Five Japanese Women Who Shaped Craft, Design, Art, and Literature

To celebrate Women’s History Month this March, we have chosen five Japanese women who shaped crafts, design, art, and literature—each in her own fierce and distinctive way.

• • •

Masako Shirasu

白洲正子, 1910–1998

Writer, curator, collector, tastemaker—Masako Shirasu was the ultimate influencer in midcentury Japan, and her influence remains deeply rooted today. Born into a wealthy family of admirals and samurai lineage in Tokyo’s Nagatachō district, Masako was sent to boarding school at the Hartridge School in New Jersey at the age of fourteen. Returning home, she married Jiro Shirasu, a charismatic diplomat who is also said to have been the first Japanese man to wear jeans, and the couple eventually settled in a thatched-roof farmhouse they called Buaiso—far from the bombing of Tokyo.

Shirasu started writing in her thirties and never stopped. She published more than fifty books on subjects ranging from Noh masks to Karatsu pottery, from hidden mountain villages to the spiritual geography of Omi province. She was not a scholar in the conventional sense—she was a walker, a seeker, someone who believed you could only understand a ceramic bowl or a wooden mask by holding it, by traveling to the kiln where it was fired or the forest where the wood was carved. Her mentors, the literary critic Hideo Kobayashi and the antiques dealer Jiro Aoyama, sharpened her eye, but her taste was unmistakably her own.

At fifty-six, she opened Kogei, a kimono shop in Ginza, Tokyo, to connect weavers and dyers with a wider public and to champion the beauty of kimono as living craft. Shirasu’s legacy is not any single artwork but rather a way of seeing—an insistence that beauty is not decoration but something discovered through attentiveness, humility, and use.

• • •

Uno Chiyo

宇野千代, 1897–1996

Writer, editor, and one of the first female entrepreneurs in modern Japan, Uno Chiyo was born in the small town of Iwakuni in Yamaguchi Prefecture. Married off to a step-cousin at the age of thirteen—a union that lasted all of ten days—she was later fired from a teaching job for having an affair and then won a newspaper literary prize with her first short story. She moved to Tokyo, wore Western clothes, took lovers boldly and publicly, and wrote with a frankness about desire that made her famous and controversial in equal measure. Her novel Confessions of Love (1935), based on the real-life story of a painter caught in a love triangle that ended in attempted murder, became a sensation.

But Uno was far more than a literary provocateur. In 1936, she founded Sutairu (Style), Japan’s first fashion magazine focused on foreign trends, which she ran for over two decades. The magazine championed what Uno called the “New Kimono”—fresh combinations of fabric, color, and cut that brought modern sensibility to traditional dress. She went on to design her own kimono, and in 1957, with her assistant designer Tomiyo Hanazawa, staged the first kimono fashion show in the United States, introducing American audiences to kimono not as museum artifact but as living fashion.

Uno lived to ninety-eight, publishing her memoir I Will Go On Living at eighty-six and earning the title of Person of Cultural Merit at ninety-three. Her biographer Rebecca Copeland called her “fashion ingenue, magazine editor, kimono designer, femme fatale, prize-winning writer.” What held all these identities together was an unshakable belief that a woman’s life should be lived on her own terms—and that beauty, whether on the page or on the body, was a form of freedom.

• • •

Aya Koda

幸田文, 1904–1990

Growing up as the daughter of Koda Rohan, one of the great novelists of the Meiji era, was not a gentle education. Rohan was exacting, demanding, and deeply traditional. He taught his daughter to scrub floors until the wood gleamed, to dress a kimono with precision, to attend to the smallest details of domestic life as if they were matters of art—because, in his view, they were. Aya absorbed these lessons not with resentment but with a quiet, watchful intelligence. After her father’s death in 1947, she began to write, drawing on decades of close observation that she had stored up in silence.

