The Roots of Japanese Pop Culture (2): The Scandalous Taisho Era Diva
From provincial girl to cultural phenomenon, how modernity, scandal, and mass culture turned Sumako Matsui into Japan’s first modern superstar.
The Roots of Japanese Pop Culture (1)
In 1868, the Meiji Restoration transformed Japan, restoring power to the emperor, dismantling feudalism, and opening the country to the modern world. Among its many social changes was the gradual lifting of a centuries-old ban on female stage performers, allowing women to slowly return to public performance after more than two hundred years of exclusion. One of the first superstar actresses, Sumako Matsui, would be born two decades later, in 1886, in the countryside of Nagano Prefecture, the youngest of nine children in a former samurai family.
At fifteen, Matsui—then still known by her birth name, Masako Kobayashi—left her quiet village behind and, with the encouragement of her sister, moved to Tokyo. Her sister had married into the family that ran Fugetsudō, the legendary Western-style confectionery in Tokyo’s affluent Azabu district. Already a fixture of elite urban life, the shop was renowned for its refined Western-inspired sweets and remains open and popular to this day.
Determined to transform a strong-willed, unpolished country girl into a proper Tokyo young lady, her sister and brother-in-law enrolled Matsui in a sewing school. Sewing was considered appropriately feminine, delicate, and respectable. And even though she learned the skill, she never truly took to it. The role of a demure young woman simply did not suit her.
What is striking is that, despite being neither conventionally feminine nor traditionally beautiful, Matsui was immensely popular. Customers at Fugetsudō courted her relentlessly. She ignored them all and, though she occasionally helped out as a salesgirl, she was not especially good at it. Instead, she preferred to observe her brother-in-law, a master salesman who could charm anyone. Watching him, she began to imitate his gestures, his tone, and his timing. Without realizing it, Sumako Matsui was already fascinated with the art of performance.
After saying no to many, Matsui finally married a frequent patron at the sweets shop, a man chosen by her family that ran an inn in the countryside. And although she tried her best to fit into the gentle wife role, her husband, and especially her mother-in-law, were not convinced. When she contracted tuberculosis, they used the excuse of her frail health as a reason for a divorce. After barely a year of marriage, she was single once again.
She was devastated and humiliated. But she would not remain single for long. While waiting in a hospital, seeking treatment for her illness, she met her second husband, Seisuke Maizawa, a fellow native of her hometown and a professor of geography and history. When he later became a lecturer at the Tokyo Actors’ Training School, he grew involved with the theater world and introduced her to it. And she fell in love with it.
Japan had long sustained a vibrant theatrical tradition. One consequence of the Meiji era’s opening was the rise of Western-influenced theater, which began attracting the interest of intellectuals and reformers. Maizawa was among those drawn to it. Through his position at the all-male Training School, he studied Western plays and built connections with actors and directors. Through him, Matsui caught a glimpse of that new world. She became captivated and decided to pursue acting, a dream her husband fully supported. He arranged introductions to help her on her path, and he knew exactly where she needed to be to achieve her ambition: the Bungei Kyōkai.
Bungei Kyōkai, or the Literary Arts Society, was a prestigious acting school affiliated with what would later become Waseda University. It was founded by Tsubouchi Shōyō, a renowned author who secured his place in modern Japanese literature in 1885 with an influential book titled The Essence of the Novel. In that study, he urged writers to explore the complexity of human emotion, becoming a key figure in the rise of realism in Japan. He later translated the complete works of Shakespeare into Japanese, which became another central achievement in his career.
When establishing his school, Tsubouchi aimed to elevate Japan’s cultural standards. More than an acting academy, Bungei Kyōkai offered a rigorous curriculum on the history and theory of drama. At a time when coeducational classes were rare, he defied convention by admitting women. To preserve propriety, strict rules forbade socializing between male and female students outside the classroom.
