Nickname: Flower of Evil: 呼び名は悪の花

The Abe Sada Story

INTRODUCTION

When Japan transitioned from 264 years of rule under the military-led Tokugawa Shogunate (1603 to 1867) to the restoration of imperial power during the Meiji era, it embarked on a path of rapid modernization. This period produced dramatic changes in the country’s political, social, and economic institutions.

In the years that followed, Japan grew and evolved at an unprecedented rate, and its economy soared to levels that were previously unwitnessed in Asia. However, in a society that had historically been structured around a strict social hierarchy, the cost of this immense growth was primarily borne by its underclass—the women.[i]

Once the shift of power took place, the Shogunate’s economy was restructured and its land tax system was reformed. Those who had paid taxes previously were issued certificates of ownership, but common lands became the property of the central government. Under the new law, taxes were paid in cash based on the value of the land rather than the value of the crops grown on the land.[ii] Utilizing the taxes collected from individual landholders, the new government invested heavily in industries such as silk and cotton production, railways, and mining. Japan’s industrial revolution created a critical need for laborers. The majority of the industrial workforce came from the rural farmlands.[iii]

The women who once helped their families on the farm were redirected to work in the factories. By 1900, 250,000 women worked in the textile industry.[iv] A little over a decade later that number swelled to an estimated 800,000.[v]

These rural women were often underage, underpaid, and indentured to the factory owners. Indentured labor was not a new concept in Japan. Dating as far back as 1543, when the Portuguese first set foot in the country, a large scale slave trade had existed in which the Portuguese purchased Japanese as slaves and sold them overseas. This practice lasted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[vi] The Portuguese also purchased large numbers of Japanese women to bring back to Portugal for sexual purposes.[vii] Some of the Japanese women were sold as concubines to the Portuguese, lascar, and African crewmembers serving aboard the Portuguese vessels engaged in trading with Japan.[viii]

Dom Sebastian I, the king of Portugal from 1557 to 1578, feared that the slave trade was having a negative impact on Catholic proselytization in Japan and ordered that the practice be banned in 1571.[ix]

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Imperial Regent, was disgusted by the fact that his people were being sold en masse into slavery. On July 24, 1587, he wrote a letter to Jesuit Vice-Provincial Gaspar Coelho. Coelho was a Jesuit missionary who replaced Francisco Cabral as the Superior and Vice-Provincial of the Jesuit mission in Japan during the late sixteenth century. In his letter Hideyoshi demanded that the Portuguese, Siamese, and Cambodians stop purchasing and enslaving Japanese people and return them to Japan. He blamed the Portuguese and the Jesuits for the slave trade and as a result banned Christian proselytizing altogether.[x]

In 1595 Portugal passed a law banning Chinese and Japanese slavery, but various forms of indentured labor still existed.[xi]

Upon being recruited by the textile mills, the women’s families were paid a sum of money which they could apply toward paying off loans and defraying the cost of their living expenses. In reality, however, these advance payments were loans from the factory owners that the women were obligated to pay back. A typical contract lasting five to seven years would enable a family to receive an advance payment of ¥200 to ¥300.[xii]

On average, women working in the silk mills in 1875 were earning approximately ¥9 annually. By 1880, that figure nearly doubled. Wages were paid annually and the factories deducted an installment from these wages as a repayment for the advances that had been paid to the workers' families.[xiii]

The women typically worked under grueling conditions and labored twelve to fourteen hours a day. They were often subjected to punishment by the factory inspectors. The punishment came in the form of fines and/or physical abuse and were applied to those women who appeared to have slowed down the production line or who seemed to be inattentive.[xiv]

Further, the women were confined to company-owned dormitories where their day-to-day lives were governed by strict rules and regulations. The sanitary conditions in these dormitories were deplorable due to a lack of sufficient bathing and laundering facilities. Most of the dormitories were breeding grounds for lice and bedbugs, which aided to the spread of disease.

