Radium and Other 20th Century Conveniences
“Everyone is saying it is colder in Tokyo this winter than ever before. If the bath water does not heat, it will be terribly uncomfortable for me. Luckily, I have not yet caught cold, thanks to the radium.”
- Letter from Akiko to daughter Uchiko, circa 1935
At first, I thought I had misread this comment in Akiko’s meandering letter to her daughter. However, a quick Internet search confirms that radium was used as a medical cure-all early in the twentieth century throughout Europe and the U.S. The “Radium Girls”, who wetted their lips while painting watch faces to keep the radium-infused paint pliant, are well known, but I did not know that radium was a home remedy, too. With understanding of radioactivity still in its early stages, it turns out that substances like radium were seen as treatments for everything from rheumatism to impotence. It was added to water for a health boost, and to women’s makeup to make the skin glow. Apparently, it was popular in Japan as well, and Akiko felt it was keeping her healthy.
As I research Yosano Akiko’s life as a poet and feminist, I am interested in her lifestyle as well. She was born in 1878 and died at the age of 63 in 1942, making her about the same generation as my great-grandparents. I wrote in my blog about maternal and infant mortality recently that medicine was better and more advanced in Japan than I expected, and in fact, sometimes produced better outcomes than in the U.S. and Europe. Given that Japan had been essentially closed off from the outside world from 1600 to the 1860s, I wouldn’t expect Western medicine, culture, and technology to have permeated deeply into middle-class Japanese society just a few decades on. But the list of modern conveniences at Akiko’s fingertips is eye-opening.
In her poem “My Parent’s House” (「親の家」), Akiko imagines watching herself at home (a ‘fly on the wall’ scenario) the night before she eloped in June 1901. In the shop at the front of her parents’ house, she imagines two or three people slumbering against piles of boxes (was it breaktime for shop employees? I do not know). She also remembers the blue glow of an electric light. Out of curiosity I googled to see if early electric lights gave off a blue light, as opposed to the warmer color of most modern household lights, but that does not appear to be the case. Perhaps her parents’ lamp sported a bluish shade. At any rate, she had electric lights in 1901, at a time when my grandfather, born in Ohio, had none.
More surprising is a verse in that same poem about a telephone.
よよとし泣けば鈴（べる）なりぬ、
Tears fall, and after a time the phone rings.
電話の室くらがりに
Into the darkness of the telephone closet
つとわが影は馳（は）せ入りて
my shadow flits.
茶の間を見つつ受話器取る。
Looking out at the tearoom, she picks up the phone
すてむとすなるふるさとの
And listens to the sound of the hometown accent
和泉なまりの聞きをさめ。
She is leaving behind.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, then, in a middle-class confectionery store in the provincial town of Sakai, there was a telephone. Most American homes did not have phones until thirty years later.
Moving to the mid-1930s, here is another story. A middle-aged Akiko scolds her daughter for getting caught in a rainstorm on the way home one day and muddying her kimono. Taxi fare would have been cheaper than what it will cost to clean your kimono, young lady, she says. This means that it would have been an unremarkable thing for a middle-class woman in her twenties to take a taxi home from the train station. Thirty years earlier, Akiko was riding about in a rickshaw.
Other references to everyday products and habits hint at the rapid cultural changes of this period. As a teenager, Akiko was locked into her bedroom at night by her protective parents, but by the time she was an independent adult, she was smoking Shikishima cigarettes marketed to women.
Akiko was not religious—Christian, Buddhist or otherwise—but as Japan inched toward war with the U.S., she and her husband sent several of their children to Christian schools and gave gifts to them at Christmas. At a time when money was so tight that Akiko could barely scrape together money for food, she pawned personal belongings to buy her toddler son Hikaru a toy train for Christmas. Akiko’s daughters Uchiko and Fujiko remember that gifts were placed in each child’s room overnight on Christmas Eve, to be found and opened upon waking. I am surprised when I hear that my Japanese friends give each other gifts for Christmas in 2021, let alone a century ago.
Akiko’s visit to Europe in 1912 turned her on to Western fashion, and she sometimes set aside her kimono for Western dresses and wide-brimmed hats. Uchiko remembers being mortified when her mother compelled her to bring a Western-style straw hat on a hiking trip and was mystified when her girlfriends loved the hat so much, they took turns wearing it.
These are nothing more than tidbits from old books, amusing observations – but they remind me that Akiko did not live in a world that was sepia-toned. Her world was as colorful as this one, and it was not so long ago. It brings her life just a bit closer – although I would recommend staying away from the radium drinks.