Maizawa, Matsui's husband, knew a few officials at the school and arranged for them to evaluate his wife’s potential. The profession demanded exceptional beauty and refinement, so officials were stunned when they met Masako. She represented the opposite of the ideal. She spoke with a thick rural accent, her movements were awkward, she had no sense of style, and her features were considered large and plain. Instead of a refined young lady, she looked like a country bumpkin.
Her flat nose was a particular concern. Because high nasal bridges are viewed in Japan as Western and therefore rare and desirable, Masako’s features were not just considered unattractive. They were seen as a liability for anyone meant to portray foreign women onstage. Determined to address the issue, she took a drastic step: plastic surgery, still uncommon and rudimentary at the time. It was painful and left lasting consequences. The paraffin injected into her nose caused the sides to turn violet in cold weather. Even so, Masako emerged with the profile she wanted, just in time for her Bungei Kyōkai audition.
At the audition, her sturdy build unexpectedly worked in her favor. Tsubouchi wasn’t impressed by her looks or her speech, but her proportions were considered ideal for Western roles. She was admitted to the school and finally adopted the stage name Sumako Matsui.
As expected, her lack of formal education became an immediate obstacle, and her total unfamiliarity with English, in a school where students were required to study numerous English scripts, nearly led to her expulsion. A tearful appeal, an intervention from her husband, and a promise to work hard ultimately preserved her place.
Matsui never mastered English, but her determination earned her the respect of classmates and teachers. She studied relentlessly, and her commitment to her craft soon eclipsed any interest in her marriage. Household responsibilities faded into the background. This brings us back to a familiar cultural framework for discussing certain Japanese relationships: the S and M dynamic.
As noted earlier, in Japan, the S&M framework is not limited to sexuality. It can describe power dynamics in relationships and even personality types. The toxic relationship between Matsui and Maizawa reflected this to a degree. Maizawa often joked to colleagues that his wife had once thrown hot soup at him or attacked him with a lit gas lamp. He remained devoted regardless and did everything he could to support her dream, even moving into a cramped apartment near her school for her convenience. He was a masochist. Despite his devotion and endurance, Matsui, the sadist, ended the marriage. After a fight, she threw his belongings from their second-floor window onto the street, and that was the end of it.
This dynamic helped shape her enduring image as cold, selfish and even villainous. But Maizawa ultimately became little more than a footnote in her story. In Japanese literature and cultural memory, the figure most often portrayed as the true victim of her cruelty, and the one who dominates her legend, is her next romantic partner, Shimamura Hōgetsu.
Shimamura Hōgetsu’s life could have been the plot of a tragic novel. He lost his mother when he was young, and a few years later his father died drunk when their house caught fire. He was then adopted by a man who recognized his talent and supported his education. Thanks to this, he was able to leave the countryside and enroll at Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University, where he would later become a professor. Beyond academia, he became an influential literary critic, translator, and author. He spent three and a half years in England and Germany, immersing himself in cultural life there and developing a deep fascination with European theater.
During all of this, an arranged marriage had bound him to a woman chosen by his adoptive father, a union he maintained out of duty and gratitude. After returning from his exciting European exchange, he struggled with the monotony of academic and family life. Seven children, deteriorating health, the loss of two of them, and mounting pressures darkened his mood. He began neglecting his work and withdrawing from daily responsibilities. Around this time, he devoted himself to translating Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a play about a married woman who abandons her husband and children to discover her own identity. It is easy to imagine the story struck a personal chord.
Meanwhile, Matsui continued her studies at the Bungei Kyōkai. By her graduation year in 1911, she was one of only two women still in the troupe, and she made her public debut as Ophelia in her class’s production of Hamlet at the Imperial Theater. The play received lukewarm reviews, but her portrayal of Ophelia was widely praised. At a time when the exaggerated, all-male performance style of Kabuki still dominated the stage, her naturalistic acting felt groundbreaking.
