Sandakan No. 8 Brothel By Yamazaki Tomoko
Translated by Tomoko Moore & Steffen Richards
BCAS Oct-Dec 1975
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Excerpted from Sandakan Hachiban Shökan—Teihen Joseishi Joshh [Sandakan No. 8 Brothel—Introduction to the History of Women in the Lowest Part of Society /, pp. 7-13, 20-22, 64-66, 73-74, 86-88, 90, 92-94, 259-274. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobö (Ogawamachi 2-8, Kanda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), 1972. Permission to reprint this translation is gratefully acknowledged. The author may be reached by writing to the publisher.
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Karayukisan is a word derived from two longer words which mean "one who has traveled to China," but means itself an overseas prostitute who, from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the First World War, had left behind her homeland of Japan and gone abroad to sell herself to foreigners; such prostitutes went not only to China and Siberia in the north and to the countries of Southeast Asia in the south but also to India and Africa. They came from Japan as a whole, but especially, it is said, from Kyushu: from the island of Amakusa and the Shimabara Peninsula. That most shared this origin was due, basically, as I shall explain later, to the poverty of these regions, whose character derived from both natural and social causes. Indeed, these prostitutes and the poor peasant women of Shimabara and Amakusa undoubtedly represent two branches of the same tree.
* * *
Perhaps the reader will wonder why, when there are so many other problems regarding women, I have so devoted myself to these prostitutes, who have now long since become only a faded memory of the past. To answer this question is extremely difficult; but, to tell you frankly, it is that I believe these women from the villages of Amakusa and Shimabara who were sold and sent abroad as prostitutes embody the agony of Japanese women as a whole, who have long been oppressed under the dual yoke of class and sex. Or, to put it another way, they constitute the "starting point" of a woman's experience in Japan.
I am getting ahead of myself, but until now most historical writings in. Japan, from the Won Shoki of the Nara period to the histories of today, have been done by men, members of the dominating sex. With the beginning of the Showa Period, in the late Twenties, when the thought and methods of Marxism were introduced, there was an attempt to write history which supported the interests of farmers and working people, but even in this the male point of view persisted, unchanged. In 1945 Japanese imperialism collapsed, having been defeated in World War II; new social and political rights were guaranteed for women, and for the first time "women's history" was established. But if you ask me, these histories, with only very few exceptions, were all of elite women, and were certainly nothing more than that. For example, most of them touched on the high points: on the study abroad in America of Tsuda Umeko, in 1872 when the curtain on Japan's modern period had just been raised; then, on the activities of Fukuda Elko and Kishida Söen, fighters in the movement for human rights; on the work of Yosano Akiko, whose voice rang out with the poetry of self-awareness raised to a new experiential level; and, going further, on Hiratsuka Raichh, who constituted the "blue stocking" movement of Japan. In effect, they treated the thought and activities of a handful of elite women from the bourgeoisie, or middle class, as though history were a graph made up of peaks linked together. From history such as this it is almost impossible to read of the lives of women who lived and died as farmers or workers, or of their melancholy thoughts.
I am not, necessarily, trying to deny the validity of all histories of elite women. I say this because I believe that for the modern, elite woman with technical or specialized ability there are tasks which in terms of advancing the world are indispensable and which without her would not be assumed. But, to use the analogy of an iceberg such as floats in the polar regions, the so-called elite women compare to no more than the part jutting above the sea; while the women of the working and farming classes, to the massive block, by tens many times the greater, which lies sunken, leaden and remote in the depths below. If such history does not make an inroad into the condition of these women below, and does not grasp the heart of their sorrows and joys, it cannot be adjudged true women's history.
For me to put such criticism of traditional women's history in the most concrete and effective form, I would have to write a general history of women; but it is definitely not in me at present to do so. And so I wanted, at the very least, to write of one of these lower women, whose life might be contrasted against that of the elite woman. But then the question became, what sort of experience could present a strong antithesis of the elite woman's history? The image which came to mind whenever I asked myself this was none other than that of the Karayukisan.
It need hardly be said that modern Japanese society was built primarily upon light industry: upon silk and cotton manufacturing; and upon the sacrifices of the women who worked in it. How cruel a life was forced upon the daughters of Japan who, throughout the country, left their villages to indenture themselves in the textile centers—in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagano, etc.—and thereby "reduce the number of mouths" to feed (as it was said) has been demonstrated: quite early in Conditions Among Factory Workers, a report of a study made about the turn of the century; in The Sad History of Women
Factory Workers, written by Hosoi Wakizó in the early Twenties; and, more recently, in Yamamoto Shigemi's Ah! Nomugi Pass!; etc. And there are those who by experience are fully qualified to denounce the prosperity of modern Japan: the peasant women who, though they grew it, were unable to eat rice and had to grovel in the muddy paddies under the blazing sun; and, though it need hardly be mentioned of coal mining, the women miners who, with only a single lantern for guide, descended several thousands of meters into the ground and into a sweltering atmosphere, to pit themselves against the veins of coal. And in addition I think we ought to regard the nursemaids—who served as child labor—and the maids, etc., whose work led them into the houses of strangers where they were cut off from friend and relative alike, as women who suffered life in this same substratum.
However, these women, though forced to work long hours, at low wages, and to live the lowest of lives, had nonetheless the freedom to love and, if they had the mind, to marry. Now, if we regard love as belonging in man to the realm of internal freedom, then these women could at least have boasted that that realm was their own. In other words, labor they sold, but beyond that they sold nothing.
But it is the nature of prostitutes that they sell for money the sex that, properly, belongs in mankind to the sphere of internal freedom. Which, I ask, is the more wretched: one who sells her labor for cruelly low wages? or one who must go so far as to sell herself sexually?
