Sex in Japan's Globalization focuses on a fundamental problem of Japan's first experience of globalization: namely, the contradiction between the validity of the existence of the Japanese poor who engaged in sex work overseas as one response to the rapid social and economic changes occurring in Japan, and the prevailing understanding of the same women as unworthy and degrading to the name of the country. In a very modest way, the preceding chapters have attempted to work around a regime of history in which the lives of these women were described in terms of prostitutes, stowaways or both.

The Response of the Poor

The rural poor women who went abroad to find work at the start of the 1870s were endowed with the capacity to act and actualize their aspirations. At the micro-level of the women's immediate communities, the poor who left the country to find work, get money and, if really lucky, strike it rich, were not stigmatized as morally flawed individuals or as a group found on the margins of local society. Rather, the movement of young Japanese women into sex work occupations abroad was one of many reactions by the rural poor to the radical social restructuring unfolding in Japan from the 1870s onward. The movement of young Japanese women was only possible because of the increase in mobility offered by Japan's incorporation into a colonial money economy that transcended national boundaries and borders.