Japanese peasant women migrated to Singapore to circumvent poverty. This flow of transient women, found on the fringes of the narrative of national development, wealth and industry, was the other side of Japanese modernity. To representatives of the Japanese state, the transient poor seeking work in Singapore were the incorrigibility of ‘backward’ Japanese customs embodied in the ‘base’ (seimin) peasant woman. To compound matters, the largest Japanese presence in Singapore until 1920 was women engaged in sex work. According to empirical research carried out by Shimizu Hajime, between 1907 and 1915 women made up over half of the Japanese population in the Straits Settlements and accounted for 79 per cent of the total number of Japanese residing in the area in 1908. The largest number of Japanese women working as licensed prostitutes was recorded in 1917, when the Japanese consul counted 1,912 women, around 62 per cent of the total Japanese population, working in the brothels of Singapore and Malaya.

This chapter focuses on Singapore to address the wider question of how gender hierarchies and political economy entwine and develop. The regulation of Japanese prostitution in Singapore reveals a plane of differentiation by which the Japanese government marked the vagabond, the pauper, the destitute and the prostitute as lacking dignity and unworthy of social and political recognition. Japanese authorities viewed the work that Japanese prostitutes performed as lacking quality (‘unsightly’), performed by persons without worth: the women's labour counted for nothing because their occupation was not recognized as having social value. Sex work failed to comply with the unconditional requirement of all Japanese imperial subjects to realize their role as producers of state wealth, vitality and advantage.

The challenges faced by successive Japanese consuls in trying to shape and regulate the Japanese community in the Straits Settlements reveal the contradiction inherent in the processes of globalization; namely, the frantic negotiation between the need to promote and facilitate the flow of money and labour and, at the same time, to control and limit the movement of workers in order to exploit their labour to the hilt. It was a negotiation requiring bipolar dexterity. The ‘freedom’ of Japanese subjects in the global world market was dependent on the executive and administrative functions of the Japanese state.