Of course we call them all "prostitutes" but their circumstances—how they live and what their environments are—are not necessarily identical. If, for instance, we were speaking of post-war Japan, when the licensed prostitute was a thing of the past, we would mean when we said "prostitute" nothing more than a streetwalker, one who tugs at the sleeves of men passing in the streets; but as soon as we mean the time before this, the meaning of the word becomes more complex. At the top of the social scale was the Geisha, who attended at parties and whose selling point was her accomplishments: her singing, dancing, and what have you; beneath her were the licensed prostitute, who worked in the gay quarters of Tokyo—in Yoshiwara, Suzaki, Shinjuku, etc.—and the streetwalker, who worked the streets away from such centers; yet even lower than these was the woman forced from her native soil and obliged overseas to take the foreigner as partner: the Karayukisan. There probably is not much point in asking which of these several prostitutes was the most miserable; but if I were to ask anyway, the answer everyone would likely give is that the Karayukisan was.
If in the century of Japanese modern history it has been the common woman who has been oppressed as the subordinate of men and capital; and if among these women it has been the prostitute whose circumstances have been the most barbarous; and if among these prostitutes it has been the Karayukisan especially whose life held no promise of salvation —then, in this sense, we may be permitted to regard her life as the "starting point" of that of the Japanese woman. This is the reason that, to open our history, our antithesis of the traditional, elite woman's history, I have selected, not the women of the textile factories or the peasantry, not the women of the coal mines, not the maids; but the prostitutes whose trade carried them to Southeast Asia.
You understand now, I think, from the above why I have chosen the Karayukisan; and if we look into the matter in more detail, we shall see indeed that studies of the overseas prostitute have been made. For example: there is the invaluable study of Mori Katsumi, White Slavery, which sought to give a broad perspective of the Karayukisan in terms of the history of the island of Amakusa, and of the population problem, to which her migration was closely bound; there is the magnificent work of Miyaoka Kenji, Prostitutes Overseas, which, basing itself on several thousand travelogues, has re-created for us the character of the Japanese prostitutes abroad: who they were, where they came from, and when they flourished. There are, in addition, a number of works which contain sketches and first-hand accounts of the overseas prostitutes and which testify thereby to the perspicuity of their respective editors: works such as Japanese Tales of Cruelty, edited by Miyamoto Tsuneichi; Japanese Biographies, which was put together by a folklore society of Origuchi (Origuchi Minzoku Gakuha); The Japanese Documented, edited by Tsurumi Shunsuke and Murakami lchirô; Women and Tales of Cruelty, by Tanigawa Ken'içhi.
* * *
Naturally, these several studies of the overseas prostitute mentioned above were not simply concerned with reporting historical fact. They were concerned as well with delving into the nature of Japanese nationalist and other forms of thought, through the life of the Karayukisan. It is unlikely that these studies will be fatally affected by the discovery in them of falsehood or error; but even so, I do not think that with them the study of the overseas prostitute is complete.
Now the reason for this is that the studies I have mentioned, with the single exception of "The Life of a Karayukisan," the interviewing work of Morizaki Kazue which is included in The Japanese Documented, have all been written by men. I am not one, of course, who thinks women only are qualified to write women's history: I have no such prejudice. I believe, naturally, that men can participate positively as readers and researchers of women's history; but I am convinced that, where the study of prostitution is concerned, there are a great many points which only a woman is in a position to clear up.
The prostitutes who poured out of Japan into Southeast Asia from the last quarter of the 19th century to the second and third decades of the next (early Meiji through Taisho) were probably 90 percent illiterate and unable even to write hiragana [the Japanese syllabary]. Naturally enough, they could not themselves take up the pen to describe the circumstances and griefs of their lives or to make any appeal with regard to them. But who knows, even if they had been able to put together a sentence, they might have maintained silence and written not a line. It is also true that, as women, they may have felt strongly reluctant to write of the detail of their lives as prostitutes. But the greatest obstacle by far to their divulging such detail was the conviction that it would bring shame upon their families and upon their ancestors.
Such being the case, there is only one way for the researcher to proceed if he is to discover the true character of the overseas prostitute: that is to elicit from those still alive everything that they have to tell of their life and thought. If we choose to proceed in this manner, which researcher would you suppose more suited to the task of opening the tightly shut door of their hearts and of listening to their unadorned stories: a man, who belongs in the camp of those who bought her for their sexual pleasure? or a woman, who belongs to the same sex? Nothing speaks more eloquently in answer to this question than the fact that the studies of overseas prostitution done by men up until now have all been extremely deficient, for they have all concentrated on how the women were abducted, or on what the economic structure of it was, etc.; while virtually nothing was said on what sexual intercourse was like for them, or on their psychological make-up.
* * *
Consequently I left Tokyo with the idea of making a study of the overseas prostitute and proceeded to Kyushu. My task to begin with was to ferret out the old women who had been prostitutes overseas and to listen to their tales. But the fact is, I had no reason to expect that these women would tell of their past life of prostitution to someone who was to them no more than a stranger just off the road, woman though she might be, when they were doing their best to forget the past. All I could therefore think of was this: that my only alternative was to live for a period in a village or house where I knew there to survive a woman who had once been a Karayukisan; to share the same life with her, her sorrows and joys, and thereby, with patience, to soften her tightly closed heart.
* * *
The Story of Osaki
The Life of an Overseas Prostitute
Let's see, I'm not sure when exactly I was born. I know the month and the day well enough: January 29th; but I don't know what year it was. Well, I'm seventy-two this year. My son once—I guess it was when he got married—got our family register from the village hall. According to it, he said, I was born in 1907 or 1908. But that's not right. My mother and father were lazy about going to the village hall and when I was born they didn't report it. It was only when I was about ten and about to leave the country that they finally did. Between what I figure—and I'm right—and what the village has, there is a gap of just a decade. That's why my neighbor, who's my age, gets an old-age pension from the government and I don't—not a scrap.
