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Some facts i like about irl Yosano Akiko that some people may not know
1. Yosano Akiko spent her life defending woman rights and opposing nationalist ideas, she was a pacifist that wrote constantly about the absurdity of war.
2. She was the first poet to write about breasts in tanka (a genre of classical japanese poetry) and despite the big criticisms she received this helped to change the way japanese people saw nudity
since till that point breasts were seen as a symbol of motherhood, from then on they began to represent the image of the female's body beauty.
3. She helped found what was initially a school just for girls in where she became its first dean and chief lecturer fulfilling her goal of offering education to woman.
4. Her most controversial poem was “Thou Shalt Not Die", she wrote it for her brother who worked in the Imperial Army during the Russo-Japanese war in fear that he might volunteer to be a "human bullet" for the Siege of Port Arthur
in the poem she referred to the war as stupid and said the emperor never put himself in any danger and still expected others to die for him, this irritated many people in the higher positions that attempted to ban her poem.
5. In a 1918 article she attacked the military class for protecting the wealth of their own families and ended it calling militarism a form of barbarian thinking.
6. She stated several times that motherhood is not a woman's main identity and that it shouldn't be prioritized over womanhood since it keeps woman trapped in old unrealistic ways of thinking.
