Sandakan Brothel No.8: Journey into the History of Lower-class Japanese Women

By Tomoko Yamazaki and Yamazaki Tomoko

Book Overview

This is a study of "karayuki-san", impoverished Japanese women sent abroad to work as prostitutes from the 1860s to the 1920s. It follows the life of one prostitute, Osaki, who is persuaded as a child of ten to accept cleaning work in Borneo and then forced to work as a prostitute in a brothel.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765603543
• ISBN13: 9780765603548
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Karayuki-san~ the forgotten women of the floating world

As someone who has been fascinated by ancient & modern Japan's idiosyncrasies, the floating world has a particular draw for me. Sadly, very little is available that can give us any kind of factual, first hand narrative of what its like to work within it~ certainly Leslie Downer & Liza Dalby have made leaps and bounds in terms of opening up their existence to the outside world, and they have done their best to do so with accuracy and unbiased, despite having not been born into the culture itself. Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha did much to set back their progress, creating a glossy love story loosely based on the life of Mineko iwasaki~ who was indeed a well-known Kyoto Geiko, and agreed to be interviewed by him and discuss what had, until then, been a life shrouded in mystery. Golden then promptly turned around and penned a pulp fiction piece to please the masses, and in doing so, gave thanks, by name, to his source, which he had expressly promised Mineko he would not do. Mineko sued him, after facing much malaise from the geiko community, and eventually decided to write her own memoirs and do what she had thought Golden might do: tell the truth and help renew interest in a fading tradition. Shorty after her novel emerged, (Geish of Gion), another called "Autobiography of a Geisha" by a former hot springs geisha, Sayo Masudo, came out that told of the darker side of this world~ one where the trade does indeed ply sex. Aside from those 2, we have no actual personal accounts~ and we have literally none of their predecessors, Tuyuu & Oiran & the rest. Having spent well over 15 years scouring for films, movies, newspaper clippings and books on any of them, i was thrilled when I came across Sandakan. Having been written in the 1970's, i couldn't believe I'd never heard of it; especially after all the Memoirs movie hype. Karayuki-san, for the record, are not geisha. They were young women and children who were impoverished and either bought from their families or kidnapped, and taken from their homeland to other countries where they were put to work not as the maids their "buyers" had ;told their families they'd be, but as prostitutes. Karayuki-san had no formal training in the arts, or anything else for that matter; most were too poor to have ever attended school, and once hired, rarely were fortunate enough to learn anything a wife would need know (cooking, cleaning, sewing)~ making them, even in retirement, not only unmarriageable and incapable, but branded. Yamazaki Tomoko was a young Japanese wife and mother who had taken an interest in writing about these women from an anthropological point of view during the 1960's. After some difficulty, she finally located a woman in Amakusa, an impoverished farm town notorious for it's high turn out of Karayuki-san. It took some doing, but eventually she earns the trust of Osaki, the former karayuki san, who was now in the later years of her life, and living in such deplorable conditions

Memorable, thoroughly researched, saddened!

The remarkable, memorable and poignant story is about Brothel Number 8 in Sandakan, a port town 1200 miles from Hong Kong in the South Seas, where young Japanese women were trafficked into prostitution, hence, the lowest class of women. In 1968, author Tomoko Yamazaki, began her journey into Amakusa to learn about the karayuki-san and encountered Osaki, born in 1909, and by age 10 was sold to the brothel. Too young at first, she worked as a house-maid, then by 12, selling her body. For 3 weeks, Tomoko lived with Osaki in a rustic, poverty stricken home, with dirt floors, no outhouse, and barely any food. She had to sleep on the same mat that was used for servicing many many men. Tomoko's mission to document the story of life in the brothel is not known to Osaki at first, and furthermore, particularly in the village, karayuki-san is not discussed publicly. The veil of secrecy remains throughout while Osaki tells the curious villagers that the new woman seen is her daughter-in-law. With extreme caution to hear and document the story, and with utmost privacy about the subject, we learn about Ofuni, who was a manager of a brothel, whose kindness to the girls was never forgotten. The suspense occurred when speaking with Ofuni's family, and how, with no other choice and with extreme urgency, author Tomoko broke down to steal the photographs from the album. This is well-documented, thoroughly researched story to the end, and with impressive notes, references, historical and geographical information, and photos. Also included is a complete index. The translation is excellent, it conveys many moods depicted. Sandakan Brothel No. 8 is the first of a trilogy by the author and includes two other books, The Graves of Sandakan and The Story of Yamada Waka. She has authored numerous books. The book was the basis for the foreign film that was nominated for an Oscar in 1975, Sandakan No. 8; it may also be titled Brothel Eight and possibly difficult to find. But it lost to tough competition, a remarkable Kurosawa gem, Dersu Uzala, which I recommend. A companion to the book is the film, most likely still in VHS, and may be difficult to locate in VHS or DVD. Although I believe the books are always better than the film versions, this color movie version was very good. The focus was more on flashback versus the emotional feeling the author experienced visiting Osaki. Rizzo