My father's name was Yamakawa Manzö and our family has always had, a farm in this village. I don't know how much land we used to own. I was four when he got sick and died, and I don't know what he looked like or what kind of a man he was. If my elder brother were alive—Funazô was four years older than I; already eight when my father died—I might learn something from him, but he's long dead and gone. I heard that my father was an awful gambler and lost all our land and that he and my mother had to go to work as day laborers in the fields of a wealthy landowner. As for my mother, her name was Sato and my father got her for his bride from this same village, from the Kawashima family. She wasn't a very nice person. I guess it's wrong to talk that way about my mother, but it's not a lie. I suppose you won't mind my saying so, as that's how it was.
Life was rough enough, even if you had your own land. You can imagine how hard it was on my mother and father, working as day laborers. Anyhow, there were three of us children: Funazö, my elder sister Yoshi, and me. Things were all right as long as my father was alive, but once he got sick and died, that was it. We finally had to sell the family house. And once that was sold, we had no place to live; but fortunately my mother's brother was attached to her and had a small house built near the house we had sold and there let us live. It was a small house, maybe big enough to take four mats. I was four or five at the time and couldn't understand why we had to move to such a small house. "Mommy! Let's move back to the other house!" I kept crying. I must have driven them crazy with that.
After that, my mother worked even harder than before as a day laborer. My brother, who was about nine or ten, went to work for a neighboring family as an attendant for the children, in order to lessen the burden on our family. But it didn't help much. There were times when I had nothing but water to drink in the morning. Noon would come, then the sun would set and night fall—and I still hadn't even had the neck of a sweet potato to eat. It is bad enough for an adult, but for a growing child to go hungry all day is a pitful thing indeed.
Life continued so for a number of years. There was talk of my mother's remarrying. The wife of my father's next-elder brother, Tokumatsu, had died, and as my mother was his younger brother's widow, the match seemed perfect and was arranged.
* * *
The year I was to go abroad was just that year in which I turned ten. It was impossible for us children alone to work rented land. Funazö had finally come of age; without land he would not be treated as a man and he would not be able to take a bride. I thought it sad to see him like that and I determined in my heart that he would get his manhood. I had seen some of the neighboring girls make a lot of money by going abroad, and in my child's mind I thought that if I went, my brother would be able to buy land, build a large house, marry well, and become a man in the best fashion. So that's how I decided to go abroad. -
If you go west from Sakitsu and pass through Oe and then go a little further, you will come to a place called Takahama. There was a man there named Yoshinaka Tarozö, who had left Takahama for the South Pacific and there made a success of himself. This man came to our house one evening. He and my brother sat around the fire and talked far into the night. Finally, the matter was settled: I was to accompany Tarozô to Sandakan, Borneo, for 300 yen.
Funazô pressed his palms together like he was praying and begged me to go. I was doing it for his sake: I said I would go. But when Tarozö asked me, I shrank inside. "If Ohana goes, I go; if she doesn't, neither do I," I said peevishly.
* * *
When Ohana and I arrived at House No. 3, Ofumi and Oyae were working out of it. Although men sometimes came during the day, ordinarily they didn't and the girls were free to lie around and to amuse themselves. But in the evening they'd put on make-up and take chairs out front and make a try at the men going past. In our house, No. 3, there were only two girls working: Ofumi and Oyae; but in House No. 2 next door, and in House No. 5, which was beyond that, there were lots of girls, and when they were sitting out front, the street looked like Prostitute Row. Whenever a man came by, they'd go for him in Japanese if he were a Japanese, in English if English, in Chinese if Chinese, and in the native language if he were a foreigner. Whenever there was a ship in harbor, there were Americans and Frenchmen around, too. The throng of clamoring prostitutes would all of a sudden be gone as, by ones and by twos, they went off with their men. But it wouldn't be long before they had finished with the one and had come downstairs to line up once again and get another. This they repeated all night long.
Those of us not yet initiated into the trade called Ofumi and Oyae oneesan [elder sister] . We watched what they did every night; I wondered to Ohana and Tsugiyo if we ourselves might not have to do that when we grew up. I didn't know what a prostitute was, though I thought I had an idea. No one told me what really happened, and I couldn't ask. I didn't know a thing.
Tarozö was nice enough before we left the village, but on board ship he began to frighten US: he was the very devil himself. By the time we got to Sandakan he was even worse. He never again said anything kind to us. He would curse us and drive us to the sound of his wheezing, for he had asthma, and he couldn't stop reminding us that he had invested good money in us. As old as I am, I can still hear him saying it. Even his wife hated him. But that didn't make her any nicer to us.
It was only the two senior girls who treated the three of us like real sisters. This was especially true of Ofumi, who stuck up for us whenever Tarozö or his wife yelled at us. "You three are from Amakusa, just like me," she said. I finally came to like Ofumi: we're good friends even now. She made it back to Japan too. She's in Oe now, where she was born. The last time I saw her was four years ago. I expect that, with her son Matsuo, she's getting along quite well.
That is how we lived until we went to work ourselves—and we didn't think it so bad that we had come to the South Pacific. Well, we didn't know what the older girls were doing, I suppose; but anyhow we were able to eat white rice morning, noon, and night. That's more than we could have done in Amakusa, where eating white rice was limited to New Year's and to certain festivals. And for an orphan like me to have enough to eat on those days was something in itself. But we ate, night and day. The rice wasn't the same as Japanese rice: it was Siamese. The Japanese who lived in Sandakan called it "Purple Rice." It wasn't sticky: it was loose, and when you cooked it, instead of its being white, it was a little pink. We were still only children, and when we saw the rice we clapped our hands for joy and shouted, "Red rice! Red rice!"
