Sandakan Brothel No.8

Journey into the History of Lower-class Japanese Women

Tomoko Yamazaki, Karen F. Colligan-Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317460244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is a pioneering work on "karayuki-san", impoverished Japanese women sent abroad to work as prostitutes from the 1860s to the 1920s. The narrative follows the life of one such prostitute, Osaki, who is persuaded as a child of ten to accept cleaning work in Sandakan, North Borneo, and then forced to work as a prostitute in a Japanese brothel, one of the many such brothels that were established throughout Asia in conjunction with the expansion of Japanese business interests. Yamazaki views Osaki as the embodiment of the suffering experienced by all Japanese women, who have long been oppressed under the dual yoke of class and gender. This tale provides the historical and anthropological context for understanding the sexual exploitation of Asian women before and during the Pacific War and for the growing flesh trade in Southeast Asia and Japan today. Young women are being brought to Japan with the same false promises that enticed Osaki to Borneo 80 years ago. Yamazaki Tomoko, who herself endured many economic and social hardships during and after the war, has devoted her life to documenting the history of the exchange of women between Japan and other Asian countries since 1868. She has worked directly with "karayuki-san", military comfort women, war orphans, repatriates, women sent as picture brides to China and Manchuria, Asian women who have wed into Japanese farming communities, and Japanese women married to other Asians in Japan.

—— 1 ——

A Prologue to the History of Women at the Lowest Level of Society

As I sit before my desk preparing to write about a category of overseas prostitutes known as karayuki-san, I find that one particular scene continues to surface in my memory. The setting is Tenshudo, Lord of Heaven Chapel, in the town of Sakitsu, at the southern end of Amakusa-Shimo Island. At the time, I was on my second trip in search of karayuki-san, and I had been brooding over the possibility that my efforts would be in vain. Perhaps it was a subconscious attempt to put my mind at ease, but as soon as I got off the bus, I headed for the Tenshudo’s dark gray steeple, rising conspicuously high over the flat roofs of the traditional houses around it.

In my mind’s eye I can still see the early-setting sun of autumn approaching the mountain ridge line in the west. It must have been about three o’clock. Although it wasn’t the time of day you would expect people to shut themselves up in their homes, in the vicinity of the Tenshudo not only were there no adults, there wasn’t even a single child at play. Sakitsu was so quiet, it seemed to have been abandoned. Just behind the Tenshudo lay the ocean. Perhaps it was because the bay curved so deeply into the land, but the water was as smooth as the face of a mirror and clearly reflected the cross on the steeple.

Had I come as an ordinary tourist, I can imagine how moved I would have been by the extraordinary beauty of that scene, what peace it would have brought to my heart. But for me, who had come from afar to encounter the real form and voice of those of my same gender, women who had been sent off far away, forced to sell their bodies in distant lands, this beautiful, quiet view brought only a vague sadness.

This sadness would deepen as time passed, but it was just then that I glimpsed the figure of an old farm woman, engrossed in her prayers.

The doors of the Tenshudo stood ajar, as if it, too, were deserted. I walked in and looked around as my eyes adjusted from the outside light. When I focused on the form of a person crouched before the altar, my eyes interpreted it at first as a stone sculpture of a person in prayer. This was because, as the minutes flowed by, the old woman kneeling on the tatami, a rosary hanging from her clasped hands, neither uttered a word nor made a single movement. However, as my eyes grew accustomed to the dim interior of the Tenshudo and I could clearly discern everything from the image of the crucifixion, the statue of Mary, and each of the candlesticks on the altar in the front, to the stained-glass windows on either side, I realized that what I had mistaken for a stone image was actually the living flesh of an old peasant woman. Taken aback by the carelessness of my observation, I was at the same time profoundly moved by the presence of this elderly woman who found it necessary to immerse herself in prayer so deeply and for so long.

She looked to me as if she might have been seventy to seventy-five years old, and that was exactly the age of the karayuki-san that one might find still living on the Amakusa Islands or the Shimabara Peninsula. This old farm woman in silent prayer like a stone image—might she have once worked as a prostitute overseas? Of course it was quite reckless of me to reach such a conclusion, but about what could it be that she was praying so fervently to her God?

Her face, which I can see as clearly now, two years later, as if she were right before my eyes, was furrowed with a number of wide wrinkles, while her fingers were short, with knotted joints. Different patterns at the elbows and knees betrayed the patches on her work clothes. If her attire indicated the poverty in which she now lived, and the wrinkles on her face spoke of the many difficulties she had faced during the course of her life, then I would probably not be going too far in interpreting the true intent of her fervent prayer, not as an idealistic request for the deliverance of humankind from original sin, but rather as a heart-rending wish that she ultimately be saved from a life of poverty and hardship.

