The Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Japan and their first president Yajima Kajiko, illustrate the intellectual turning point between the Tokugawa Era into the Meiji period. While still carrying views from the past, the movement brought a big first wave of female participating in public spaces to alleviate the oppression of women. While it is being argued that through a lack of demands for actual equal rights, women were not actively participating in the public sphere in the way that men were, we would like to argue that this is not necessarily the case. While there is a difference in activism, actions of women in the WCTU in our eyes are influenced both through the status of women at the time and through a continuation of stagnant gender views from the past. Supporting this claim is the view expressed by Mara Patessio’s argumentation, which illustrates that “different social groups expressed different ideas through various mediums”, so too did the WCTU, which shows that “such unrelated “actors” were actually working within the same public social and political spaces, enlarging them, and becoming an important social force in Japanese society.”  We therefore think the WCTU should be understood as a first big step towards an active female activism in Japan, rather than discounted on the sole premise of lacking the demands for equal rights of women and men outside of marriage and women of different classes and social standings.