was one of the first three women in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

to become lawyers.

Biography

Kume was born in

Ōsaka Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Kansai region of Honshu. Osaka Prefecture has a population of 8,778,035 () and has a geographic area of . Osaka Prefecture borders Hyōgo Prefecture to the northwest, Kyoto Prefecture to the north, Nara P ...

. At the time, the definition of someone who could enter the modern legal profession in Japan was "A male Japanese national" who must be at least twenty years old. This was amended in 1933, and in 1936, women were allowed to enter the

bar Bar or BAR may refer to: Food and drink * Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages * Candy bar * Chocolate bar Science and technology * Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment * Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud * Bar (u ...

. Kume was one of the first three women, including

Masako Nakata , nee (December 1, 1910 – October 15, 2002) was one of Japan's first women lawyers. Biography Masako Tanaka was born and raised in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo on December 1, 1910. Her father Kunijiro was a major at Military Police who loved reading W ...

and Yoshiko Mibuchi, to pass the exam in 1938. The women were about to study law from 1929 at Women's College, Meiji University. All three became fully qualified lawyers after an eighteen-month internship, in 1940. Kume worked in private practice in Tokyo. She was a founding member of the Japan Women’s Bar Association which began in 1950. Kume was the first chairperson. From 1960 to 1969 she served in the United Nations in New York on behalf of her government. In 1960 Kume was interviewed by

Beate Sirota Gordon Beate Sirota Gordon (; October 25, 1923 – December 30, 2012) was an Austrian-born American performing arts presenter and women's rights advocate. She was the former Performing Arts Director of the Japan Society and the Asia Society and was ...

as part of her research work at Columbia University and her memories are captured in ''The Reminiscences of Ai Kume: Japanese Occupation''. Kume was the first woman to be recommended for appointment to the Supreme Court by the Bar association in 1976, but she died unexpectedly on July 14 of that year.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kume, Ai 1911 births 1976 deaths People from Osaka Prefecture Japanese women lawyers 20th-century Japanese lawyers 20th-century women lawyers