As is commonly known, the term karayuki-san is a contraction of karahitoyuki [a person going to Kara, i.e., China, or abroad] or karankuniyuki [going to China, or a country overseas]. It refers to overseas prostitutes who, from the final stages of the Tokugawa shogunate in the mid-nineteenth century through the Meiji period (1868–1911) and until the middle of the Taisho period (1912–1925) at the end of World War I, left their native country behind and traveled north to Siberia or continental China, or south to the various countries of Southeast Asia, or even to India and Africa, to sell their flesh to foreigners. These women came from all over Japan, but it is said that the great majority came from the Amakusa Islands and the Shimabara Peninsula. As I explain in the final chapter, the reason so many of these women were born in Amakusa and Shimabara can be explained in terms of the paucity of natural resources and the social poverty of these regions. If this is the case, then karayuki-san and the poor peasant women of Amakusa and Shimabara must represent two branches of the same tree. The soundless voice of the old peasant woman who sat kneeling like an image carved of stone before the altar at the Tenshudo in Sakitsu, silently appealing to God to recognize the unendurable hardships of her life, must be the same, fundamentally, as the inner voice of the karayuki-san.

Within the Tenshudo, which grew darker as the sun fell below the ridgeline, a new thought took the form of a vow within my heart. As one who conducted research on women’s history, I would make it my “work” to understand the voiceless prayer of the old peasant woman from Amakusa. When at last her prayers ended, the woman put away her rosary, and, without any sign of censure for the trespasser before her, gave the slightest nod of her head and walked out of the Tenshudo. And yet, I found myself still motionless in that same spot.

I have somehow uncovered these unforgettable personal memories, and I suspect that there are readers who may ask why I am concerning myself with the karayuki-san, a faded memory from the distant past, when there are so many other women’s issues I might confront. This is a difficult question to answer, but, frankly speaking, it is because the women of the villages of Amakusa and Shimabara who were once sold into overseas prostitution are the embodiment of the suffering experienced by all Japanese women who have long been oppressed under the dual yoke of class and gender. In other words, these women represent the “starting point” or “quintessence” of women’s existence in Japan.

I am getting ahead of myself, but it should be noted that until now the majority of all Japanese history texts, from the Nihon shoki of the Nara period (710–784) to contemporary collections, have been written by the dominant male sex. Since the introduction of Marxist ideology and methodology at the beginning of the Showa period (1926–1988), attempts have been made to write history from the perspective of laborers and farmers, but because these histories also adhere firmly to the male standpoint, they do not differ from earlier works. “Women’s history” made its debut only after Japanese imperialism collapsed in 1945, upon Japan’s defeat in World War II, and women were guaranteed political and social rights. In my opinion, however, these historical treatises were, with few exceptions, histories of an elite segment of women and nothing else.

For example, most of these women’s histories follow a certain formula: they open the modern era with an account of Tsuda Umeko’s study exchange to America in 1872, following this with the activities of Kishida Soen and Fukuda Eiko, proponents of the Liberal Rights Movement. Then they mention the work of Yosano Akiko, who spoke loudly through her poems of the awakening of self-consciousness at the level of the senses, and go on to discuss Seito, the publication of those such as Hiratsuka Raicho who were active in Japan’s Bluestocking movement.¹ It is as if the authors drew a line on a graph, connecting one high point to another representing the thought and activities of a handful of elite women who emerged from the bourgeoisie, or middle class. It would be impossible to extract anything from such women’s history about the daily lives and suppressed feelings of those innumerable women who lived and died as laborers or peasants.

It is not that I am trying to deny the validity of all forms of elite women’s history. These modern elite women who have acquired academic learning or technical skills have some special work that only they can do to further the progress of society. However, if we draw an analogy with the icebergs that float in polar regions, elite women constitute only some 10 percent of the iceberg exposed to the sunshine above the ocean’s surface, while women of the labor and peasant classes lie submerged deeply and unseen as the great mass of ice below. If a text does not follow the actual circumstances of such lower-class women and capture the essence of their joys and sorrows, then it cannot be considered a true history of women.

In order to criticize traditional women’s history in a more concrete and effective manner, I would have to write a general history of women, but this is not something I am prepared to do at the present time. I wanted at least to write about the life of a lower-class woman who might be contrasted with her elite counterpart, but then the question arose, what sort of existence would provide a powerful antithesis to the elite woman’s history? When I pondered this question, the image that entered my mind was none other than that of the karayuki-san.

It need not be reiterated here that the development of modern Japanese society was heavily dependent on light industries such as cotton spinning, silk reeling, and textile weaving, and that these industries thrived upon the sacrifice of the women they employed. In order to reduce the number of mouths, it was said, girls from farm villages throughout Japan would indenture themselves at industrial sites in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagano, and so on. The severity of their labor is documented in older works such as Shokko jijo [Conditions Among Textile Workers], a survey of textile sites conducted at the turn of the century, and again in Joko aishi [The Pitiful History of Female Factory Workers], written by Hosoi Wakizo in 1925. Recent works include Aa Nomugi Toge [Ah! Nomugi Pass], by Yamamoto Shigemi.²

Others, too, are fully qualified to denounce the prosperity of modern Japan: peasant women who were forced to crawl about in muddy paddies under the scorching sun, growing rice they were unable to afford to eat themselves, not to mention the women whose job it was to transport coal, descending deep down into the earth with only a metal hand lantern to light the way, sweltering in the heat as they confronted the coal veins. Add to these the child laborers who worked as live-in baby sitters, or girls forced to work as maids in the homes of strangers, cut off from family and friends—these girls, too, languished at the bottom rungs of society.