We even had fish to go with the rice. Amakusa is surrounded on all sides by water, and our village is right near the harbor of Sakitsu: yet we never ate fish. My father had died and mother gone off, but at least I didn't have step-parents. On the other hand, Ohana had been adopted into the Shôda family and the whole year long had to swallow what they dished out—and that was her food. I ask you, which do you think she liked best, living like that, or with rice and fish on her tray?
* * *
We were made to take men after a couple of years went by: that was when I was thirteen. It was after lunch one day, a day I shall never forget, that Tarozó told US: "Starting tonight, you'll have men, like Ofumi and the rest of 'em." Tsugiyo, Ohana, and I stood up to him: "We're not taking any men. Say what you like, we're not doing it." Tarozö got red in the face and scared us, for he looked like a demon. "What do you think I brought you here for?" he yelled at us. The three of us huddled together. "You didn't tell us then what we'd be doing. You brought us here and now you tell us we have to take men: you lied to us!" we told him.
But he didn't give an inch. Then, like a cat licking its chops over a captured mouse, he said, "I've put 2,000 yen in on you. You pay back the 2,000 yen and you can skip the men. Well, where's the 2,000 yen? Huh? Let's have it! If you haven't got it, run along like good girls and start tonight with the men." We didn't even have a sen: how could we return 2,000 yen? At last we gave up. Much as we disliked it, we started taking men that night.
* * *
Tarozö made us take native men. One night of it terrified us and left us fear-stricken. We didn't realize that that's what men and women did. It was horrible: we couldn't believe it—that was how the three of us felt.
* * *
I talked with Ohana and Tsugiyo, and together we went to Tarozö's place and told him, "We'd rather die than do what we did last night. We're through!" Tarozö looked at us and said with an ugly look in his eye, "If you don't do that, what else is there?" We braced ourselves and said, "We'll do what we've done up until now. It doesn't matter what anyone says, we're not going to do what we did last night anymore." Tarozô looked over at his wife: "Osaki, this is your fault," he complained.
But that night, Tarozö came over and got us to go back to work after giving us the business of the 2,000 yen again. When it came to the money, we didn't know what was what; we were, for that reason, somehow awed by it and couldn't say more to him to his face. So that was that: back to the men we went.
But it was an awful thing he did, you know. When I left Amakusa, my brother Funazö got 300 yen for me. The same was true of Ohana and Tsugiyo. And I'll bet it was the same for Ofumi and Oyae too. We asked Tarozö about it and he told us gruffly that the money beyond the 300 yen included our fare to Sandakan and the cost of food for three years. Money wasn't worth then what it is now, after the war. Two thousand yen in the Taisho Period was big stuff. We were only thirteen, and that debt of 2,000 yen weighed really heavily on us. We were to use our bodies to pay it back. Our fee was, if the man left straightaway, two yen; if he stayed the night, then ten. We divided that money in half with Tarozö. He was supposed to provide room and board, and the women were supposed to provide their own clothes and cosmetics.
* * *
The Karayukisan and Modern Japan
To put it flatly, the most important reason by far that there should have been prostitutes abroad was, as you will have gathered from Osaki's account, poverty: the backbreaking poverty of the Amakusa peasant. It was that and nothing else. When Osaki was young—and even when she was still with her parents—this was her life:
There were times when I had nothing but water to drink in the morning. Noon would come, then the sun would set fall—and I still hadn't even had the neck of a sweet potato to eat. After her mother remarried and the three children began to live by themselves, life became even harsher. When winter came, the barley bin and potato barrel were as empty as empty could be. Days upon days would pass in which there was not even sweet potato broth, much less barley porridge, to sip. Unlike our old family house, the new, small one had no tatami mats. We gathered dry branches in the mountains and that gave us afire, but when the three of us children had sat down on the wooden floor, holding our empty stomachs, the only thing we could think of was food.
It need hardly be said that for Man, eating is the bare minimum required if he is to live. With Osaki and her brother and sister, clothing and shelter were lacking, of course, and food was too, so cruel a life did they lead. Let me say this another way. They were forever struggling on the verge of starvation, and this situation obtained not only in the case of Osaki and her brother and sister, but in general, as you would guess, wherever a household produced so much as one Karayukisan; and probably, we must also conclude, in households such as produced procurers like Muraoka Iheiji and Tanaka Tarozö.
Now, that being the case, where, we ask, did this poverty, which was common to the households which produced prostitute and procurer, come from? Some explain that it derived from the inferiority of natural conditions on Amakusa and that it had no other basis whatever. And, indeed, there are not a few persuasive points to this line of thought.
Such people reason in this way: Island though it is, it is a large island, an island not necessarily incapable, to judge by its area, of supporting an independent economy. But the interior is by and large made up of mountains and mountain ranges, and this has as a result brought poverty to the island. That is to say, Amakusa, while it lacks mountains of sizeable proportion, is nonetheless mountainous throughout; moreover, as the mountains are steep, there are no large rivers, and flat land is scarce. And even were the mountain sides to be terraced, the amount of arable land thus made available would only be slight in the extreme. What is more, were the soil rich and harvests abundant, that would be one thing; but the soil of Amakusa is incredibly barren, owing to the ash deposits originating from the eruptions of Mount Unzen, which soars above the shore of Shimabara, opposite to the north, and is capable only of. supporting an extremely low level of productivity. So runs the argument.
