Kaneko Fumiko (Kaneko is the patrilineal name) lived during the first world war and the interwar period before the start of WWII. She experienced the Japanese occupation of Korea as a child, and identified with the oppressed Koreans over her own culture. She left her abusive father’s household, to live with her uncle, a promiscuous holy man. When her father tried to arrange for his brother to marry her, she shut that down by having a sexual experience with a third man. Abandoned by her family, she traveled to Tokyo to find work and get an education, and refused to go to women’s schools, instead facing misogyny to study traditionally masculine subjects.

She joined the embattled socialist movement, despite similar anarchist badass Kanno Sugako being executed with others in 1911 to terrorize socialist organizing in the kingdom. She eventually split from ‘mainstream’ Japanese socialism due to toxic masculinity and hypocrisy in the movement and embraced the even more politically taboo subject of Korean independence as ‘Park Munja’ with her Korean comrade Park Yol, whom she would formally marry in prison.

Fumiko and Yol were rounded up as part of a Japanese pogrom against Koreans, and facing a death sentence, wrote her memoirs. Note – she has later claimed she was making serious plans to assassinate the emperor, but she was imprisoned because she published Korean independence literature. While supporters were petitioning for her release, the imperial government leaked a picture they confiscated of her sitting on Yol’s lap. The image of a Japanese woman in such an ‘improper’ position, with a Korean man, no less, scandalized Japanese society, and caused controversy even within socialist circles.

Despite her political isolation, her forbidden love, her social class, and familial estrangement, she remained defiant. The emperor granted her clemency, and upon receipt of the pardon, she tore up the monarch’s signature and threw the paper back at her captors. She was later found hung in her cell with her hands tied behind her back.

Today there are monuments to Yol in north and south Korea, where Fumiko is treated as a footnote in his legacy. I don’t think she gets enough attention as the total bad-ass proto-feminist she was, especially considering her context in patriarchal and authoritarian Japanese and Korean societies, which still haven’t caught up with her socially or politically. If you’re serious about running with this kind of tale, I’ve got other stories I can share.