After graduation, Matsui and her classmates became salaried members of the school’s troupe. The younger students, however, were growing restless with Tsubouchi’s old-fashioned repertoire, which consisted mostly of Shakespeare adaptations. In response, A Doll’s House was chosen as the troupe’s next project. Shimamura, who had translated the play, was asked to direct. He had never directed before, but he accepted, and Matsui was cast in the lead role.
At the same time, Japan was swept up in the “atarashii onna,” or “new woman,” controversy sparked by Hiratsuka Raichō. In Meiji-era Japan there was little space for women with radical ideas, yet Raichō was impossible to ignore. In 1911, the same year Matsui debuted in Hamlet and later starred in A Doll’s House, Raichō launched her influential feminist literary magazine Seitō.
Seitō, or Blue Stocking (a reference to the British feminist social movement), was created and run entirely by women to advance women’s rights. Over the years it provoked enormous controversy. In 1912, contributor Otake Kōkichi wrote a piece personifying alcohol as if she herself had consumed it, then published an account of visiting the Yoshiwara red-light district with her uncle and other Seitō members. These incidents, along with rumors of a romantic relationship between Kōkichi and Raichō, sparked a scandal. The “new women” began to be portrayed as promiscuous figures who drank, visited forbidden places, and even pursued same-sex love.
The contributors became targets of the Tokyo press. Their homes were vandalized, some lost their jobs, and the government made repeated attempts to censor the magazine.
But, in 1911, the “new woman” was still a cultural novelty. Japanese society was trying to understand who these bold women were and whether they represented progress or moral decline. Many women of the emerging middle class admired them. In later marketing terminology, 1911 would be remembered as the year of the “new woman boom,” a moment of intense media and public fascination with these rebellious young women.
Within this atmosphere, an adaptation of a Norwegian play in which the heroine rejects the “good wife, wise mother” ideal was bound to provoke discussion and was buoyed by the atarashii onna phenomenon. By the end of the play, Nora Helmer chooses herself over her husband and children. The choice was so radical that even many atarashii onna criticized it. In a special Seitō issue devoted to the play, Raichō described Nora’s actions as selfish.
While Nora, as a character, was polarizing, the production itself was not. It became a cultural phenomenon. Once again, Matsui’s natural acting style drew widespread praise and transformed her into a full-fledged star.
After the success of A Doll’s House, Matsui and Hōgetsu became partners both in work and in love. This was a bold move, considering that Bungei Kyōkai expressly forbade any socializing between male and female students outside of class. To make matters worse, Hōgetsu was married with children.
At least in the beginning, their success was too great for them to face any professional reprisal. Following A Doll’s House, Hōgetsu, now more confident as a director, chose Hermann Sudermann’s Die Heimat (also known as Magda) as the troupe’s next production. As expected, Matsui once again played the lead. Echoing the themes of A Doll’s House, the play caused a stir for its criticism of patriarchal society and traditional social norms. But unlike Ibsen’s heroine, Magda does not abandon her children. Instead, the play attacks the tyranny of family expectations, with Magda rebelling against her conservative father. Unlike Norah, a polarizing figure, Magda was extremely well received by the atarashii onna, who, from the pages of Seitō, championed a similar message.
The Ministry of Home Affairs, on the other hand, took issue with the play’s ending, in which Magda defies her father’s wishes and poses beside his corpse. Officials closed the theater and banned further performances. In response, Hōgetsu yielded to government pressure and added a final line in which Magda apologizes to her family.
The controversy only fueled interest. The production toured all across Japan with sold-out showings. What raised eyebrows within the troupe, however, was the sense that Hōgetsu and Matsui were treating the tour as their honeymoon.
As their relationship intensified, it became impossible to ignore. Both began to be ostracized for what the troupe considered undignified behavior. Shimamura was mocked for being romantically involved with a mere actress, someone considered beneath him in status, while Matsui was branded a promiscuous woman who would pursue a married man without shame. Eventually, the rumors became too loud for Tsubouchi, Bungei Kyōkai's leader, to overlook and, in 1913, he fired Matsui. Soon after, Shimamura resigned in a thirty-page letter “composed in blood and tears.”
