Born into a highly-educated family of the former samurai class, Yamakawa graduated from the private women's college Joshi Eigaku Juku (renamed Tsuda College in 1948) in 1912.Faison, 2018, p, 12 In 1916, she married the communist activist and theoretician Yamakawa Hitoshi, who, in 1922, founded the short-lived pre-war Japanese Communist Party and was a leader of the Labor-Farmer faction.Faison, 2018, p. 18
