[3] Despite higher academic ambitions,[4] after failing to complete her post-secondary education and working for a time in a cotton-spinning mill, she returned home in 1914 and taught in the same school as her father for three years.

[8] Takamure's articles on her experiences and the fact that she undertook the pilgrimage as an unmarried woman alone made her something of a celebrity in Japan at the time, and her notoriety only grew after she left her household and husband in Tokyo in the company of another man in 1925.

[12] Her status as her household's primary wage-earner led her to publish a great many articles in various journals and magazines during these years, as well as to engage with other prominent Japanese feminists in print.

[20] From her "House in the Woods" (Mori no ie), named in homage to Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Takamure embarked on the most influential phase of her career, that of a pioneering historian in the field of Japanese women's history.

[26] Her scholarship and method were heavily influenced by the nativism of Motoori Norinaga, which led her to conclude, against the folkloristic (minzokugaku) conclusions of Yanagita Kunio, that marriage in the Heian period had been largely uxorilocal.