Feeling betrayed, Tsubouchi dissolved the Bungei Kyōkai entirely and retreated into the safer world of Shakespeare research. Meanwhile, Matsui and Shimamura, along with other former members of the troupe, founded a new and more modern company called Geijutsuza. Free from the restrictive rules of their former school, Matsui’s fiery temperament grew even more pronounced. Still, her star power was indispensable for the troupe’s survival, creating an environment in which the other actors had little choice but to tolerate her.
As everywhere else, Japan loved a good scandal. While lover suicides and illicit affairs could ruin reputations in a rigid, shame-based society, they also generated enormous public fascination. The troupe became successful from the start, helped along not only by Matsui star power but also by endless gossip about her and the director. Their productions played to full houses, fueled as much by the rumor mill as by the plays themselves. But in 1914 they struck gold with a play that would elevate Matsui status from a successful actress to a social phenomenon
In 1911, just as the Meiji era was coming to a close, the “atarashii onna” boom helped turn Hōgetsu and Matsui’s adaptation of A Doll’s House into a full-blown sensation. By the early years of the Taishō period, however, Japan had found a new cultural obsession: the works of the recently deceased Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Having learned from experience, Hōgetsu quickly realized it would be wise to ride this wave. So, in 1914, Geijutsuza opened its new production, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, with Matsui in the role of the Russian prostitute Katusha.
As expected, Resurrection became a huge phenomenon. A song performed by Matsui, “Katyusha no Uta,” with lyrics written by Hōgetsu, spread its reach even further. Although phonograms were still rare and extremely expensive, a recording of the song sold 20,000 copies, close to the total number of phonograms available in the country. It became Japan’s first true pop sensation. By September 1914, combined sales of records, sheet music, and songbooks had topped 140,000, a national record. Katyusha fever swept the country. Fans attended performances dressed in Russian peasant attire and wore the Katyusha hairstyle, Katyusha combs, and Katyusha headbands. The trend became so widespread that the Japanese word for “headband” remains katiusha to this day.
The record-breaking “Katyusha no Uta” is considered Japan’s first major pop hit. It helped popularize the word katyusha, now used in Japanese to mean “headband,” and turned Sumako Matsui into one of the country’s biggest stars. The version above preserves the Taishō-era romanticism of the original but is a modern re-recording, as Sumako’s original version is not widely available online.
Resurrection toured nationwide, performing 444 times over four years, and Matsui Sumako became a pervasive presence in Japanese society during the early Taishō years. Club Cosmetics and Lait, the two major engines of the cosmetics revolution at the time, used her image in their advertisements. Her autobiography, released at the height of Katyusha fever, became a massive bestseller, devoured by the modern girls of the era. Uno Chiyo, the celebrated novelist I wrote about earlier, idolized her and dreamt of becoming an actress before chasing literature.
Meanwhile, the Geijutsuza theater troupe was awash with money, starting constructions on a headquarter theater and a training school. Hogetsu, who was now experienced at commercial theater and giving the public what they wanted, also started including songs in all of the group’s plays. All these songs, performed by Matsui, went on to become huge sellers. They visited Russia and Manchuria and, to pay for their ambitious projects, had a grueling schedule of performances across the whole country, sometimes doing several plays simultaneously. But everything would come to a grinding halt in 1918.
In 1918, the Great Influenza Epidemic ravaged the world, with over a third of the global population contracting it, a pandemic many believe to have been the deadliest in history. Even Matsui, known for almost never getting sick, was infected, though she was nursed back to health by her lover and, within a few weeks, was back on her feet. Shimamura, on the other hand, was not so lucky. In far frailer health, he did not survive the illness, dying in November of that year.
Matsui was devastated when she returned from rehearsal and found him dead in bed. Many of Shimamura’s friends blamed her, pointing out her selfishness and self-centeredness as the cause of his death. According to them, when he wanted to go to the hospital, she refused, fearing that his wife and children would take him away from her. Knowing that he had a weak heart, they argued that she had all but killed him.