The argument can also be pushed further. The condition of the land being unfit, why not make use of the sea, which surrounds it on all sides, and establish a livelihood that way? The answer is that, with the exception of Ushibuka, Amakusa has from the beginning never been blessed with a good harbor, and natural though it might seem, has never been able through fishing to surmount the problem. But let us suppose for the moment that there were a good harbor: what then? There would be yet a further difficulty. Owing to currents and other factors, the number of schools running south from the Gotô Islands are few; and consequently the establishment of a fishing industry would be difficult. So runs this further argument.
That the inferiority of natural conditions on Amakusa is one of the chief factors behind the poverty of its people, no one, certainly, can deny. However, this is but one side of the coin. To the other side—the social conditions which surround the people of Amakusa—we must turn our glance: to do otherwise, I think, would be far from satisfactory. No, I will go further. Is it not true that it was the social conditions which Man himself brought about, rather than the natural conditions which existed prior to his settlement there, that constituted by far the most important factor?
I will skip over the ancient period of Amakusa's history, for I know little of it, and it has, besides, no direct bearing on the modern period. To start with what happened in the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), I must state that in Amakusa the tax rate was, in proportion to the yield, extraordinarily high.
According to Modern Statistics of Amakusa (Amakusa Kindai Nenpu), by Matsuda Tadao, and Amakusa, by Yamaguchi Osamu, when Tokugawa Ieyasu became Shogun in 1603, he conferred the two islands of Amakusa upon Terasawa Hirotaka, lord of Karatsu Castle in Hizen, as reward for his exploits at the time of the Battle of Sekigahara. Amakusa once his domain, Terasawa ordered it surveyed. The island was determined to yield 37,000 koku, or bushels, and the sea to yield 5,000, a total of 42,000 koku for the domain: taxes against the farmers he levied accordingly. As you know, taxes in the Tokugawa Period were paid in kind, as in rice or barley; as it was customary for the rate of taxation to be set at from forty to fifty percent of the yield, the farmers of Amakusa were required to contribute approximately 15,000 to 18,500 koku, yearly.
It might well have been possible, had the productivity of the land been high and the arable land available to each household sufficient, for the farmers to pay this tax and still make a go of it. But, as I have already written, the natural conditions on Amakusa were by no means good and there was very little arable land available to each household. This means that, after a tax of forty to fifty percent of the yield had been paid, not even the minimal amount of food to maintain a household, let alone to provide for a crop for the next year, remained. And it was precisely because this was so, that the farmers of Amakusa cast their hopes for happiness, beyond their reach in this world, on that Other Shore: they lent an ear to what the Portuguese missionaries, who happened just at that time to be spreading their faith, and the Christian daimyos were saying, and became Christians; and in 1638, enflamed by their faith, a faith founded upon poverty, gave battle in what are known as the Shimabara and Amakusa Rebellions.
After these rebellions, Amakusa was designated an Imperial domain; the bailiff sent was Suzuki SaburökurO Shigenari. The most important accomplishment of this man was to carry out a new land survey and to appeal to the Shogunate to assess the yield at about half what it had been, or 12,000 koku. His appeal, of course, being without precedent, was ignored. Shigenari then, as a last resort, appealed to the Shogunate once again and committed suicide by disembowelling himself. The bailiff of the Imperial domains was no less than the direct embodiment of the will of the Shogunate; yet nothing speaks more eloquently than his appeal and suicide of the fact that Shigenari, bailiff though he was, recognized that the fundamental cause of the poverty of the Amakusa farmer was the disproportionately high tax: that and nothing more.
Now, it must be stated that, in addition to these taxes, which by themselves were already fully severe, Amakusa had yet another major problem. That problem comes back again to the taxes, to which it was heavily linked; and that was the problem of population growth.
Whether you look to the records of the missionaries of the time or to the documents of the Shogunate itself, it is clear that in the Shimabara and Amakusa Rebellions the Shogunate armies carried out a brutal suppression of the Christians—really a massacre of peasants—which staggers the imagination. The result of it was that the population of Amakusa declined by half: in the villages of the Shimabara Peninsula in particular, it is said, smoke from houses became rare, as did even the'sight of birds and animals in the fields and hills. And so the Shogunate, wanting to Set this situation to rights, began to implement, in the year which followed the suppression of the rebellion, a policy of resettlement in Amakusa. Numbers of people were forcefully allotted to the Imperial and various other domains of Kyushu, something which continued for about fifty years.
By itself, this might not have been so bad. But the population of Amakusa rapidly increased for other reasons as well. There was, from the middle of the Tokugawa Period onwards, a gradual increase of immigrants from other domains; there were, as it had been designated a place of exile, numbers of prisoners sent there from Edo and Kyoto; moreover, the surveillance of the Christians was strict, and it was difficult for anyone to leave the island. According to the statistics, the increase in population in the ten-year period from 1860 to 1870 was particularly marked, showing a violent jump of 1,393 people per year, on the average.
Naturally, had the land been normal enough, an increase in the population would have meant, in effect, an increase in labor power. Productivity would then have risen, and the spread of poverty would not, especially, have been accelerated. However, in Amakusa, unblessed as it was with respect to its natural conditions, the growth in population did not lead directly to a rise in production; on the contrary, it led to even further poverty for the people on the island, for that poverty intensified greatly. To elaborate the point: the soil of Amakusa, debilitated by volcanic ash among other things, did not produce a yield consonant with the amount of the increase in labor power; the additional population had to depend, still, on a yield unchanged from what it had been before. The result was to push every farmer of Amakusa still deeper into poverty.
