Kiyohara Tama

Who They Were

Kiyohara Tama (1861–1939) was a Japanese painter who spent most of her working life in Palermo, Sicily. She was born in Edo on 17 July 1861, in the final years of the Edo period (1603–1868), under the nengō Bunkyū 文久, the era name that had begun that same year. Her given name was Tama, and her family names were Kiyohara and, after marriage, Ragusa. She is also recorded under the names Kiyohara Otama, O'Tama Chiovara, Eleonora Ragusa, and Ragusa Tama.

Tama’s maiden name was Kiyohara Tayo (清原多代). She was the wife of Vincenzo Ragusa, an Italian sculptor, and she worked primarily as a painter. She died in Tokyo on 6 April 1939.

Life and Career

Tama was born in Edo, the city that would become Tokyo, and her early life coincided with the upheaval of the Meiji Restoration. In the 1870s, Vincenzo Ragusa arrived in Japan, where he taught Western art techniques. Tama became his student, and the two developed a close professional and personal relationship. They married, and Tama relocated with him to Palermo, the capital of Sicily, where she would live for the greater part of her life.

In Palermo, Tama established herself as a painter. Her work drew on both Japanese aesthetic traditions and the Western oil-painting techniques she had learned from Ragusa. She painted portraits, still lifes, and genre scenes, and her output was exhibited and collected in Italy. Her position was unusual: a Japanese woman painter working professionally in nineteenth-century Europe, at a time when few Japanese artists, male or female, had established careers abroad.

Tama’s life in Palermo lasted for decades. She maintained ties to Japan, however, and her identity as a Japanese artist working in a European idiom made her a bridge between two artistic worlds. She returned to Japan late in life, and she died in Tokyo on 6 April 1939.

Why They Matter

Tama matters because she was one of the first Japanese women to build a sustained professional career as a painter in Europe. Her marriage to Vincenzo Ragusa placed her inside a major artistic network in Palermo, and her paintings circulated in Italian exhibitions at a time when Japanese art was still being discovered in the West.

Her career also illustrates the cultural exchange that followed the opening of Japan in the late Edo and early Meiji periods. Ragusa brought Western sculptural and painting techniques to Japan; Tama carried Japanese sensibility into Sicilian painting. Her work is a concrete example of how individual artists, not just governments or trade delegations, shaped the flow of ideas between Japan and Europe.

Tama’s life also complicates the usual story of Japanese artists abroad, which tends to focus on male students who travelled to Paris or London. She went to Palermo, married an Italian sculptor, and worked there for most of her life, all while retaining her Japanese name and identity. Her career is a reminder that the Meiji-era encounter with the West was not a one-way street, and that Japanese artists were active participants in European art worlds.

The Name in Japanese

The name most commonly used for her in Japanese is ラグーザ玉.

• Kana reading: ラグーザたま
• Romaji: Ragusa Tama

Breaking it down:

• ラグーザ (Ragusa): This is written entirely in katakana, the Japanese syllabary used for foreign names. It is the phonetic rendering of the Italian surname Ragusa. There are no kanji, so there is no character-by-character meaning; the katakana simply represents the sound of her husband’s family name.

• 玉 (tama): This is a single kanji. Its reading here is たま (tama). The character means “jewel” or “ball,” and in names it carries connotations of something precious and round. It is the same character used in the word 玉 (tama) for a gem or a sphere.

So the full name ラグーザ玉 reads literally as “Ragusa Tama,” with the foreign surname in katakana followed by the Japanese given name in kanji. This reflects her dual identity: the Italian married name and the Japanese personal name held together in a single written form.

Her maiden name, Kiyohara Tayo, is written 清原多代. The characters are:

• 清 (kiyoshi / kiyo): “clear” or “pure.”
• 原 (hara): “field” or “plain.”
• 多 (ta): “many” or “much.”
• 代 (yo): “generation” or “era.”

The name 清原 (Kiyohara) is a classical Japanese surname, and 多代 (Tayo) is a traditional feminine given name meaning something like “many generations.”

Legacy

Tama’s legacy is tied to her position as a Japanese painter who worked in Italy for most of her life. Her paintings remain part of the artistic record of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Palermo, and her name appears in histories of Japanese-Western artistic exchange.

Her life also left a mark on the city where she worked. As the wife of Vincenzo Ragusa, she was connected to the sculptural and educational projects he undertook in Palermo, and her presence there made her a visible figure in the local art world. In Japan, she is remembered as a pioneer: a woman who left the country in the Meiji era, built a career abroad, and returned only at the end of her life.

Tama died in Tokyo on 6 April 1939. Her work survives in collections and in the historical record, and her name — ラグーザ玉 — remains a compact symbol of the meeting between Japanese and European art in the nineteenth century.