Karayuki-san (1975)
Credited cast: IMAMURA Shôhei
Directed: IMAMURA Shôhei
Genre: Documentary
Runtime: 71 min
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Subtitles: French, original hardcoded subs
Release Date: 1975 (Japan)
Karayuki-San, The Making of a Prostitute (1975) is a documentary of Kikuyo, a Japanese “comfort woman” who was tricked into going into Malaysia in the early part of the century to be in service in Japan, only to end up working at a Japanese brothel there. Japan has entirely forgotten her. Now in her 70s, She has carved out a living for herself in Malaysia and lives with her stepson, her husband having died. Though she speaks cogently and stoically, her friends tell Imamura that she is far less happy than she seems and is mistreated by the family. Her fortitude and calm are tremendously impressive; the injustice and inhumanity of what has been done to her is suffocating.
"Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute" is a 1975 Japanese film by director IMAMURA Shôhei. It is a documentary on one of the Japanese "karayuki-san," who were women from poor rural areas Japan trafficked into the booming prostitution trade in South East Asia in pre WW2 Japan.
Imamura focuses on a particular such woman who was sold into the booming prostitution in colonial Malaysia before the war, and never returned to Japan, due to the discriminations she had endured at home as part of the burakumin cast.
Imamura then follows her in her first trip home after all these years, organized with help of the league to end burakumin discrimination.
Joan Mellen, in The Waves at Genji's Door, called this film, "Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura's fine documentaries.
"Karayuki-san" (唐行きさん "Gone-to-China" ) was a word initially designating male migrant manual workers and later came to designate Japanese women who traveled to East and Southeast Asia, in the second half of the 19th century, in the late Meiji and Taishô periods, to work as prostitutes.
Many of these women were said to have originated from the Amakusa Islands of Kumamoto Prefecture, which had a large and long-stigmatized Japanese Christian community, from the Shimabara peninsula in Kyûshû and also Southern Honshû.
Many of these women who ended up sold into prostitution were either tricked into this or told that they were doing this to support their families because of the extreme poverty that was endemic in these areas at the time.
Indeed, many of the women who went overseas to work as karayuki-san were the daughters of poor farming or fishing families. The mediators who arranged for the women to go overseas would search for those of appropriate age in poor farming communities and pay their parents, telling them they were going overseas on public duty, or for "decent work". The mediators would then make money by passing the girls onto people in the prostitution industry. With the money the mediators received, some would go on to set up their own overseas brothels.
The end of the Meiji period was the golden age for karayuki-san, and the trade lasted until the ban on the foreign prostitution trade in the late Taishô period. However, with the internationalization of Japan things began to change, and soon enough karayuki-san were considered shameful. During the 1910s and 1920s, Japanese officials overseas worked hard to eliminate Japanese brothels and maintain Japanese prestige.Many of the Japanese prostitutes returned to Japan, but some remained.
The main destinations of karayuki-san included China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Borneo, Thailand, and Indonesia. They were often sent to Western colonies in Asia where there was a strong demand from migrant workers, Western military personnel and Chinese men.
There were cases of Japanese women being sent to places as far as Siberia, Manchuria, Hawaii, North America (California), and Africa (Zanzibar).
A similar trade existed in China, where Chinese women from poor rural areas also ended up in similar brothels next to the Japanese ones, and these women were called the "Ah Ku" in Cantonese.
After the Pacific War, the topic of karayuki-san was a little known fact of Japan's pre-war underbelly. But in 1972 Tomoko Yamazaki published Sandakan Brothel No. 8 which raised awareness of karayuki-san and encouraged further research and reporting.
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