Yuki Ikeda

Yuki Ikeda, (who also went by the name "Sachiko Ikeda"), was a Japanese resistance fighter, writer, and ballroom dancer who along with fellow resistance fighter, and husband, Wataru Kaji, joined the Chinese resistance against the Empire of Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Life in Japan

Described as beautiful by historians, and people who met her personally like Koji Ariyoshi, a nisei sergeant in the United States Dixie Mission.^{[citation needed]} While still in college she had become active in the Christian reform movement of Toyohiko Kagawa, and later worked with Shidzue Katō.^{[citation needed]}

Ikeda suffered torture at the hands of the Imperial Japanese for her anti-government activities. Resulting in all her fingers being broken by her jailers. Despite this, she never surrendered her beleifs. ^[1]

Exile in China

She continued her underground organization of Japanese women laborers until pressure on active anti-militarists became so great that she transferred her activities to China.^[1] She worked as a ballroom dancer in Shanghai to earn a living while also in poor health. She escaped from Shanghai along with her husband Wataru when the Japanese invaded the city. Both of them were friends with Chinese resistance fighter Kuo Mo-jo.^[2]

Ikeda, along with Kaji, were part of a diaspora of Japanese antiwar writers who lived in China, and were involved with Chinese literary circles.^[3]

Kanzo Uchiyama, who owned the Uchiyama Bookstore in Shanghai, also supported her, and Kaji's ex-wife, a proletarian musician named Sakura Kono. Kono's life in Tokyo was facing a dead end after 1934 when the Proletarian Music League was forcefully abolished and Kaji was arrested and imprisoned. Ikeda asked Kono to join them in Shanghai, having found a job for Kono at the Japanese newspaper Shanghai Daily Newspaper (Shanghai Mainichi Shinbun). Ikeda arranged for Kono's accommodation close to the Uchiyama Bookstore. Kono took the bus in front of the bookstore every morning, and would stop by at the bookstore in the evening.^[4]

Meeting Edgar Snow

She and her husband, who also suffered in a Japanese political prison, met journalist Edgar Snow.^[5] Snow found both Yuki, and Kaji worth reporting to his American audience, both of them surviving a Japanese bombing attack on Wuchang to meet him at the Hankow Navy YMCA. Snow met them again a year later in Chongqing and was reminded that "Japan was full of decent people like them who, if they had not had their craniums stuff full of Sun goddess myths and other imperialist filth, and been forbidden access to "dangerous thoughts", and been armed by American and British hypocrites, could easily live in a civilized co-operative world if any of us could provide one."^[5]

Working with Chinese Resistance

She and Kaji, and another Japanese named Kazuo Aoyama, were involved with the Kuomintang's re-education of captured Japanese troops, and psychological warfare against the Imperial Japanese which was conducted by the Japanese People's Anti-war Alliance. Ikeda was also a student of world politics. Was constantly studying and applying her knowledge to practical work. She was considered the pillar of the re-education program in Chongqing, acting as a young mother to the re-educated Japanese Imperial soldiers. Ikeda also, together with her husband, came into contact with Koji Ariyoshi, a nisei sergeant in the United States Dixie Mission when he visited Chungking on behalf of the U.S military.^[2][6]

See also

• Japanese resistance to the Empire of Japan in World War II
• Resistance during World War II
• League to Raise the Political Consciousness of Japanese Troops
• Japanese People's Emancipation League
• Sanzo Nosaka
• Shigeki Oka
• Naoki Oka

References

Further reading

• 1973-06-25. 故池田幸子女史の歩んだ道: 日中戦争期における反戦運動 (Japanese), Institute of Chinese Affairs, 304, pp. 23–35.