was a Japanese writer, literary agent, translator, and anti-war and women's rights activist. She was born in Tokyo and was educated in Japan and Korea before being sent to study in the United States in 1931, as a protest to the Asian Exclusion Act. She graduated from Shaker Heights High School in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1935 and earned a degree in political science from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1939. During her schooling, she became interested in international relations and was active in organizations which promoted peace and friendship. In the interwar era, she was active in the Pan-Pacific Women's Association and attended several youth conferences aimed at developing international cooperation. On her way home to Japan when World War II began, she began to examine the criticism leveled at Japan's militaristic policies.
During the war, Matsuoka worked at the International Cultural Association and then lectured at the Kokoumin-Seikatasu-Gakuin girls' school. Near the end of the war, she became an editor at the Japanese office of Reader's Digest and began working as an interpreter and translator for foreign correspondents, including Keyes Beech and Edgar Snow. Becoming a journalist and literary agent, she was disillusioned with policymakers and became openly critical of both the United States and Japan for their militarism. Matsuoka was a founding member of the (Women's Democratic Association). She was elected as its first president in 1946 and served as editor-in-chief of the club's media organ, The Democratic Women's News. The club members actively opposed militarism and fought for socio-economic parity for women. The following year, she also became president of the women's auxiliary of the Japan Socialist Party. When her leftist associations began to impact her ability to publish, Matsuoka returned to the United States and completed graduate studies in foreign relations at Swarthmore and then at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy between 1949 and 1952. In her last year in the US, she published her autobiography, Daughter of the Pacific.
Matsuoka served as an interpreter for Eleanor Roosevelt when she visited Japan in 1953. As a journalist and activist, Matsuoka visited more than twenty countries urging internationalist and anti-war policies. She translated many works of other writers and in 1956, she became secretary general of the Japan PEN Club. She was the permanent director of the Japan-China Friendship Association and was active in the fight to normalize diplomatic relations with China. She was an outspoken critic of the Cold War superpowers' interventionist and militaristic policies. She opposed the separation of North and South Korea, as well as North and South Vietnam and pressed for reunification. Matsuoka worked with women's groups to create pan-Asian solidarity and closer alliances between Japan and nations in the Global South. She was a prominent activist in the Women's Liberation Movement in Japan, known as , until her death in 1979.
Early life and education Yoko Matsuoka was born on 20 April 1916 in Tokyo, to Hisa and Masao Matsuoka, a journalist and university lecturer. Both of her parents had been educated in Japan and the United States and both descended from samurai families. Her father was the son of Totaro, a lawyer who had been adopted into the family of former-samurai Tadataka Matsuoka, when he married Tadataka's daughter Miwa. Totaro was disinherited when the couple divorced. Tadataka was a member of the Sho-Nanbu clan, whose members provided the horses for the Tokugawa shoguns and during the Meiji era lived as landed gentry in the Aomori Prefecture. Masao was the brother of Japan's first woman journalist, Motoko Hani, who employed Hisa upon her return from the United States in 1912 and introduced the couple. Hisa had studied at Wellesley College, and after working briefly at her sister-in-law's magazine, taught at the school Motoko founded. Hisa's family included a cousin, Tsuda Sen, who was one of the founders of Aoyama Gakuin, a Methodist educational institute. Matsuoka's parents were progressive and unorthodox, choosing not to believe in traditional superstitions. They ensured that all three of their daughters, Yoko, Kwoko, and Reiko, received higher education. The sisters were raised as Christians, although for significant celebrations, such as weddings or funerals, the family followed Shinto rites.
Although Matsuoka began her schooling in Tokyo, she lost half of her first year suffering from the measles. The family moved to Osaka in 1923, when her father was transferred with the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun. She was enrolled in the private school, Lark-Hill Primary, to enable her to catch up on her studies. The sisters also learned English at a Sunday school run by American missionaries. In 1927, Matsuoka's family moved to Seoul, Korea, when her father agreed to accept an appointment as vice president of the Japanese-government-run newspaper Keijō Nippō. The sisters were enrolled at the Nandaimon Primary School, a segregated institution which taught only Japanese pupils. During the two years she spent in Korea, Matsuoka became aware of the differences in living conditions between colonizers and colonized people. In 1929, she returned to Tokyo and enrolled in middle school at Jiyu Gakuen Girls' School, a private school which had been founded by her aunt, Motoko Hani. The school focused on teaching students to develop critical analysis, self-examination, and manage their own governance.
