A big part of the advocacy of the Japanese WCTU was the promotion of female dignity and the abolition of prostitution. Many members were women of a hard past, and in the words of the former president Kubushiro Ochimi (1882-1972), grandniece of Yajima “Kyofukai was created not from strength, but from weakness [of women], weakness. Indeed, it was born in order to reduce allurements and make the course of lives as easy as possible.” Those women therefore harbored anger against the many conditions that adversely affected women and realized that Confucianism was not influential and did not deny concubinage and that Buddhism regarded women as evil and that many Buddhist priests had concubines. Christianity therefore seemed like a powerful instrument to advocate for sexual purity. To be able to now understand the impact of the movement regarding emancipation and reduction of female suffrage, a contextualization of the motives and wording seems necessary.

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When ideals of purity, submissiveness, and the sole role of women as the mother are being used, by today’s standards we do not evaluate them as being feministic. But in the time of the early Japanese Kyofukai, many women, while still holding on to the gender roles of Tokugawa times, felt oppressed by a system that allowed concubinage and through the Victorian ideals of womanhood and Christianity, many saw a way out. “For these women, Christianity functioned as a liberating spiritual instrument from oppressive practices” Pictures of the woman as the mother as a sole purpose and in control of a “separate sphere”, by today’s standards, also sound rather misogynistic than emancipating, but it is important again to put these words expressed at the time into context. Many women in Japan saw the Victorian ideals and Christianity as an instrument, not only to break free from an oppressive system, but further also to possibly change existing views on women held in society. These views stem from feudalistic samurai ethics that considered women little more than “borrowed wombs” and restricted female bodies and their sexuality outside of marriage. Aligning with the Christian views to fight female oppression of such sort was the first president of the WCTU, Yajima Kajiko. The Christian notion of the bond of a man and a woman through love and respect therefore seemed like a long-needed change for many as well as Yajima.

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Additionally, the call for the abolition of prostitution is often seen as a sort of one-sided activism, only considering the lives of middle-class women in Japan and not regarding concubines and geisha as women of equal value. Underlining this view is the fact that many women advocating for the alleviation of female suffrage more closely associated with middle-class men than women of poor backgrounds, demanding halt of oppression mostly for women of a similar background and seeing prostitutes and concubines as women debasing social morality, in other words lowering the status of all women through their actions. Concubines and prostitutes therefore were not seen as disenfranchised individuals, but as causing harm to Japanese society.