Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan Book

I would give this book 5 stars, but I had to take a star (and maybe a star and a half?) off for inaccuracies.

Let me give you a direct quote written about the "High Treason Incident":
"After a secret trial, conducted with great dispatch, twelve socialists, including Koutoku Shuusui and Kanno Suga were hanged."

Kanno Suga was an anarchist, not a socialist and the "High Treason Incident" was a case of primarily anarchists being hanged. Sievers also mislabels Osugi Sakae as a Socialist. I am providing a link to a Wikipedia article about the High Treason incident. Further Helene Bowen Raddeker's book "Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan" discusses Kanno Suga at length.

Given that Wikipedia and the Internet did not exist when Sievers wrote her book, it means she had to do legwork on this book in a way that we youngun's of today probably can't really understand. Further, I've said elsewhere that inaccuracies and errors are, unfortunately, unavoidable to some degree in all scholarship for a variety of different reasons. However in each instance when I discover an error in a book I wonder--what other errors are there that I DIDN'T catch because I'm not super familiar with the topic? I also wonder what are the *reasons* for the errors? Did Sievers have inaccurate information available to her? Did she misinterpret the available information? Does she not understand the difference between "anarchist" and "socialist"? Or does she, for some reason, have a commitment or interest in the word "socialist" that causes her to skew some bits of history? While I enjoyed the book, I obviously have reservations about trusting the information contained inside it. Yet at the same time I am sympathetic to how hard it is to be one of the forerunners of research on a topic where information is very difficult to get in English (or even in Japanese!!).

Other points of confusion for me: this author claims that Itou Noe was anti-abortion. This is possible, for sure. Anything is possible. But Itou Noe was Japan's first Anarcha-feminist, heavily inspired by Nietzsche and Stirner. She was in a relationship with Tsuji Jun (an anarchist, feminist, surrealist, playwright and translator of "The Ego and It's Own") for a brief time. It's hard for me to imagine Itou Noe as being "Anti-Abortion", especially for the stated reason of her being "opposed to anything unnatural". Again--people are complicated, so people CAN hold contradictory ideas but this particular idea is hard to square with all other known facts I've heard, seen, and read about Noe.