As a result, tuberculosis was on the rise in Japan during this period, particularly in the rural areas. The women would often contract the disease in the dormitories and infect others that they came in contact with after they returned to their villages to recuperate. Until the 1920s, tuberculosis was responsible for 40% of the deaths of the women living in factory dormitories and 70% of the deaths of the women who had returned to their villages.[xv]

Thiamine deficiency (also known as beriberi), a condition that causes disorders of the cardiovascular system and the nervous system, was also common during this period due to the poor diet the women were subjected to.

Many of the women attempted to run away from the factories, but they were chased down, captured, and returned to the factory owners. Several women committed suicide.

Due to their rural background, most of the workers were uneducated. By the 1900s many companies began to offer primary education to their female workforce, but this education was focused on learning skills that could later be utilized by the factories.

After the textile industry, the second largest employer of women during the Industrial Revolution was the sex industry. Prostitution was legalized by the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1617, and fathers had the right to sell their daughters to brothels.

Many families facing poverty, famine, and crop failure often resorted to selling their daughters to brothels in an effort to ease the family’s financial burdens. However, selling women to the brothels was not limited only to the families who were financially destitute. The affluent samurai families had established the practice of selling daughters whom they deemed to be sexually promiscuous to the brothels as a form of punishment.

During the Tokugawa (or Edo) period, the practice of infanticide as a form of population control had become prevalent in Japan. Farmers killed their second or third sons soon after birth in what was known as mabiki. Mabiki is an agricultural term used to describe the act of pulling plants from an overcrowded garden.

In northern Japan alone, between 60,000 and 70,000 cases of mabiki were recorded each year. Daughters were often spared, because they could be married off, or sold as servants, prostitutes, or geishas.[xvi]

In 1842, the Shogunate banned induced abortions in Edo (Tokyo), but the law did not extend to the rest of the country until 1869. During the Meiji period, the government strived to promote a larger population in order to exercise greater military and political power in the world arena. The Meiji reformers enacted Japan’s first penal code in 1880, which criminalized both abortion and infanticide.[xvii] An increase in the number of children being born in Japan during the Meiji period contributed to the number of males who could be inducted into the military and the number of females who could be sold to the sex industry.

Despite the legalization of the sex industry, the social attitudes to prostitutes did not change; many Japanese found it easier to blame the victim rather than the society that created the conditions for prostitution to exist.

In 1872, the Meiji government passed the Prostitution Emancipation Act as a response to foreign criticism of Japan’s sex trade. The new law freed geishas and prostitutes from being bound by contracts of indentured servitude. However, the law also left many women unemployed. With nowhere else to work, they returned to the brothels under similar contracts. The brothels had relabeled themselves as kashi zashiki gyo (room rental establishments).

Three years after the Prostitution Emancipation Act was passed, the government backtracked and once again recognized the legality of contracts of indenture for prostitutes.[xviii]

Many major cities in Japan allocated specific districts on their outskirts to the sex industry. In 1883, there were 3,156 registered prostitutes in approximately 400 districts. By 1904, that number rose to 43,134. In the next two decades, the number increased to 52,325.[xix]

The rapid industrialization of Japan created a largely disproportionate ratio of men to women in the factory areas which fostered the growth of the sex industry.

In the 1890s, the Meiji reformers instituted a state-sponsored education system and along with the Home Ministry introduced the twin ideals of ryosai kenbo (good wife, wise mother). These ideals were carried over from the Tokugawa period, when women of the samurai class were considered catalysts for bringing either respect or shame to their families and to their clans. Samurai women were expected to be good examples of propriety and virtue to the members of their household as well as all other members of their clan. They were charged with serving their husbands well by bearing children for them and preserving the honor and lineage of their families. Women were discouraged from forming friendships or becoming intimate with anyone other than those individuals to whom they were introduced to by their parents or by middlemen acting on behalf of their parents.[i]