At the time of the great social reforms known as the Meiji Restoration, the farmers of Amakusa might have expected their life to improve, but, that expectation was doomed to frustration. The reason is that the Meiji government, "new" though it was called, and irrespective of the fact that it had toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, merely changed what had been a tax in kind to a tax in money and made no attempt whatever to lower the tax rate in any significant way.
Naturally, the farmers of Amakusa still had to eke out an existence that was virtually unchanged from the days when Tokugawa feudalism held sway. However, it would be untrue to say that nothing at all changed with the advent of the Meiji Period. One thing though it was, it was something which represented a significant change from what had been in the Tokugawa Period. That was, that the prohibition against Christianity was abolished and the surveillance against it curtailed; movement to and from the island resumed, now unrestricted.
Compared with what it had been like in the Tokugawa Period, when the peasants had been tied forcibly to a soil of low productivity, the right to come to and to leave the island at will was certainly a gain in freedom and must be accounted a step forward for the peasant. However, when you give the peasant only the right of free entry to and exit from the island and do not change in the least the foundation of the social structure which exploits him, and subject him to the same poverty as before, what follows is not difficult to imagine: he is obliged to seek, a solution to his poverty, on an individual basis, through migration; and, in fact, the peasants of Amakusa all without exception sought solution to this poverty of their families and relations through just that.
Of the peasantry of Amakusa, the men scattered throughout the island of Kyushu, though principally to Nagasaki, to sell their labor. Now what did the women sell? There were those who were domestic workers—nursemaids and maids—but such labor required nothing special in the way of technical skill or training and consequently the women could only get extremely low wages for it. Of the many Amakusa women who went in for work such as this, there were some who did it simply to make that much less the number of mouths at home to feed, and there were not a few others, whose families were desperately poor, who were driven to it out of the necessity for bringing in more and more money. Now if we assume that these women too were without special technical skill and education, then what should they sell but their own bodies?
It so happened that the Meiji Period in Japan was a time when migratory workers,, some no doubt in reaction to the very long period of isolation which had just been done away with, were pushing farther afield overseas, in ever greater number; and, indeed, it was far easier overseas than in Japan to find that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And there was also this factor: on Amakusa, which is surrounded by the sea and relatively near the Chinese mainland and Southeast Asia, there was not that sense of isolation such as the people of Honshu might have been aware of when the possibility of going abroad came up. And so the women of Amakusa who had made up their minds to sell themselves put their native land behind them and went off to the Chinese mainland, to Siberia, and to Southeast Asia. That is to say, it was here that the group of women known as the Karayukisan—the overseas prostitutes whose origin was Amakusa—was born.
This birth of the Karayukisan came about less because of the natural conditions of the island than of the social conditions of the Tokugawa and modern periods. That being so, the existence of the Karayukisan cannot be attributed to factors wholly dependent on Amakusa; it must be related to women's problems elsewhere, problems which derived from peasant life in many other regions of Japan. Or rather, to be more precise, it might better be said that it was related to the problem of women in modern Japan as a whole: to the problem of existence itself in modern Japanese society.
If I were to give a couple of examples, one would be the factory girls of the silk and cotton textile industries who originated principally from the Töhoku region, or northern Japan. Another would be the so-called Echigo geisha. It need hardly be reiterated that in northern Japan and in the snow country opposite the Sea of Japan (the Hokuriku), the land is buried under snow for a good half the year; as a consequence, natural conditions are extremely inferior for agricultural production. Yet, be this as it may, what really pushed these women into such conditions was, I'm afraid, social in origin.
That is to, say, in northern Japan low productivity and high taxes combined to cause throughout the Tokugawa Period the spread of such vile practices as infanticide and child abandonment: even now vestiges of these practices remain in certain place names, like Warasugawara (Child River). During the Meiji period, the police kept a watchful eye on these practices; but at the same time, the silk and cotton textile industries began to flourish, bringing with it the need for factory girls. This meant that the Töhoku peasant girls who might otherwise have been fated for infanticide in the Tokugawa period, were sent off to the cities as soon as they had finished grammar school and put to work in the factories. Recruiters for these girls—procurers, that is—would recite them the advantages of being in the factories: that there they could go to school, learn the tea ceremony and flower-arranging, etc.
But it does not need to be pointed out how far a cry from the truth this was. Labor there was summed Up: "The factories are hell, girl; the boss a devil and the spinning wheels wheels of fire"; and life in this way: "Worse than a bird's in a cage, a life in the dormitories is even more bitter than a life in prison."
Now in the Hokuriku region, the poverty of the peasant was given additional spur—in addition, that is, to what poor natural conditions (to wit, heavy snowfall) gave—by two things: the thoroughness by which the large landowners held the land; and the deep-rootedness of the religion Jödo Shinshü, which had persisted there since its propagation by its founder, Shinran. In other words, the land was monopolized by a small number of landlords through their landholding system, and this pushed the overwhelming majority of farmers ineluctably into poverty or tenant farming; and the religion, Jo-do Shinshü, which was widespread among these farmers, proscribed because of its emphasis on human life the evil of infanticide and thereby led inevitably to overpopulation. And so the peasants of the Hokuriku came to grips with this overpopulation: the men by leaving home to become quacks in Toyama, and apprentices to brewers and attendants in bathhouses in Echigo; and the women who did not go into the textile factories, by becoming (it is said many of them were beauties with snow-white skin) Echigo geisha.
If it be true that the emergence in modern Japan of this social substratum of women—the Karayukisan of Amakusa, the many girls in the silk and cotton textile factories, the Echigo geisha, etc.—was based rather upon social factors than upon the inferiority of natural conditions in the land where they were born, then it makes sense that the government could have nipped the problem in the bud, had it taken effective steps to do so. The basic function of society, of the state, you see, has to do with its own nature. It is the essence of Man that he is incapable both spiritually and economically of living by himself, and it is the object of society, one would think, to make his life secure. That being the case, it ought, given the suffering of people through social reasons, to succour them, to root out the problem and have done with it.
