Kaneko Fumiko
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Kaneko Fumiko (1903-1926), partner of Korean independence activist and fellow anarchist Pak Yeol (1902-1974). Kaneko, born in Yokohama, met Pak while the latter was studying in Tokyo in 1922. After meeting, the couple engaged in anti-imperialist activities.
Following the Great Kanto Earthquake of Sep. 1, 1923, the couple was accused of plotting to assassinate the Japanese emperor and arrested for high treason; on March 25, 1926, they were sentenced to death, although this was commuted to life in prison. When the warden of Ichigaya prison handed her the certificate of commutation, she ripped it to shreds in front of him.
Transferred to Utsunomiya prison, Kaneko refused any work that was assigned to her and was promptly placed in solitary confinement. Three months later, she requested a job making hemp rope. The next morning, July 23, 1926, she was found dead, reportedly hanging herself with the rope she had made.
After her death, Pak’s older brother went to Japan and brought Kaneko’s body back to Korea, where it was interred at the Pak family’s burial area in Pallyeong-ni, Mungyeong-eup. In November 2003, her body was moved to Maseong-myeon, in back of Pak Yeol’s birth home.
Kaneko Fumiko's experiences with Christian and socialist reformers convinced her that not only was meaningful social change impossible through reform, but also soured her to both socialism and Christianity. She candidly revealed her opinions on socialism, and revolutionary change, during her interrogation by Japanese authorities on November 22, 1923 after her arrest.
Of socialists, she stated that, "Just as generals take pride in the medals on their chests, socialists covet records of their arrests in order to earn their bread. They take pride in this. When I realized this fact I gave up on them." (Hane 1993:121)
Although considered an anarchist, Kaneko Fumiko most closely identified with the political methodology of nihilism toward the end of her life, a circumstance of her long years of economic and personal hardship and accumulated traumatic experiences. By the time of her arrest, in her own words, she rejected, "the optimistic mode of thinking which dreams of the construction of a society that is without authority and control," and believed that as long as living things persisted, so too would authority. In the end, she states in the transcript of her interrogation that she "decided to deny the rights of all authority, rebel against them, and stake not only my own life but that of all humanity in this endeavor." (Hane 1993:122)
[edit] References
Hane, Mikiso, editor. Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan. University of California Press, 1993. Berkeley. ISBN 0-520-08421-7
