docked at Yokohama Bay. On board was women’s rights and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and her 14-year-old son Grant. Her visit was sponsored by the magazine Kaizo (or “Reconstruction”). The respected publication had bankrolled a series of
On March 10,1922, the passenger ship Taiyo Maru docked at Yokohama Bay. On board was women’s rights and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and her 14-year-old son Grant. Her visit was sponsored by the magazine Kaizo (or “Reconstruction”). The respected publication had bankrolled a series of visits from leading Western thinkers in the early 1920s such as Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. Kaizo had hoped Sanger could help shed light on the much-talked about topic of the times, birth control, but the Japanese government had other ideas.
For Sanger, Japan was just the first stop on a six-month world tour, but it would prove to be her most turbulent. Still aboard the Taiyo Maru, “I was asked to make a formal request to enter Japan.” Several uncomfortable hours later she was told she could enter Japan on only one condition: « Do not deliver any public lectures about birth control. »
Sanger was confused — and rightfully so. After all, the major point of her visit was to speak on this very subject, as requested by the magazine sponsoring her trip. She needed a clear reason why this restriction was being placed on her.
“It is not easy to surprise anyone who had worked for long in the Birth Control movement,” Sanger would write a few months later. “We get accustomed to the unexpected happening. In this case, however, my surprise was real, because I was led to believe by Japanese in the U. S. A. that there was a general interest in the Birth Control subject on the part of the younger members of the government.”
According to author Helen M. Hopper, the decision to block Sanger was “urged on by a large block of conservatives in the House of Peers (now the House of Councillors), the upper house of the Japanese Diet.” There were a number of reasons why the government pushed back against Sanger, and it started with the anti-immigration rhetoric coming from American newspapers and politicians stating that they were concerned with Japanese people taking over California and the entire west coast.
Because of this shadowy fear, new “alien land laws” were passed, blocking incoming Japanese immigrants from acquiring property. These fears were humiliating to a proud minority in the Japanese government. This, coupled with the recent demand by the U. S. and Great Britain for Japan to reduce its naval fleet (fearing a flare-up akin to WWI Germany), caused the government to distress over how much to trust in Western cultural ideals.
The way Sanger describes it in her autobiography, “by our Exclusion Act we had implied they were undesirable citizens, and now it was an American [myself] who was undesirable to them.”
Sanger was finally able to leave the ship after signing an agreement stating that she would avoid explaining “practical methods of contraception, suggest how to obtain birth-control literature, or introduce birth control as a method of limiting population in any public forum.” Officials would attend all of her lectures and make sure her “dangerous thoughts” were not communicated to the audience.
Fortunately for Sanger, she had three valuable resources to help spread her message to Japanese women across the country: Kaizo’s ability to adapt (how can we get around the idea of a “public lecture”?), the media’s desire to report on government controversy and, most importantly, the support of her best Japanese friend and fellow birth control advocate, 25-year-old Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto, more commonly known later as Kato Shidzue, one of the most important politicians in 20th century Japan.
