Born Asaba Waka in Kurihama Village, Miura County (present day Yokosuka), in Kanagawa Prefecture to a poor peasant family, at age 18, in 1897, she went to nearby Yokohama to look for a job.

[1] She was held as a sex slave there until 1900, when she met a Japanese journalist, Tachii Nobusaburo or Shinzaburo Ritsui (立井信三郎), who became interested in her plight and helped her to escape to San Francisco.

They moved to Tokyo’s Yotsuya Ward, where she encountered the writings of pioneering Swedish women's rights advocate Ellen Key, who wrote a great deal on motherhood, pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, and the state protecting those roles.

This attitude put her at odds with most of the other feminists of the day, many of whom were not supporters of the Japanese imperial goals, and who emphasized more equality with men without being as concerned about the roles of wife and mother.

In the graphic novel Sous le soleil de minuit [fr], published in 2015 by writer Juan Díaz Canales and artist Rubén Pellejero [es], a fictionalized version of Waka Yamada is "rescued" by Corto Maltese in 1915 in Dawson, Alaska where she was "retained by a madam on behalf of a Japanese syndicate.