However, the ideals of modesty, frugality, and purity embodied in ryosai kenbo were reserved primarily for the upper- and middle-class women; the lower-class women, who remained largely uneducated, were simply viewed as laborers required for the factories.[ii]

Although women endured repression and hierarchical subjugation during the Tokugawa period, it wasn’t until the implementation of the Japanese Mimpo (civil code) in 1898 that the subordinate status of women in society was formalized in the law. The new law not only deprived married women of their economic independence, it also further subjected them to the will of the head of the household.[iii]

Overall, the extent to which women could participate in society differed over time and in accordance to their social class. In eighth century Japan, it was permissible for women to rule. During the twelfth century, women were allowed to inherit property in their own names. This gave them a degree of freedom and considerable power over their lives. Furthermore, divorce and remarriage were not stigmatized. However, as a result of closer adherence to Confucianism and Buddhism coupled with the advent of samurai culture, the role of women in Japanese society was downgraded to a state of acquiescent confinement.

Beginning with the Tokugawa period and well into the Meiji period, when Japan embraced change and modernization, the social status of women drastically declined. The condition of the lower classes consisting of the impoverished rural women, the factory laborers, and the sex industry workers remained largely unchanged throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Despite the benefits it gained, the industrial development of Japan came at an enormous cost to Japanese society. The system blatantly exploited the already repressed members of society—its women.

Abe Sada was born in Tokyo’s Kanda ward on May 28, 1905 (Meiji era). She was the seventh of eight children born to a family of tatami (straw mat) makers. She was raised amidst and forced to find a way to survive in a newly modernized, male-dominated, and misogynistic society.

[i]Anderson, Patricia. “Roles of Samurai Women: Social Norms and Inner Conflicts During Japan’s Tokugawa Period, 1603-1868.” New Views on Gender, Volume 15 (February, 2015). Pages 30-37. [ii]Narayan. "Women in Meiji Japan." [iii]Ibid.

[i]Narayan, S. “Women in Meiji Japan: Exploring the Underclass of Japanese Industrialization.” Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1369/women-in-Meiji-japan-exploring-the-underclass-of-Japanese-industrialization. [ii]Sanderson, Beck. Ethics of Civilization (Volume 21) East Asia 1800-1949. “Japan’s Modernization 1800-1894.” World Peace Communications, 2007. http://www.san.beck.org/21-7-JapanModernization1800-94.html. [iii]Narayan, "Women in Meiji Japan." [iv]Robins-Mowry, Dorothy. The Hidden Sun: Women of Modern Japan. Westview Press, 1983. Page 36. [v]Narayan. "Women in Meiji Japan." [vi]Hoffman, Michael. "The rarely, if ever, told story of Japanese sold as slaves by Portuguese traders." The Japan Times. May 26, 2013. [vii]Monumenta Nipponica: Studies on Japanese Culture, Past and Present,Volume 59, Issues 3-4. Jochi Daigaku (Sophia University), 2004. Page 463. [viii]Weiner, Michael, ed. Race, Ethnicity and Migration in Modern Japan: Imagined and imaginary minorities. Taylor & Francis, 2004. Page 408. [ix]Monumenta Nipponica. [x]Moran, J. F. The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth Century Japan, 1st Edition. “The Japanese Jesuits.” Routledge, 1993. Pages 384-386. [xi]Dias, Maria Suzette Fernandes. Legacies of slavery: comparative perspectives. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Page 238. [xii]Narayan. "Women in Meiji Japan." [xiii]Ibid. [xiv]Ibid. [xv]Ibid. [xvi]“Infanticide in Japan: Sign of the Times?” The New York Times. December 8, 1973. [xvii]Norgren, Tiana. Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan. Princeton University Press, 2001. Pages 22-23. [xviii]Prostitute Emancipation Act. Samurai-Archives, 2014, wiki.samurai-archives.com/index.php?title=Prostitute_Emancipation_Act. [xix]Narayan. "Women in Meiji Japan."