Kawasaki Natsu (1889-1966)

Jun. 12th, 2026 07:50 am
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[personal profile] nnozomi posting in [community profile] senzenwomen
Kawasaki Natsu was born in 1889 in Nara, the daughter of a watchmaker. She lost her mother shortly after her birth, skipped grades in elementary school and entered the Nara Girls’ Higher Normal School at thirteen (having apparently fudged her birth records to appear two years older). After graduation, she taught for three years at her hometown elementary school and at nineteen went to Tokyo to enter the Tokyo Girls’ Higher Normal School. There she discovered Hiratsuka Raicho’s Bluestocking and the poetry of Yosano Akiko, volunteered at Noguchi Yuka’s Futaba Kindergarten, scandalized her professors by writing essays in the style of spoken rather than literary Japanese, and only just avoided expulsion as a dangerous element.

Natsu graduated in 1912 and went to teach at a girls’ high school in Hokkaido, where she encouraged her students (she was in charge of essay-writing for all 500 girls) to write freely and with imagination, about themselves as well as the texts they read. She returned to Tokyo in 1916 for graduate study on the psychology of creativity, at the same time teaching writing at her alma mater the Girls’ Higher Normal School, and later at Tokyo Women’s University upon its founding.

In 1921, the well-to-do architect Nishimura Isaku asked her to recommend a school for his daughter Aya, but she couldn’t think of one that would do. The Yosanos, who happened to be there, suggested that they start one, and so Natsu found herself in charge of the newly established Bunka Gakuin (Culture Academy), the only professional educator among teachers who also included Nishimura himself, the Yosanos, and the composer Yamada Kosaku (Tsuneko Gauntlett’s little brother) among other notable figures. The school, like theJiyu Gakuin started in the same year by Hani Motoko, focused on individual creativity and freedom; students wore their own clothes (Western-style clothing was recommended, giving the school a name for high fashion), and girls and boys were educated together for the first time in Japan’s history. It was to produce a long line of accomplished alumni, largely in the arts and humanities. [I haven’t found much in English about Nishimura himself, but he was a pioneering architect and iconoclast and had nine children, of whom Aya, the reason the school was founded, was the oldest; she eventually succeeded her father as principal of the school herself. I also came across a fascinating obituary for Aya’s sister Sono.]

Natsu’s classes were popular; she would begin a geography class by asking her students to imagine themselves on a train headed north from Ueno Station, following the map to Nasu where they would encounter a nine-tailed fox spirit or to Nakoso where they would fight a historical battle alongside warlords. Eating oysters and admiring horses, they would take ship (in imagination) to Hokkaido, at which point Natsu would pause to promise her students she would take them to Hokkaido for real some day and they could all go skiing. She also taught them about feminism and the proletarian revolution, and argued that the goddess Amaterasu was a human being like the rest of them, all topics which at the time could have been grounds for jailing.

In 1943 the school was closed down for sedition. In response Natsu devoted herself to the support of her friends who were down on their luck or imprisoned for their left-wing sensibilities, giving houseroom to fugitives hiding from the authorities, as well as continuing to work for women’s rights and women’s suffrage. (Biographies of more prominent activists tend with clockwork regularity to include lines like “…and Kawasaki Natsu brought her food and clothing when she was in prison” or “…Kawasaki Natsu on the left in the photo of the covert gathering.”) After the war she became a Diet member representing the Socialist Party, remaining in office for six years; she also taught intermittently (at schools now run by her own former students), demonstrated in the Anpo Riots, and worked to bring together the Japan Mothers’ Union as a force for social change. She died in 1966 at the age of seventy-seven.

Sources
Mori 1996

Montreal . . .

Jun. 12th, 2026 05:36 am
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[personal profile] sartorias
It's pretty hot and humid here, but wonderful. But yesterday I was trying to cope with the news that Jane Yolen is no longer among us.

I got to know her through an apa we were in together; through that, I was invited along with a pair of other writers to stay with her in Hatfield, where she had a fifteen-room house, before going to World Fantasy Con. It was Halloween. Her daughter, in high school at the time, breezed in the night before we left for the con to report that she and friends had been going around smashing people's Halloween pumpkins on their porches, and Jane laughed like a fellow teenager, making me feel that she was ageless. Also I wondered if smashing pumpkins was a thing. (There was a band called Smashing Pumpkins.)

On the drive to the con, I was in the front seat and two other writers in the back. Jane was talking writing as she drove. (Very fast.) I gained the impression that she respected everybody who was trying to write, wherever they were along the path, but impatient with those who wanted to have written. (Writers know what I mean, for example the folks who say, "I've an idea, but I'm too busy to sit down and write it. How about me telling it to you, you write it, and we'll split the profits?" or, further along the weedy path, plagiarists who seem to need to be known as writers but can't quite do the work themselves.)

