Located on a hill about 2 kilometres from the town's central business district, it is a cemetery where the remains are buried of many Japanese female prostitutes called Karayuki-san from poverty-stricken agricultural prefectures in Japan who were sold into slavery at a very young age years before World War II which also include recent comfort women during the war.

The cemetery was founded in 1890 by Madam Kinoshita Kuni (born 7 July 1854) from Futae Village, Amakusa County, Kumamoto Prefecture,[2] a successful Japanese female manager of Sandakan's lucrative 'Brothel No.

[3][4] Madam Okuni is a very influential and kind woman who fluent in English with many Yamato nadeshiko (Japanese girls) sought her guidance and protection with the treatment as a human beings of the girls in her brothel were much better than in the other Japanese brothels in Sandakan where she is called as the "Okuni" of South Seas.

[2][3][5] A majority of the cemetery are belong to Karayuki-san, mainly daughters of poor Japanese people with no social status or value as female where they been exported overseas as maids to work before being forced into prostitution activities.

[1] Those who buried in the cemetery are with their feet pointing towards the direction of Japan as a posture or gesture that condemns their ancestral home that abandoned them or exhorted them to support their country war efforts which is considered as an ultimate insult.