Chiyo Sakakibara ( ja, 榊原千代, 15 July 1898 – 28 April 1987) was a Japanese journalist, educator and politician. She was one of the first group of women elected to the House of Representatives in 1946. In 1948 she was appointed Deputy Secretary of Justice, also becoming the first woman appointed to a cabinet post.

Biography

Sakakibara was born Chiyo Mano in what is now Mishima in

Shizuoka Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshu. Shizuoka Prefecture has a population of 3,637,998 and has a geographic area of . Shizuoka Prefecture borders Kanagawa Prefecture to the east, Yamanashi Prefecture to the northea ...

in 1898. She attended Ferris Japanese-English Girls' School, graduating in 1917. She then studied at Aoyama Girl's Academy until 1919, after which she became a reporter for the magazine ''Fujin no Tomo'' (''Women's Friend''). She later taught at

Jiyu Gakuen Girls' School , the "House of Tomorrow," is the original building complex of Jiyu Gakuen, designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. ''Jiyu'' means 'freedom', and ''gakuen'' is 'school'. Arata Endo, working as an assistant for Wright's project constr ...

, before marrying the economist in 1927. The couple had three daughters and a son, , who founded the

Hippo Family Club The is the brainchild of an organization known as the Institute for Language Experience, Experiment & Exchange, also known as LEX. It was created in 1981 by , who had been researching language acquisition for over 30 years prior to his death. The H ...

. She subsequently studied in Europe with her husband, attending the University of Marburg in Germany and Selly Oak College in England. When they returned to Japan, Iwao became a professor at the Fukushima College of Economics, with Sakakibara becoming a teacher at . She was also a piano teacher. After the war, Sakakibara was a Japan Socialist Party candidate in Fukushima in the 1946 general elections (the first in which women could vote), and was elected to the House of Representatives.Analysis of the 1946 Japanese General Election
United States Department of State, 1946, p89 She was re-elected in the 1947 elections, after which she was appointed Deputy Secretary of Justice in the Tetsu Katayama government, becoming the first woman appointed to the cabinet.Pioneers in politics
Democrat and Chronicle, 5 February 1948 However, she lost her seat in the 1949 elections. In 1951 Sakakibara became a member of the National University Management Law Enactment Committee. In the same year she became president of the school corporation and a director of

Aoyama Gakuin is an educational institute in Tokyo, Japan, which comprises Aoyama Gakuin University, Aoyama Gakuin Women's Junior College, Aoyama Gakuin Senior High School, Aoyama Gakuin Junior High School, Aoyama Gakuin Elementary School, and Aoyama Gakuin K ...

. She was also a founding member of International Christian University, served as a director of and became a mediator for the Tokyo Family Court. She was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a

world constitution A world constitution refers to a proposed framework or document aimed at establishing a system of global governance. It seeks to provide a set of principles, structures, and laws to govern the relationships between states and address global iss ...

. As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. She died in Tokyo in 1987.Mennonite Weekly Review, 18 June 1987, p3

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sakakibara, Chiyo 1898 births Japanese schoolteachers Japanese journalists University of Marburg alumni 20th-century Japanese women politicians 20th-century Japanese politicians Members of the House of Representatives (Japan) Japan Socialist Party politicians 1987 deaths World Constitutional Convention call signatories