However, although these women were compelled to exist at the most minimal level, working long hours for low wages, they at least had the freedom to love, and even to marry if they wished. If we take it as a given that the emotion of love falls within that “free” territory that lies within us, these women could at least boast that they were in full possession of this territory. In other words, these women sold their labor, but nothing else.

When it comes to prostitutes, however, the nature of their existence dictates that they must sell for money the sexual favors that should by all rights belong to that territory of “internal freedom.” Which is worse, to live by selling one’s labor for the most meager of wages, or to have to survive by selling one’s body?

Of course, all those women we refer to by the single term “prostitute” do not necessarily share the same type of existence or external circumstances. In postwar Japan, where the licensed prostitute no longer exists, the term “prostitute” refers to the private streetwalker who pulls at men’s sleeves as they pass by. If we look at the prostitute of earlier eras, however, the definition becomes more complex. At the top we have the geisha, who entertained at banquets, selling such artistic accomplishments as the traditional dance and the singing of popular ballads. Below them are the licensed prostitutes, or courtesans, who worked in the pleasure quarters of Tokyo—Yoshiwara, Suzaki, Shinjuku, and so on—and the private prostitutes, who plied the streets outside. Yet even lower, we find the karayuki-san, forced to leave their homeland behind and go overseas, there to sell their bodies to customers of another nationality. There may not be much point in asking which of these categories was the more miserable, but if I were to pose the question anyway, most people would probably respond that it was the overseas prostitute.

The customers of geisha, courtesans, and streetwalkers were fellow Japanese, who spoke the same language and shared the same cultural consciousness. Of course there are some exceptions, such as the rasha-men, who worked the treaty ports opened at the beginning of the Meiji period, and the “pan-pan girls,” who catered to servicemen stationed in Japan following Japan’s defeat in World War II, but most of the partners these girls encountered were men from Europe or America.³ In the context of a nation about to walk the road laid out by the advanced countries of the West, these women did not find that taking European and American customers was such a humiliating experience. The foreign lands into which the karayuki-san were sold, however, were not in Europe or America, but were the nations of Southeast Asia whose civilizations lagged behind that of Japan, and which had been colonized by the Western powers. Their customers were primarily Chinese or men from one of the many indigenous ethnic groups. Since the karayuki-san were not liberated from the prevailing Japanese prejudice against people of other ethnic backgrounds, these women must have felt a strong sense of inferiority at having to take as customers dark-skinned indigenous men whose words, to their ears, were gibberish and in whose behavior they could find no sign of refinement. And, if we accept the validity these views held for them, we can say that not only did they lead miserable lives, but that this misery extended right into the domain of their hearts and minds.

During the past century of the history of modern Japan, if we recognize that it is the common woman who has been oppressed as the subordinate of men and capital, and that among these common women it is the prostitute who has endured the most cruel circumstances, and among these prostitutes it is the karayuki-san whose life held the least hope for salvation, then the reader will forgive me for viewing the karayuki-san as the “starting point, or quintessence” of the Japanese woman. This is the reason I have chosen for my prologue to the antithesis of elite women’s history neither the textile worker nor the peasant woman, neither the coal miner nor the maid, but the karayuki-san, the woman sent away to work as a prostitute in Southeast Asia.

My reasons for focusing on the karayuki-san should now be clear, but if we look closely, we will see that there has already been considerable research conducted on the topic of overseas prostitutes. For example, Mori Katsumi’s Jinshin baibai [The White Slave Trade: Women Who Went to Work Overseas; 1959] is a valuable piece of research that adheres closely to the history and population problems of Amakusa as it attempts to depict a total picture of the karayuki-san as an emigrant in search of work. Miyaoka Kenji’s Shofu—kaigai roruki [Prostitutes—A Record of Overseas Journeys; 1968], based on several thousand travel accounts, is a commendable reconstruction of when, where, and the cir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Translator's Preface and Acknowledgments
• Translator's Introduction
• Author's Foreword to the English Translation
• Chapter 1 A Prologue to the History of Women at the Lowest Level of Society
• Chapter 2 A Chance Encounter—My First Trip to Amakusa
• Chapter 3 My Attempts at a Second Trip
• Chapter 4 Life with Osaki
• Chapter 5 Osaki's Story—The Life of an Overseas Prostitute
• Chapter 6 Many More Voiceless Voices
• Chapter 7 Oftimi's Life
• Chapter 8 Oshimo's Grave
• Chapter 9 Okuni' s Birthplace
• Chapter 10 The Home of Gagnon Sana
• Chapter 11 Farewell, Amakusa
• Chapter 12 Epilogue—Karayuki-san and Modern Japan
• Author's Afterword to the First Edition (1972)
• Translator's Afterword
• Maps
• Sandakan Brothel No. 8, the Film, Two Photos
• Index