The 1974 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

CITATION for Fusaye Ichikawa

Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
31 August 1974, Manila, Philippines

Among all the changes wrought in postwar Japan none have been more fundamental socially than the emancipation of women. In her career, spanning more than six decades, FUSAYE ICHIKAWA mirrors this transformation.

In the traditional rural villages in Aichi Prefecture where she was born in 1893, her parents were simple farmers, cultivating and tending silkworms on the less than one hectare of land on which they strove to raise six offspring. Although determined his children must have the education he lacked, her father was harsh; watching her mother beaten left an indelible imprint on the girl, as did the repeated lament, "What a misery it is to have been born a woman.... "

From a village schoolteacher, Miss ICHIKAWA became in turn a news reporter, stockbroker's clerk and labor union worker. She moved in 1918 to the national arena as a founder of the pioneering New Women's Association that sought, as a first step in raising women's status, an amendment to the law prohibiting women from listening to, making or sponsoring political speeches. Helped again by her elder brother who had sent money from the United States for her secondary and normal school education, she studied two and a half years in America before returning to join the newly opened Tokyo branch of the International Labor Organization (ILO).

Daytimes at the ILO she directed the Women's Committee in winning prohibition against female labor on factory night shifts and in underground mines. After hours, working often until midnight, she was the mainstay of the League of Winning Women's Suffrage and the Women's Problems Research Council.

As reaction and militarism settled heavily upon Japan, beginning with the army's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Miss ICHIKAWA and her co-workers protested the fascist trends and addressed themselves to solutions of problems created for women by the war. Following Japan's surrender, she was elected leader of the New Japan Women's League that became the League of Women Voters after women's suffrage was granted under directive of the Allied Occupation. Ironically purged from leadership in March 1947 on a false accusation of militarism, her clearance was won in October 1950 through repeated protests by women's organizations in Japan and abroad.

Quickly reinstated as head of the League, she led the successful campaign against licensed prostitution and helped found a Fair and Clean Elections Association to safeguard the franchise. In 1952 she won election as an independent to the House of Councilors, the upper house in the Diet, in a campaign modeled strictly on the "ideal election code" she had advocated.

Serving 18 years in the Diet, she consistently opposed pay raises for members and lived frugally, donating all increases plus a portion of her salary each month, to women's causes. She made public reports yearly on Diet sessions and on her own activities, attendance record, income, expenses and donations. Out of office for three years, she yielded in July 1974 to the insistence of supporters—particularly the young—and was returned to the Diet—with minimal campaign expenditure and by a large majority—in recognition of her service to Japan's women, conscience and political morality.

In electing FUSAYE ICHIKAWA to receive the 1974 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes her lifetime labors advancing with exemplary political integrity her countrywomen's public and personal freedom.