Then she asked us what we were writing, and my friends in the back described their project--they wrote together as collaborators. Then it was my turn and I said I was writing a sequel in a sequence. She said, "How many books are in this sequence?" and I said, "One hundred and thirty-five notebooks." And she slewed around to look at me--while still driving. The car swerved with a dramatic swoop and my friends in the back got saucer-eyed, but Jane straightened out the wheel as she said, "Are they any good?" "Probably not," I said.

Which was oh so true--it's taken me another forty years of slow labor to learn to RE-write, still learning--but that aside, it was a pretty funny episode. She then at that con introduced me to the woman who would become my agent. Which turned out to be problematical to a painful degree, but that was not her fault.

Subsequent meetings were always at cons, or in New York, which included insider data on how the publishing world worked, as she knew all the editors of the day. What a force of nature she was! And how generous to those of us further back on the path!

(no subject)

Jun. 12th, 2026 09:37 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] ase!

Typo du jour

Jun. 12th, 2026 04:12 pm
fred_mouse: screen cap of google translate with pun 'owl you need is love'. (owl)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

I have a head cold, and zero attention span, so I'm rereading fic, with breaks for micro-naps, just so that I'm not completely bored. Today's tyop:

explicit homophonic law

(correct text: explicit homophobic law)

I'm sure there are some interesting jokes there.

New Worlds: Home Production

Jun. 12th, 2026 08:02 am
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[personal profile] swan_tower
Given the surge in popularity of "tradwife" influencers these days, it seems an appropriate time to take a direct look at what it actually means for everything you need to be produced at home.

Starting with two basic facts: first, that essentially nobody has ever produced everything they need at home. And second, that the more you have to do so, the more your life sucks.

If you want an illustration of what I mean, check out the book Lost in the Taiga by Vasily Peskov. It's a nonfiction account of the Lykov family, who fled religious persecution and spent fifty years living in almost total isolation in the Russian wilderness. By the time they started having regular contact with anyone outside their family, they were living the most horrifyingly marginal existence you can imagine: their house was a filthy, windowless lodge, they wore crude skins for clothing, and multiple family members (especially children) had died due to the almost complete lack of medicine. The weather itself had nearly killed them more than once when their crops failed, at one point necessitating the Lykovs taking turns keeping round-the-clock watch on their few surviving plants, to keep wild animals from destroying them.

And even then, the Lykovs weren't fully self-sufficient. They depended on metal tools like their cooking pot which, if lost or destroyed, were completely irreplaceable. Yes, it's possible to cook without metal vessels; yes, you could theoretically make stone tools if you didn't have access to metal knives. But every such step toward self-sufficiency requires more labor, until every single hour in your day is devoted to the task of bare survival.

Granted, the Lykovs were not living in the most forgiving environment. But if you check out the stories of people who exited the "trad life," you'll find account after account of how much work they poured into living that way, until there was simply no time or energy left over for enjoying its supposed benefits. It's an open secret at this point that the glossy, successful tradwives pulling in huge amounts of money from their work are showing a highly edited version of their existence, often involving armies of paid assistants -- and/or their children, whose free time becomes a sacrifice on the altar of their mother's career as an influencer.

Because that's the first thing to know about home production as a system: everybody works. If you're old enough to do some kind of simple task, like shelling peas, then you do it. Furthermore, you work nigh-constantly, because there is always more to do. The internet likes to pass around the claim that medieval Europeans worked less than moderns, but if you start to crunch the actual numbers, that doesn't really hold up . . . especially when you consider the tendency to ignore women's work. Even if a saint's day or other religious festival meant the men weren't going out to labor in the fields, the women still had to tend children, cook meals, clean up afterward, and probably spin thread while they watched the celebrations. Life will not go on hold just because it's a special day.

But what do I mean when I say "home production"? It's a fuzzy concept, but generally speaking, it refers to the idea that stuff is mostly made and used at home. You can also, of course, make stuff at home and then trade or sell it elsewhere; given how often houses doubled as workshops, it's inevitable those two modes will overlap. And piecework, where someone gets paid per item they make, has gone hand-in-hand with home production for centuries, as a way for a household to bring in a little more money. Home production in the sense I mean it here, though, is about the idea of self-sufficiency: rather than buying things ready-made, you make them you and your family, for you and your family.