But neither the Tokugawa Shogunate nor the Meiji government which toppled and superseded it made any attempt to succour this substratum of Japanese women or to deal in a fundamental way with the poverty of the peasantry which produced it. No, it was yet worse: the government of modern Japan, bent upon strengthening itself through, as it planned, the invasion of other Asian states, used these women, pure and simple.
The Tokugawa Shogunate, through its policy of domestic seclusion, had kept the country at peace for close onto 250 58 years; but the new government, which was determined to resist the political, economic, and military pressures put on it by the Western powers, whose industrial revolutions had ended and capitalist systems been established, had, I say, as its supreme goal the task of catching up with the advanced capitalism of the West. Although perennially a member of the Opposition, Fukuzawa Yukichi was nonetheless one of the ideologues of the Meiji government, and it was his belief, as he expressed it in Getting Away From Asia in 1885, that Japan had better align itself with the advanced capitalist nations and get away from identifying itself with Asia. To this end, he wrote: "in dealing with China and Korea, we ought to conduct ourselves only as would the Westerner." Now here we have, I think it can be stated without objection, the fundamental thinking of Meiji Japan, put bluntly. That is, Fukuzawa was saying (he put it euphemistically as "conduct ourselves [with respect to Asia] as would the Westerner," but he meant, to put it directly, the heavy-handed, remorseless, colonial rule practiced by the Western powers in Asia and in Africa) that Japan ought to adopt the same aggressive posture with regard to the rest of Asia.
But by the middle of the Meiji period, Japan, despite its effort to realize the slogan "Enrich the Nation; Strengthen the Army," had still an insufficient accumulation of basic capital, and as a result was weak economically and unlistened-to internationally. It was natural, therefore, that Japan should be unable, while thus crossing swords, as it were, with the Western powers, to advance a colonial rule in any of the Asian countries; but that does not mean that she had given any such ambition up. Although apparently at the end of her rope, she had, as a matter of fact, a design: it was, the exhaustive exploitation of the very substratum of women we have been talking about.
Muraoka Iheiji, the procurer whose name was brought up in the introductory chapter, remarks in his autobiography the following with respect to the abductors and prostitutes under his control:
The women write letters home and send money every month. Their parents are reassured and gain a certain repute in the neighborhood. Then the village headman hears of it and imposes an income tax. It is hard to tell just how much good the country gets out of this. Not only does the master prosper: the families of the girls do too. And that's not all. Put a whorehouse anywhere in the wilds of the South Pacific, and pretty soon you've got a general store there to go with it. Then clerks come from Japan. They grow independent, and go into business for themselves. A company will open up a branch office. Even the master of the whorehouse will open up a business because he gets tired of being known as a pimp. Inside of a year or so, land developers are on the increase. Meanwhile, Japanese ships begin to call. Before long, the place is thriving.
By these words, the procurer Iheiji crudely sought to rationalize his immoral work; and without intending it, he demonstrated how Japanese colonial policy, whose inner workings Fukuzawa Yukichi illuminated, worked concretely. In other words, Japan, at a stage when it was too weak to advance politically and militarily into China or the islands of Southeast Asia, advanced first economically—and without the need of capital: it adopted the scheme of sending out prostitutes in large numbers, with the idea of bringing to fruition the slogan "Enrich the Nation; Strengthen the Army" through use of the foreign currency thus channeled in. And it did just that. According to A History of Japanese Expansion Overseas, by Inc Toraji, the Japanese overseas in Siberia, mainly Vladivostok, sent back to Japan in 1900 the sum of approximately one million yen; of this, 630,000 yen came from the prostitutes. And the Fukuoka Daily News of September 9, 1926, has, in an article on the Karayukisan entitled "A Land of Women," the following:
These women . . . who journeyed overseas from the four villages under the jurisdiction of the Kohama Government Seat /Shimabara] sent more than 12,000 yen home last year. The total for the 30 villages and towns which comprise the Shim abara Peninsula easily broke the 300,000-yen mark in the last year alone.
How much this much foreign currency contributed to Japan's effort to "enrich the nation and strengthen the army" during the Meiji and Taisho periods, when the value of money was high, one can well imagine.
Now if things indeed happened in this way, one is bound to conclude that the Karayukisan was, whatever else you may say, necessary to Japan until she became able to stand up in some measure politically, economically, and militarily to the Western powers. That is why Japan made no move whatever to right the matter, notwithstanding the repeated demand from Christians of conscience and from advocates of women's liberation (liberation in the widest sense of the term) on the one hand, and from consuls stationed in every part of Southeast Asia on the other, to rehabilitate the prostitutes and to control the procurers. Naturally, not a thought was given to the possibility of rehabilitating the prostitutes; and no effort was made to control the procurers, who roamed at will, still less to find a means of recovering the peasant from his destitution, the womb from which the Karayukisan was born. And what is more, Japan only issued a prohibition against prostitution overseas after capitalism in Japan had come into its own with the end of the Meiji period and Japan had made hay out of the First World War and become strong enough, politically, economically, and militarily, to be able to compete, if barely, with the Western powers.