The water trade

This book is the heartrending story of a Japanese child prostitute. She was sold by her family at the age of 8 to a sex slave trafficker, shipped to North Borneo (port of Sandakan) and forced to work in the sex business at the age of 12, even before she had her first menstruation. The roots of the trafficking system were religious, economic and political. On the religious front, the Confucian system of patriarchy determined the social duties of women. They were told to obey first their fathers, than their husbands and ultimately their sons. The social superiority of the male permitted the exploitation of women financially, physically, sexually and emotionally. Economically, high taxation rates for the farmers (60 % of the yield went to the landlord) provoked poverty and famine: 'There were days when I would have nothing to swallow but water from morning 'til night.' Starving peasants felt compelled to sell their daughtes in order to save the rest of the family. The main character in this book, Osaki, agreed (?) at the age of 8 to be sold in order to permit her brother to buy farmland. This poverty was aggravated by the settlement policies of the government provoking a burgeoning population in the region. More, the Japanese government did nothing against the traffickers. On the contrary, it needed the foreign currency sent back by the sex slaves in order to become, as it said, a strong nation. The selling of children in Japan has only been abolished in 1959. After the exploitation by the government and the landlords, the children were milked by the traffickers, who took 50 % of their earnings and compelled them to redeem with the rest their original inflated 'investment'. Having heavily supported the Japanese nation with their bodies, the sex workers were looked upon as 'Boule de Suif's' by the rest of the population when they could come back home. They tried to avoid to be recognized in order to escape their social 'stigma'. Osaki survived prychologically nearly unscathed and without guilt her harsh experience. This book is a profound human document about the struggle for survival. It is excellently introduced by Karen Colligan-Taylor. Highly recommended, not only for Japanese scholards. I also recommend the autobiography of the geisha Sayo Masuda, as well as the work of Robert Van Gulik 'Sexual Life in Ancient China'.

What is a Life?

Sometimes when reading or thinking or, simply, being direct witness to the casual cruelty that God is so evidently fond of, we feel a small bubble become loosened in the vicinity of our inner soul and, rising and expanding, it reaches surface and our faces spontaneously contract and our eyes fill with tears and we must sit quietly for a moment and, in my case, wish that we could smash that God squarely in it's hellish face. But it passes and we are again back in the normal universe where we understand that things just are. The reader of this book has more than one opportunity for such experience. The slightly elitest tone of the author does not detract, but offers some hope, that we may grow up. The translation, as well as I can judge having lived only four years in Hiroshima, is superb.

What is a Life?

Sometimes when reading or thinking or, simply, being direct witness to the casual cruelty that God is so evidently fond of, we feel a small bubble become loosened in the vicinity of our inner soul and, rising and expanding, it reaches surface and our faces spontaneously contract and our eyes fill with tears and we must sit quietly for a moment and, in my case, wish that we could smash that God squarely in it's hellish face. But it passes and we are again back in the normal universe where we understand that things just are. The reader of this book has more than one opportunity for such experience. The slightly elitest tone of the author does not detract but, somehow, offers some hope that we may grow up. The translation, as well as I can judge having lived only four years in Hiroshima, is superb.