Her essays and stories are devoted to the beauty of the everyday: the weight of a silk kimono on the shoulders, the sound of rain on an old wooden house, the proper way to arrange charcoal for tea. In works like Flowing (1955)—adapted into a celebrated film by Mikio Naruse—and Her Brother (1956)—filmed by Kon Ichikawa—she wrote with an intimacy and material precision that set her apart from more abstract literary voices. She did not theorize about aesthetics; she showed you the texture of a well-worn threshold, the smell of a tatami room in summer, and let you feel why it mattered.

Koda Aya’s world is small in scale but vast in depth. In Wim Wenders’ 2023 film Perfect Days, the solitary protagonist buys one of her books at a secondhand shop—a fitting tribute, since her writing speaks most powerfully to those who understand that the care we give to ordinary things is a measure of how fully we are alive.

• • •

Tamako Kataoka

片岡球子, 1905–2008

For years, Tamako Kataoka was known in the Japanese art world by a cruel nickname: “the god of unsuccessful submissions.” Born in Sapporo as the eldest of eight children, she had originally wanted to become a doctor, but a friend’s encouragement redirected her toward painting. She enrolled at the Women’s School of Fine Arts in Tokyo and studied nihonga—traditional Japanese painting—while supporting herself as an elementary school teacher for thirty years. Exhibition juries rejected her work again and again. She kept painting. She kept submitting. In 1946, her persistence finally broke through, and by 1952 she had become a core member of the Japan Art Institute.

What the juries had resisted was precisely what made Kataoka extraordinary: a bold, almost defiant use of color and form that pushed against the refinement and restraint that nihonga typically prized. After sketching Mount Usu in Hokkaido in 1960, she became obsessed with volcanoes—Sakurajima, Mount Myogi, and above all, Mount Fuji. Her Fuji is not the serene, snow-capped icon of postcards. It is red, orange, electric blue—a mountain that seems to pulse with geological fury. She painted it over and over, each time more vivid, as if she were trying to capture not what the mountain looked like but what it felt like from the inside.

Kataoka also created Tsura-gamae (Visages), a striking portrait series of historical figures rendered with the same volcanic energy. She was awarded the Order of Culture and continued working until the very end of her life, dying in 2008 at the age of 103. In a tradition that often valued subtlety and understatement, she proved that audacity could be its own form of beauty.

• • •

Eiko Yamazawa

山沢栄子, 1899–1995

Before she ever picked up a camera, Eiko Yamazawa studied nihonga painting under Rogetsu Mori and attended the Women’s School of Fine Arts in Tokyo—the same institution where Tamako Kataoka would later train. But in 1926, she made a remarkable leap: she sailed to the United States to study at the California School of Fine Arts, where she became an assistant to the photographer Consuelo Kanaga. She returned to Japan in 1929 with a new vocation, and in 1931, she opened a portrait studio in Osaka—becoming one of the first professional women photographers in the country.

For three decades, Yamazawa worked in portraiture and commercial photography, shooting for Osaka’s major department stores. It was steady, skilled work, but it was not where her heart was heading. After retiring in 1960, she embarked on a second career that no one could have predicted. Inspired by a return visit to the United States and the energy of postwar abstraction, she began making vivid, experimental color photographs that looked more like paintings than anything the Japanese photography world had seen. From 1979 to 1986, she held annual solo exhibitions under the title What I Am Doing—a quietly defiant declaration from an artist in her eighties who was only just getting started.

Yamazawa died in 1995 at the age of ninety-six. For decades after, her work was largely forgotten—overshadowed by the male-dominated canon of Japanese photography. But a 2019 retrospective at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum brought her extraordinary late-career abstractions back into view, reminding audiences that some artists need a lifetime of looking before they find what they truly want to say.

Further Reading

Masako Shirasu

Lost Japan by Alex Kerr (Penguin, 2015)—Kerr writes about Shirasu as his mentor in Japanese aesthetics

Japan Society Boston: Masako Shirasu

Uno Chiyo

The Story of a Single Woman (Pushkin Classics)

Confessions of Love (University of Hawai’i Press)

Aya Koda

Mirror: The Fiction and Essays of Koda Aya (University of Hawai’i Press)

Tamako Kataoka

Tamako Kataoka on Artnet

Eiko Yamazawa