Karayuki-san
[citation needed] Near the end of the Meiji period there were a great number of karayuki-san, and the girls that went on these overseas voyages were known fondly as joshigun (娘子軍), or "female army.
"[4] However the reality was that many courtesans led sad and lonely lives in exile and often died young from sexual diseases, neglect and despair.
With the greater international influence of Japan as it became a Great Power, things began to change, and soon karayuki-san were considered shameful.
[citation needed] The main destinations of karayuki-san included China (particularly Shanghai), Korea, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia (especially Borneo and Sumatra),[7] Thailand, and the western USA (in particular San Francisco).
[8] There were cases of Japanese women being sent to places as far as Siberia, Manchuria, Hawaii, North America (California), and Africa (Zanzibar).
[14] The Sino-French War led to French soldiers creating a market for karayuki-san and eventually prostitutes made up the bulk of Indochina's Japanese population by 1908.
[15] In the late 19th century Japanese girls and women were sold into prostitution and trafficked from Nagasaki and Kumamoto to cities like Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore and then sent to other places in the Pacific, Southeast Asia and Western Australia, they were called Karayuki-san.
[27] The immigrants coming to northern Australia were Melanesian, South-East Asian, and Chinese who were almost all men, along with the Japanese, who were the only anomaly in that they included women.
In Northern Australia in the sugarcane, pearling and mining industries, the Japanese prostitutes serviced Kanakas, Malays, and Chinese.
[31] Japanese prostitutes were embraced by the officials in Queensland since they were assumed to help stop white women having sex with nonwhite men.
The Queensland Police Comiissionee said that they were "a service essential to the economic growth of the north", "made life more palatable for European and Asian men who worked in pearling, mining and pastoral industries" and it was written that "the supply of Japanese women for the Kanaka demand is less revolting and degrading than would be the case were it met by white women".
[36] Around areas like ports, mines, and the pastoral industry, numerous European and Chinese men patronized Japanese prostitutes such as Matsuwe Otana.
In the late 19th century, Japan's impoverished farming islands provided the girls who became karayuki-san and were shipped to the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
The volcanic and mountainous terrain of Kyushu was bad for agriculture so parents sold their daughters, some of them as young as seven years old to "flesh traders" (zegen) in the prefectures of Nagasaki and Kumamoto.
[39] The voyages the traffickers transported these women on had terrible conditions with some girls suffocating as they were hidden on parts of the ship or almost starved to death.
The girls who lived were then taught how to perform as prostitutes in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore where they then were sent off to other places including Australia.
A Japanese reporter in 1910 described the scene for the people of Kyūshū in a local newspaper, the Fukuoka Nichinichi: Around nine o'clock, I went to see the infamous Malay Street.
Many of these women are said to have originated from the Amakusa Islands of Kumamoto Prefecture, which had a large and long-stigmatised Japanese Christian community[dubious – discuss].
Referred to as Karayuki-san (Hiragana: からゆきさん, Kanji: 唐行きさん literally "Ms. Gone-overseas"), they were found at the Japanese enclave along Hylam, Malabar, Malay and Bugis Streets until World War II.
[45] The vast majority of Japanese emigrants to Southeast Asia in the early Meiji period were prostitutes (Karayuki-san), who worked in brothels in Malaya, Singapore,[46] Philippines, Dutch East Indies and French Indochina.
[54] Japanese colonial films also associated the region with sex as many "Karayuki-san", or prostitutes had been either sold to brothels or chosen to go to Southeast Asia to earn money around the turn of the century.
[55] The 2021 award-winning novel 'The Punkhawala and the Prostitute' written by Wesley Leon Aroozoo and published by Epigram Books followed the life of Oseki, a Karayuki-san in Singapore.
