Fumiko Kaneko

After lengthy judicial proceedings, Fumiko and Pak were convicted of high treason for attempting to obtain bombs with the intention of killing the emperor or his son. They confessed to this crime, and it appears that at least Fumiko made herself appear guiltier than she actually was, possibly with the intention of sacrificing herself for her cause. During the trial, Fumiko wrote the story of her life as a way of explaining "what made me do what I did," and this memoir is the main source of information about her life, along with court documents. Pak and Fumiko, who had been romantically involved for most of their time together, were legally married a few days prior to their sentencing, which historian Hélène Bowen Raddeker identifies as a move to "underscore the obvious irony in the fact that the Japanese state had united them legally in life before uniting them legally in death." Pak and Fumiko were initially given the death sentence, but an imperial pardon commuted that sentence to life imprisonment. Instead of accepting this pardon, Fumiko tore it up and refused to thank the emperor. While Pak survived his time in prison and was released years later, Fumiko was reported to have committed suicide in her cell in 1926, although there were suspicious circumstances around her death.

Though Fumiko considered the belief systems put forth by the Salvation Army group and the Socialists, she eventually settled on nihilism as her guiding philosophy. Her perception of nihilism changed over time, as is indicated by a statement she made to the court in 1925. She stated, in reference to the strictly negative version of nihilism she originally pursued, that "formerly I said 'I negate life'... [but] my negation of all life was completely meaningless... The stronger the affirmation of life, the stronger the creation of life- negation together with rebellion. Therefore, I affirm life." However, she also takes care to define what this affirmation of life means for a nihilist, which she expects to be very different from the perspectives of the officials: "Living is not synonymous with merely having movement. It is moving in accordance with one's will… one could say that with deeds, one begins to really live. Accordingly, when one moves by means of one's own will and this leads to the destruction of one's body, this is not a negation of life. It is an affirmation."

Fumiko was able to attend school on and off in the midst of these life developments, and the major shift in her thinking, from socialism to anarchism and nihilism, began in 1922, when she met Hatsuyo Niiyama at her night school classes. In her memoirs, Fumiko calls Hatsuyo her "closest friend," and mentions that she introduced her to the ideas of foundational nihilist thinkers like Max Stirner, Mikhail Artsybashev, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Around this time, Fumiko was also introduced to a Korean activist named Pak Yol, who shared many of her ideas, and when she finally abandoned the socialist movement she worked with Pak to attempt to accomplish her vision.

Together, Fumiko and Pak published two magazines which highlighted the problems Koreans faced under Japanese imperialism (though they were never directly a part of the Korean independence movement) and showed influences of their radical beliefs. The articles Fumiko wrote for these publications were probably her most obvious activist activity. Sometime between 1922 and 1923, they also established a group called "Futei-sha (Society of Malcontents)," which Fumiko identified as a group advocating for direct action against the government. These activities soon brought Pak and Fumiko under government scrutiny. In September 1923, the hugely destructive Great Kantō earthquake led to massive public anxiety, with many people concerned that the Koreans, who were already agitating for independence from Japan, would use the confusion to start a rebellion. The government therefore made a number of arrests, mostly of Koreans, on limited evidence, and among those arrested were Pak and Fumiko.

When Fumiko arrived in Tokyo in 1920, she initially lived with her great uncle, but soon managed to get a position as a newspaper girl. She requested an advance on her wages in order to pay her enrollment fees at two different co-ed schools, and started to take classes in mathematics and English. Her job introduced her to a number of groups, most notably the Christian Salvation Army and members of the socialist movement who advocated their philosophies on the street. However, the job was difficult, her employer exploited his workers and was immoral in his personal life, and she hardly had any time to keep up with her school work, so she eventually quit. She then briefly maintained a relationship with the Salvation Army group, but she was not compelled by their beliefs and was abandoned by her one Christian friend after a time because he believed the feelings he was developing for her were threatening his beliefs. While she hoped to escape the hypocrisy she saw in this group by joining the socialist movement, she found that socialists could also behave in ways that seemed to contradict their beliefs, and she eventually abandoned them as well in favor of a more independent activism.

In 1919, when she was 16, Fumiko was sent back to her maternal family in Japan, presumably because she was of marriageable age and her grandmother and aunt did not want to have to arrange a match for her. She stayed with her maternal grandparents again and began to form a strong relationship with her Uncle Motoei, who, because of the way she was registered, was officially her brother. By this time, she had reconnected with her birth father, living with him for short periods of time, and he attempted to arrange a marriage between Fumiko and Motoei. The arrangement fell through, because Motoei discovered that Fumiko had developed a relationship with another young man and claimed that her potential loss of virginity suggested by that relationship voided his agreement with her father. Fumiko was sent back to live with her father after this event, but her life there was unpleasant and she was not allowed to follow her desires for a serious education, so she decided to go to Tokyo and pursue a life there.

During this time, Fumiko was first confronted with the problems of being an unregistered child. Her circumstances made her "invisible to educational authorities," and she was not technically allowed to attend school. Some schools eventually permitted her to attend classes, but she was not called in attendance, did not receive report cards, and was ineligible to receive the official certificate of graduation at the end of a class year. Despite these difficulties, including frequent gaps in her attendance, she did very well in school. After Fumiko's father left, her mother was involved with several other men, but none of these relationships led to better living circumstances and they were nearly always extremely impoverished. Kikuno even considered selling Fumiko to a brothel, claiming that it would be a better life for her, but she abandoned this plan when it turned out that Fumiko would be sent far away to another region of Japan. After several years of these difficult circumstances, Fumiko lived briefly with her maternal grandparents while her mother remarried again. In 1912, her father's mother, Mutsu Sakei-Iwashita, came to visit, and it was agreed that Fumiko would go back with her to her home in Korea, where she would be adopted by her aunt, who was childless. Before leaving Japan, Fumiko was finally registered as the daughter of her maternal grandparents.

Fumiko Kaneko (金子 文子, Kaneko Fumiko, January 25, 1903 – July 23, 1926) or rarely Park Fumiko and Park Munja, was a Japanese anarchist and nihilist. She was convicted of plotting to assassinate members of the Japanese Imperial family.