Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Japanese Names
- Introduction: In the Beginning was the Prostitute
- 1 Another Japan: Sex and Women's Work
- 2 Creating the Archive: The Power of the Pen
- 3 Sexuality and Class: Prostitution and the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union
- 4 Sex as Progress: Fukuzawa Yukichi on Trade and Overseas Prostitution
- 5 Disciplining Globalizing: The Colonial Singapore Example
- Conclusion: Globalization and the Poor
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Another Japan: Sex and Women's Work
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Japanese Names
- Introduction: In the Beginning was the Prostitute
- 1 Another Japan: Sex and Women's Work
- 2 Creating the Archive: The Power of the Pen
- 3 Sexuality and Class: Prostitution and the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union
- 4 Sex as Progress: Fukuzawa Yukichi on Trade and Overseas Prostitution
- 5 Disciplining Globalizing: The Colonial Singapore Example
- Conclusion: Globalization and the Poor
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Karayuki san
(literally ‘one who goes to China’, i.e., abroad). Japanese women who went to work as prostitutes in such places as Siberia, Manchuria, China, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, India, and even America and Africa after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. While karayuki-san came from all parts of Japan, the majority were natives of western Kyushu, particularly the impoverished Amakusa area, where the term originated. Their exact number is unknown, but it may have been as many as 100,000. Girls in early adolescence were either sold by their parents or unwittingly signed themselves over to procurers (zegen), who then sold them to overseas brothels, where they worked as maids until they could become prostitutes in their mid-teens. Conditions were such that most women died before the age of 30. Nevertheless, many of them retained feelings of filial piety and loyalty to Japan, sending money home to support their former households and donating money to Japan in times of war.
Kodansha Encyclopedia of JapanIn the summer of 1968, Yamazaki Tomoko drew upon her family's meagre savings to travel to the Amakusa Islands in western Kyushu. Her travel was crucial to her exposé about the island women ‘who had been sent far away’ and ‘forced to sell their bodies in distant lands’. Yamazaki hoped that during her three-week stay on the Amakusa Islands she would encounter such women, ‘crawling through the dirt’, living in miserable poverty, and would hear their life-stories, which would reveal the true experience of lower-class Japanese women during Japan's transition from an agrarian society to the major industrial and military power in Asia.
Providence smiled on Yamazaki. Early in the first week of her stay in Amakusa, she had a chance encounter with a local elderly woman, Osaki, who had left the islands at the age of ten to work in Sandakan, North Borneo, and later worked as a prostitute in one of the Japanese brothels.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sex in Japan's Globalization, 1870–1930Prostitutes, Emigration and Nation-Building, pp. 15 - 36Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014