Measured by the time and effort invested, home production focuses almost entirely on food (including drink) and clothing, and neither one is fully seasonal. Winter still entails agricultural labor, and when it doesn't, the men are probably working on making or repairing tools they'll use when the weather warms up, or taking care of livestock. The women are busy turning the raw outputs into actual food, and the aforementioned spinning, which has to fill almost every moment it can if you're to have enough thread to weave enough cloth to clothe everybody in the family. They might also make simple medicines at home, or crude furniture, or other necessities and minor luxuries, but those are a side note to the overwhelming demands of sustenance and shelter for the body.

And that's still not the whole story, is it? Blacksmiths have been high on the list of necessary trades since we invented metalworking. (All right, since we invented iron-working. Apparently the proper term for someone who works bronze is a brownsmith!) Successful metalworking requires so much training and specialized knowledge, not to mention equipment, not to mention time, that nobody's doing that and also being a full-time farmer. Pottery is much the same, because building and operating your own kiln is way too much to add atop everything else. Other things can be done at home, like milling grain, but they're so labor-intensive that it's vastly more efficient to have a specialist with the right tools do the job.

This is how "home production" turns out to be a spectrum. Yes, people used to produce most of what they needed at home -- but not everything, and at the first opportunity, they started outsourcing certain tasks. If you could buy or trade for thread already spun (perhaps from a local poor spinster), you did; if you could buy or trade for cloth already woven, you did. You were, essentially, buying a respite from the endless labor that is the genuine trad life. Furthermore, specialization of labor is good for us as a society: a dedicated weaver can make finer cloth than someone who's doing that in her spare time, and god knows a dedicated physician can know more about medicine than someone tossing a few herbs into tea and hoping that will do the job. When you don't have to do everything yourself, you get better results.

But the belief that the traditional life was somehow purer and better isn't entirely a new phenomenon. The transcendentalist philosophers of nineteenth century America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, touted the benefits of "simple living" out in nature. In recent years the internet has given them something of an unfair shake; it's true they weren't entirely self-sufficient, but neither did they claim to be. (Thoreau in particular has become the target of "his mom did his laundry and brought him sandwiches!" We don't actually know how his laundry got done, and he himself admits he regularly walked into town to dine with friends and family.) It is true, however, that they approached their vision of simplicity from a relatively privileged direction, and could therefore afford a great deal of assistance and modern convenience. Their lives would have been significantly more difficult if the innovations of the Industrial Revolution had not made things like the production of their clothing faster and cheaper than the womenfolk of their families could manage by hand.

The flip side, of course, is that there can be genuine satisfaction in making stuff yourself. Especially if your job feels very separated from material reality -- you spend all your time on the computer moving words or numbers around, all to create something far removed from the physical product, or that never becomes a physical product at all -- then sinking your hands into a mass of dough, or sewing your own skirt, or raising vegetables, or any of the other simple tasks of creation often feels rewarding all out of proportion to its necessity . . . or maybe rewarding because it isn't necessary. It reconnects you with the fruits of your labor, and that can be very good for the brain.

So although I have a ton of issues with the entire "trad" movement (even before we get to the often reactionary politics behind it), I recognize and value some of the impulse there. And for writers, it's worth not only acknowledging the ugly reality of what real self-sufficiency looks like, but understanding the conditions that make people nostalgic for the concept. I would wholeheartedly believe in a spacefaring civilization where anything can be printed from a replicator on the spot -- and therefore has thriving communities of hobbyists who enjoy making stuff by hand instead.

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(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/06/12/new-worlds-home-production/)

It's not coming home

Jun. 12th, 2026 08:35 am
elisi: (The Brig by sallymn)
[personal profile] elisi
I have no interest in football, but here is Mathew to explain it:


😘

I started a story!

Jun. 11th, 2026 10:41 pm
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
We went to see the steam engine Big Boy No. 4014 at Letchworth State Park, which was fascinating, crowded, and hot. The enormous train whistle echoing through the gorge, which is known as the Grand Canyon of the East, will stick with me.

We got there two and a half hours early, so we settled in to wait. While I waited, I started writing Last Week Tonight: Petrova Truthers. Anyone who is familiar with Project Hail Mary -- particularly the book, but the movie, too -- and John Oliver's voice is invited to come help me with it.

After I got home, I shared the draft-so-far with [personal profile] buggery, who read it aloud via phone and laughed immoderately. That was a great feeling.

