A window into the mind of Esperantist and political activist Teru Hasegawa

Japan Times

20-05-2025

Little predisposed Teru Hasegawa to a life of political resistance.
Born in 1912 to a conservative middle class family, she grew up in comfortable circumstances during the Taisho Era (1912-26), a thrilling period of political liberalization and cultural experimentation. After completing her elementary and secondary studies in Tokyo, Hasegawa moved to the Kansai region to attend the Nara Higher Normal School for Girls, now Nara Women's University, where she trained to become a teacher. She was smart and witty; she was expected to breeze through.
But internally, Hasegawa was burning. As a child, her older sister later recalled, she had been 'stubborn and staunchly rebellious.' Things got worse during her teenage years, when she grew distrustful of authority. Her sense of alienation became so acute that she briefly contemplated suicide. More trouble awaited in Nara, where Hasegawa made friends among leftwing groups. This led to her arrest, in 1932, for harboring 'dangerous thoughts,' a catch-all describing beliefs running counter to established political norms. The result was a week behind bars and expulsion from school. Suddenly, her future looked a lot darker.
It was around that time, writes Adam Kuplowsky, the translator of Hasegawa's collection of essays, 'Whispers from a Storm,' that the young Japanese woman was introduced to Esperanto, a language created in 1887 by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, a Polish physician who dreamed of a neutral idiom that was untainted by nationalism and could unite people across borders. It was not a politically neutral tongue however. From the start, it attracted all manner of leftists, from progressives to communists, who saw the artificial lingua franca as an ideal vehicle to disseminate their ideas. Esperanto gave Hasegawa a new name, Verda Majo, and exposed her to a vast and 'politically charged transnational community.' It changed the course of her life.
After her release from prison, Hasegawa joined the Japanese Union of Proletarian Esperantists and began publishing political essays, drama and translation from Japanese to Esperanto. 'Whispers from a Storm,' out this month, gathers 14 of these pieces, penned between 1937 and 1945.
Whispers from a Storm: Fragments from a Japanese Esperantist in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, by Teru Hasegawa (Verda Majo). Translated by Adam Kuplowsky. 198 pages, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS, nonfiction.
As Hasegawa's engagement with Esperanto deepened, she realized her country's drift toward fascism was not an isolated phenomenon. All over the world, people had begun to resist. In 1936, she met one of them, a Chinese exchange student and fellow Esperantist, Ren Liu, who hailed from Manchuria, then under Japanese control. Within a few months, they married, against the wishes of her family. Hasegawa's decision was a token of love, Kuplowsky writes, but also 'an act of international solidarity and antifascism.'
In early 1937, the couple moved to Shanghai to join the anti-Japanese struggle. From day one, Hasegawa hated the city and its inequality. Their difficult personal circumstances made things worse. While Liu worked at a publishing house, Hasegawa had to stay home and hide. She spoke no Chinese, and only a smattering of English, and she feared that if her nationality were discovered, she would be sent back to Japan. In the longest essay in the book, 'Inside Fighting China,' she explains that to avoid detection when venturing out, she tried 'to imitate the bearing of a Shanghainese woman.' Money was short and they often had to make do with two meals a day, mostly 'cheap vegetables cooked in soybean oil and seasoned with salt.' At least there was Esperanto, which helped her integrate a small circle of kindred spirits.
In November that same year, Shanghai fell to the Imperial Japanese Army, forcing the couple to hit the road. They spent the following months on the move, never settling anywhere for long. First Guangzhou, where Hasegawa was exposed and expelled, then Hong Kong, followed by Hankou, before finally settling in Chongqing, China's wartime capital, where Hasegawa joined the propaganda arm of the Chinese government. She spent the following years airing radio programs denouncing Japanese war crimes. To the Chinese, she became a hero.
Hasegawa was 25 when she landed in Shanghai, her idealism red hot. The Chinese Esperantists she encountered were all 'comrades,' invariably 'youthful, earnest and progressive,' she writes, their ranks devoid of 'hypocrites' or 'chauvinists.' In the streets of the international concessions, she walked with them, shouting 'Freedom for China via Esperanto!' Her politics were lucid when informed by direct experience, but ingenuous otherwise: She denounced in graphic detail the 'living hell' unleashed by Imperial Japan upon China, but, in 'To all the Esperantists of the World," an essay from 1938, she praised the Soviet Union, where she never set foot, for 'showing the way to tomorrow for Esperantists everywhere.'
Though her early writing from this essay collection is occasionally pompous, it gained nuance over time as her perspective grew more reflective. She was overjoyed when Tokyo surrendered, but worried the social class that profited from the war would remain in control. Sadly, she never saw Japan's remarkable transformation. In Harbin, in 1947, pregnant with a third child as China's civil war raged, she decided on an abortion. It did not go well: She contracted an infection and died shortly after. She was 35.
What remains are her words, a rare window into the mind of a young Japanese woman who took enormous risks to follow through on her ideological commitment.