Without Shimamura to shield her, Matsui suddenly found herself in the eye of the storm. She now had to confront the fact that no one liked her. Her fiery temperament, diva behavior, and reputation had earned her very few allies. Although she was appointed his successor as head of the troupe, almost no one respected her. Some claimed she tried to seduce a particularly capable staff member to bring him to her side, but an intervention by the actors prevented it, leaving her even more isolated.
In January 1919, two months after Shimamura’s death, she performed the starring role in the troupe’s adaptation of Carmen. After the performance, she returned to her room in Geijutsuza’s headquarters. She changed into her finest Ōshima silk kimono, layered a crested haori over it, tied a pale blue satin maru obi, put on her watch and rings, and carefully applied makeup. Then, went into the prop room, and hanged herself.
During her successful years, Matsui had been seen as a strong, confident figure admired by other women. Although she never identified herself as an atarashii onna, she was connected to the movement and contributed to Safuran, an art magazine for women founded by former Seitō contributor Kazue Tomimoto. In her most famous piece, she lamented the discrimination she faced in the theater world, where her opinions were often ignored by male colleagues. She frequently clashed with men, and in the weeks leading up to the debut of Resurrection, she quarreled with every man in the cast. Shimamura, forced to choose between them or her, fired them all. Her defiant, strong-willed disposition in a highly sexist country was seen by many as her defining strength.
After her death, however, her image became more nuanced. Shimamura’s influential male friends wrote about her in unflattering terms. In their accounts, she was selfish, cruel, egotistical, narcissistic. She was not a “new woman” but, in their view, a terrible human being.
Of course, being a strong, opinionated woman in early Taishō Japan made her an easy target. But to attribute her troubled reputation solely to sexism would be too simple. Accounts of her selfish, difficult, and diva-like behavior abound, from both men and women who shared the stage with her.
The influential writer and playwright Hasegawa Shigure devoted a chapter to Matsui in her seminal 1918 bestseller Bijinden, which chronicled the lives of influential and beautiful women of the Meiji and Taishō periods. Even while attempting to eulogize the legendary actress, Shigure recounts several absurd episodes and admits that it was difficult not to find her, at times, “detestable.”
Perhaps, after years of success, the greatest humiliation was reserved for her after her death. Her legacy was tarnished by countless recollections of her poor manners and abrasive personality, and her final wish—to be buried alongside Shimamura—was denied by his de facto wife.
Still, there were no hard feelings between Matsui and Mrs. Shimamura. When the widow and her children arrived at the room where his body lay to pay their respects, Matsui bowed and apologized for causing worry. The widow replied, “No, you’re not the one who is at fault. Once Shimamura left our house, I considered him a stranger. Whatever happened afterwards was no concern of mine.”
As Phyllis Birnbaum observes in her profile of Sumako Matsui, the often forgotten Mrs. Shimamura, reduced in films and memoirs to a nagging, plain, and forgettable wife, is in many ways the true victim of this story.
While Matsui and Shimamura lived turbulent, consequential lives, Mrs. Shimamura was left to endure humiliation, care for the household and children, and shoulder the aftermath long after both were gone. Matsui paid a price for her scandalous defiance in a patriarchal society, but she ultimately achieved fame, success, and lasting significance. Mrs. Shimamura’s story, by contrast, reflects a far more common fate. While her husband and his lover made history, she lived a life of quiet suffering and responsibility, carried alone and met with little sympathy or recognition. Perhaps that is the true tragedy.
Matsui, on the other hand, burned brightly. Against the odds, she transformed what were perceived as personal flaws into performances of striking emotional complexity, portraying women who were conflicted, defiant, and sometimes selfish -- figures that often mirrored her own temperament. Traits for which she was criticized offstage became the source of her power on it. In doing so, she did more than achieve stardom: she helped redefine what female presence could look like in modern Japanese popular culture.