My previous effort in John Oliver voice is:

Last Week This Benduday with J'hon Olivah: Clone Soldiers (5516 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (TV), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano
Characters: John Oliver, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker, Original Clone Character(s)
Additional Tags: In-Universe News Broadcast, John Oliver Pastiche, Jedi Discourse, Galactic Republic (Star Wars), Galactic Republic Politics (Star Wars), Parody of Satire, Turtles all the way down - Freeform, Screenplay/Script Format, Mancrush, Comedy, Dark Comedy
Series: Part 42 of Petra's Favorites Of Their Own Work, Part 1 of Star Wars Prequels in 2020s Media
Summary:

Last Week This Benduday with J'hon Olivah is a Coruscanti late-night talk and news satire program available throughout the Republic via the holonet. The main story from this week's episode discusses the clone soldiers fighting the current war, their origins, and what responsibility the Jedi Order bears for them, including interviews with current and former Jedi.


*

I am pretty sure that, while the Jedi pressure their heroes to do press, Eva Stratt has infinite numbers of better things to do.

What's the over/under on whether Grace does science education outreach via late night satire? John would hit on him so hard and tell him, "It's really, truly okay for you to say 'Fuck.'"

Project Hail Mary spoiler )

Dept. of Listsickles

Jun. 11th, 2026 08:06 pm
kaffy_r: (Sen Waits)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Things I Have Done and Seen

As the hed* suggests, I haven't been standing still since my last post.

Walks: I've gone on a few walks, although not nearly at the once daily pace I'd prefer - it's so easy to find a reason not to go outside. Especially when the temperature is bouncing between the mid-80s, which I can deal with, and the low 90s, which is a tad less healthy. Tonight, it's thundering and we're still under a tornado watch. Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler, but still rather humid. That's good enough for me; it might be time for a really early walk. 

Norman: On one of those walks, I met a ginger cat named Norman. I worried about him being out in front of the Yellow Chicken House, because I didn't know if he belonged there or somewhere else. He was extremely friendly and he had the purple tag that allowed me to learn his name. And then a guy coming out of his house and putting things in his car looked over and said, "Hi, Norman!" and came over to pick up a very happy Norman. We chatted; I learned that Norman did indeed belong to the Yellow Chicken House and was let out because he never leaves the area bounded by the house's fences. The guy put down Norman just as a woman came by, walking her dog. "You know what else Norman is?" the guy asked with a grin. "He's not afraid of dogs. The woman walking the dog called out "Hi, Norman!" then turned to me and said "He's right!" I kind of stumbled when I said  that I'd lost two cats to traffic so I didn't let my current cat out - it seemed kind of rude and beside the point for me to say this, when Norman was obviously healthy and he really didn't go beyond the sidewalk boundaries of his home. He really is the epitome of a neighborhood cat, in a most definite neighborhood. 

Getting wordy. Rest is under here.  )

* That's what us Ancients of Newsroom Days called headlines and that's how it's spelled. WHAT??!?

Don't know why you say goodbye.

Jun. 11th, 2026 08:54 pm
hannah: (Laundry jam - fooish_icons)
[personal profile] hannah
Chopped out and rewrote about 400 words for the better is one of those things where I'm moving, but it doesn't feel like I'm moving forward. It's still movement, though, and I'm focusing on that part. They're more useful words than what I had before because I know where to go next.

That was about the only thing of merit today, besides carting some materials to the library to be processed by professionals for resale or recycling. I might've been able to push a bit at one point or another to do some paying work, and a two and a half-hour movie in the middle of the afternoon might not have been the best plan to help with that, though I can't say I quite regret it. Disclosure Day was a ride of a time and sitting in the theater was where I figured out how to move those words around. I'd probably have figured it out anyway, but it definitely helped it happen today.

well, I never...

Jun. 11th, 2026 06:45 pm
chazzbanner: (painted tower)
[personal profile] chazzbanner
I felt tired and headachy much of the day. Do you know what? I think it was the front that went through!

Yes, even a front that brings cooler, dryer air can give me a persistent little headache. Grr!

This didn't help: in mid-afternoon I glanced at the thermometer and saw it was 78F inside! (25.5C). I opened windows, and it's gone down to 73.

-

History is a yahrzeit candle

Jun. 11th, 2026 06:56 pm
sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
[personal profile] sovay
Jane Yolen has died. Her books were some of the first I read. Even with my library in storage, I can see several of her titles just by turning my head. Her shadow sisters got into my Jewish demons. She ushered me through the corridors of the sea. I had the fortune of sharing some panels with her; I did have the chance to tell her how much of my sense of story she had shaped. Tam Lin and Commander Toad, White Jenna and Merlin, dragons and owls and selkies and golems and cats and always, unsentimentally, words. Which remain, but it still feels like a great light blown out.