In 1924, when the Asian Exclusion Act was passed in the United States, Matsuoka's parents made the decision to send her to the United States to study by the time she turned sixteen. Her mother, in particular, saw her entry and study in the US as a way to protest the policy of arbitrarily excluding people. They began making preparations in 1931 for her to go to Cleveland, Ohio, with an American missionary, Bertha Starkey, the following year. Matsuoka first attended the Cleveland Preparatory School, an institution designed to help immigrants and adults gain the equivalent of a high school diploma, but within a few months transferred to the Shaker Heights High School. She graduated from Shaker Heights in 1935 and went on to earn a degree in political science from Swarthmore College in 1939.
Early activism
During her university days, Matsuoka became interested in international relations and was one of the founders of the International Relations Club at Swarthmore, serving as its first president in 1937 and 1938. She was elected president of the Middle-Atlantic Inter-Collegiate Conference of International Relations Clubs in November 1937 and December 1938. In 1937, she met her mother in Vancouver, British Columbia, to attend the Pan-Pacific Women's Association Conference. The conference was designed to bring women's rights activists from the Pacific region together to work on social reforms and to foster peace through international understanding and acceptance. The following year, she attended the 1938 World Youth Congress, held at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and was featured on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser with Chinese student Pearl Teh-Wei Liu of Hong Kong as symbols of peace, in spite of their countries' ongoing war. After graduating in 1939, Matsuoka made her way home to Japan, after stopping in Amsterdam to attend the World Christian Youth Conference as a delegate of the Tokyo YWCA and touring Europe. The purpose of the conference was to discuss peace. Japan was the only one of the Axis powers that sent delegates to the gathering.
After leaving the conference, Matsuoka went to Freiburg, Germany, to visit a friend, before traveling to Geneva, Switzerland, to visit the League of Nations. While there, she visited an exhibition about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. The tour of the League of Nations buildings and the exhibition caused her to question Japan's role in world affairs. After touring Venice, Rome, and Naples, Matsuoka boarded a ship for home on the day that Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain declared war on Germany. The changes the war brought were already visible as she sailed through the British ports at Colombo (now in Sri Lanka), Singapore, and Hong Kong, before arriving in Shanghai, where she witnessed the aggressive treatment towards Chinese people by the Japanese military. Confused by the criticism leveled at Japan on her journey home, upon reaching Tokyo, she questioned her father. He recommended that she travel through Manchuria and northern China to make her own decision. She was disturbed by the evidence of Japanese militancy that she encountered on her trip, but tried to justify the government's actions as stemming from security concerns.
Career Japan (1940–1948) After her return, Matsuoka consulted with Count Aisuke Kabayama about finding a job that would allow her to promote world peace and international understanding. At his suggestion, she began working at the International Cultural Association in 1940, as a typist and mail clerk. In 1941, she married Takashi Ishigami, a journalist. She was unsure whether she was in love with him, but bowed to pressure from her cousins for an arranged marriage. Since the Matsuoka family had no sons to maintain their name, Ishigami agreed to take their surname when the couple married. Shortly after the wedding, Japan declared war upon the United States and Matsuoka resigned herself to hoping that after the conflict positive relationships could be restored. She resigned from her job in 1942 in anticipation of the birth of her daughter, Seiko. Five months later, she began working at the American Research Institute, but left in 1944, to become a lecturer on American government at the Kokoumin-Seikatasu-Gakuin girls' school. During the war, her husband Takashi served in Singapore and was taken prisoner by the British.
Matsuoka, her mother, her sister Reiko, and daughter Seiko fled the bombings in Tokyo and spent the months prior to the surrender of Japan in Hanamaki. Upon notification of the approach of the U. S. Army, the police chief asked Matsuoka to serve as his interpreter. The family returned to Tokyo in September 1945, and she returned to the girls' school briefly. When offered a job at the Reader's Digest in November, Matsuoka began working at the Japanese editorial office, spending much of her time serving as an interpreter for foreign correspondents. She resigned from her position at the magazine and began working directly with writers including Edgar Snow of The Saturday Evening Post and Darrell "Berry" Berrigan of the New York Post. She also worked with Laura Lou Brookman, managing editor of the Ladies' Home Journal and Keyes Beech, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who focused on Asia. Many of these journalists published articles analyzing Japan after the war and their experiences with Matsuoka and her family.