The worst of it is that the prohibition, as far as I am concerned, was so slipshod, so harsh, that it makes you wonder how in the world the government ever came up with it. Let me explain. To begin with, Japan had, by the early Taisho period, just about reached the point where it was ready to act against prostitution overseas, this owing to the reports and pleas from its consulates in Southeast Asia. But in 1915, in protest against the Twenty-One Demands which Japan had presented to China, the Chinese merchants of Southeast Asia began a boycott of Japanese goods and this caused the proclamation against prostitution to be put off. The boycott was incredibly effective. Japanese merchants in Southeast Asia were forced out of business right and left, and Japan's strategy of raising foreign currency verged on disaster. And so at this time Japan, acting in silence, encouraged the work of the Karayukisan and by the money she earned, narrowly escaped the danger. But this would have meant that in proportion as the Chinese regarded the prostitutes as just another Japanese good, the women had, if they were to increase the number of customers beyond the ordinary, to exert themselves far more than they otherwise would have.
Presently the storm—the boycott—passed away and Japan's position in Southeast Asia, thanks to her having been a party to the victory in World War I, stabilized: at long last she took the step and proclaimed the abolition of prostitution. But in forcing the Karayukisan out of her trade, Japan did nothing in the way of planning for her rehabilitation. What she, Japan, did do was to put the women forcibly on ships and to dump them off in the vicinity of Nagasaki; and that was all. With regard to how the women would manage afterwards or to how their families would get along in their home villages, Japan made no helpful moves whatever. And that is why the women who were desperate for large sums of money to send home, drifted into primitive areas where they were beyond the reach of the police and other watchdog groups; and still others, among the older prostitutes who were unable to shift their line of work, committed suicide: such was the only "present" Japan gave the Karayukisan: such was the reality of the decree against overseas prostitution.
By now it should be clear, I would think, to whoever cares to look, that the Karayukisan was the pathetic victim of the aggressive policy which Japan adopted in Asia. What we as women's liberationists run into in our search for the women—Japanese womanhood itself—who eked out in misery a living in the lowest substratum of society—what we run into when we are intent and probe deeply is (and this is true the deeper we probe) the government of modern Japan itself, which never deigned to give the people or women one jot of consideration; and it is this with which we must come to grips, and we must do so squarely.
Well, it is now a half-century since Japan issued, midway through the Taisho period, its formal proscription of prostitution overseas; and a quarter-century since our defeat in World War II. The word Karayukisan is practically dead, and the women who were once prostitutes on the Chinese mainland and in Southeast Asia are all seventy and eighty years old: one by one the lights of their lives are fading and going out. But even when the last of these women, now faintly breathing in the mountain fastnesses and sea coasts of Amakusa and Shimabara, is dead and gone, the Karayukisan will by no means be gone from Japan for good.
We know. We know that during World War II the Japanese army took with it upon its expeditions into China and Southeast Asia, Japanese and Korean women known as "R & R Girls" (ianfu). And we know that after Japan was defeated in World War II and the allied troops—Americans mainly—had come to occupy her, "Pan-Pan Girls" sprang up like bamboo shoots after a rain, to sell them their favors. And we know something else. We know of a reality: the reality that although Japan signed a peace treaty and became independent, American army bases are still entrenched there and in Okinawa, and that clustered about these bases in full force are "Special Women," who sell themselves.
However true it is that the "R & R Girls" of the Japanese army took men who were not foreigners but their fellow countrymen, it is nevertheless true that, inasmuch as they were compelled by events to go overseas and sell themselves, they were in no respect any different from the Karayukisan of the past. The so-called "Pan-Pan Girls" and the Special Women of today did and do not, it is true again, go far overseas as did the- Karayukisan; but inasmuch as they took and take Americans, white and black, they took and take foreigners, and in this respect they are in fact today's Karayukisan.
Among present-day Karayukisan such as these, there is probably not one who imagined such a life to be ideal and who freely entered it as a consequence. If we take a look at them one by one, we shall find a variety of reasons behind their circumstances: some fell to pieces, having been betrayed by a lover; some were raped by strangers and lost all hope; and so forth. But those who entered a life of prostitution for purely personal reasons are few: the majority had to, and for social reasons. And that poverty lurked at the root of these social causes can be ascertained quite clearly from a reading of any of the several volumes of memoirs prostitutes have had published thus far: from Okôchi Masako's Yoshiwara, for example, or from the two volumes of Gotô Tsutomu, Chastity in Japan.
Now, if we ask ourselves wherein lies the cause of the poverty which compelled these women to take such steps as they did, the answer is that it lies not in the laziness of the women or their families, but in the policies of the modern-day government, which favored a few monopoly capitalists and disfavored the workers and farmers. If that is the case, it means that to solve the problem of the present-day Kara-yukisan in any fundamental way we must eliminate from the lives of the Japanese people such poverty as makes women become prostitutes; and we must change the government, which has willfully neglected that poverty. No, that is not enough by itself. We must take yet a further step if I am not mistaken. We must reform the political and social structures, which make such poverty among the people inevitable, and we must build a society which will truly fulfill the will of the people.
And if we do this, if we succeed in conquering poverty once and for all, we will hot only see the end of the modern-day Karayukisan—the women scattered throughout Japan and especially in Okinawa who sell erotic favors in the vicinity of American military bases—but we will see, too, the liberation of women as a whole and of the whole Japanese people.
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About Yamazaki Tomoko
Born 1932.
Publications: The Graves of the Overseas Prostitutes (a sequel to the work from which this translation is excerpted); co-author, The Japanese Kindergarten: A History of Child Education.
Yamazaki has been writing on the theme of Asian women for several years, and is now working on a book on maids and other women servants in Japan. Her books about the Karayukisan have been widely read in Japan, and a movie was made about overseas prostitution last year which recently premiered in San Francisco. Her books have, moreover, reached beyond the usual educated audience to considerable numbers of exploited women themselves. Bar hostesses, for example, have formed study groups to read and collectively discuss the meaning of the Karayukisan for contemporary Japanese women.
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