I saw a sailor once
shed his skin
as quickly as a crab
sloughs its shell.
He danced alone,
easy in his bones,
amid the coral memories
of his sunken ship.
When he opened his mouth,
little colored fish
swam in and out,
avoiding his brittle teeth,
his stripped and shining jaw.
They were quick and bright
as laughter,
running their zigzag course
through the silent syncopation
of the sea.


—Jane Yolen, "Metamorphosis" (1982)

The Big Idea: Cynthia Pelayo

Jun. 11th, 2026 08:49 pm
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

To be whisked away to Neverland was certainly the dream of many a child, but for Wendy Darling it was always a trap, rather than a paradise. Author Cynthia Pelayo discusses in her Big Idea how Wendy was a servant, not an equal to the Lost Boys, and takes us to revisit Wendy in her newest novel, It Came From Neverland.

CYNTHIA PELAYO:

Wendy Darling is the reason any of us even know about Neverland. We think this is Peter Pan’s story, but it’s not, not really. The only reason any of us even know about Neverland is because of Wendy Darling. 

Let’s strip away the fairy dust and the pirates and the flying and the crocodile, and what do we have? A girl. A girl who was told that something magical was waiting for her on the other side. A girl who believed what she was being told. A girl who later learned she was lured with the promise of magic, yet found herself inside a trap instead. 

J.M. Barrie introduced us to Peter Pan through The Little White Bird in 1902, and that little boy would go on to pique the public’s curiosity so much that Barrie revisited his story. Then came the play in 1904 and the novel in 1911. However, the reason the story works and the reason it continues to survive over a century later is because of Wendy. Without Wendy there would be no Neverland. No Tinkerbell. No Hook. No Lost Boys. Peter Pan without Wendy Darling is just a boy screaming into the dark. Wendy is the story, and Peter’s promise to her is the lie. 

Peter tells her to come away with him, that she will never grow up, but what he means is something entirely different. What he wants is a mother, for the Lost Boys, and selfishly for himself. He wants someone to read to them, to mend their socks, to take care of them. Someone who will stay in that role, forever. 

Yes, Wendy goes, because she is sweet and brave and kind and beautiful, and she is made up of stories. And perhaps it’s because of her kindness that she allows herself to trust, to trust in the possibility that maybe this is all real. Perhaps she even catches the hint that there is something wrong in this request to run away, but she overrides her own intuition for the possibility of magic and friendship. Quickly Wendy learns that the promise of eternal youth was just manipulation. It was all a story, and not a happily-ever-after kind. She was not brought to Neverland to take part in adventure, to be treated as a partner, or even as an equal. She was brought to Neverland to be a caretaker in a prison with no walls. 

Wendy is every woman who has ever been told one thing and expected to be something else. That is the story that I needed to tell: The Girl Who Bravely and Beautifully Grew Up, Wendy. 

I wanted to write a version of this story where we are provided with the accounts of Neverland directly from Wendy’s perspective, as an adult, after she has had time to process it all. I wanted her to be able to clearly name what happened to her, to accept that she was lied to, and then made out to be foolish and called unstable for the wounds inflicted on her by others. I wanted to tell the story where she lives with that trauma and learns that she is not defined by what happened to her. 

In It Came From Neverland, Wendy is in her early 20s and she is working as a schoolteacher at an orphanage at the start of WWI in 1914. She also volunteers in the afternoon, reading to soldiers who have returned from the war. When one of her students goes missing, and a solider in a comma utters the words “Peter Pan,” she knows Peter has returned and she and her brothers must reunite to finally stop him from kidnapping more children. 

This book is for every woman who was told she was special by someone who really meant that she was useful to them. For every woman who followed a beautiful story, later to learn it was only a cage. 

And, for every single woman who told the truth about what happened to her, but was not believed, and she realized that no one was coming to save her, so she learned to save herself. 

The only story that has ever truly mattered is Wendy’s. 


It Came From Neverland: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

dhampyresa: (Default)
[personal profile] dhampyresa
I recently had to get a new mp3 player, because my old one stopped working. As I was filling it with music, I put all of the musical Hamilton on there and took the opportunity to relisten to the whole thing in order while paying attention rather than "whatever comes up on shuffle while I'm out and about doing stuff". Overall, I don't think my opionion has changed much from a decade ago, ie: I enjoy it overall, Leslie Odom Jr is the best singer of the bunch (unfortunately, Lin-Manuel Miranda is the weakest), I wish the women got to do more than just Be Romantically And/Or Sexually Entangled With Hamilton, Lafayette's French accent sure is Something, Huh and slavery is a bit glossed over, innit? I do really like the artfulness of the lyrics -- the way the words work is really nice, idk.

Anyway, there's a line in Cabinet Battle #2 that goes "If we try to fight in every revolution in the world, we never stop" and HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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