Oharazeki - Listening To The Other Women in Japanese North America

Listening to the Voices of "Other" Women in Japanese North America: Japanese
Prostitutes and Barmaids in the American West, 1887-1920

Author(s): Kazuhiro Oharazeki
Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Summer 2013), pp. 5-40
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History
Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.4.0005
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Listening to the Voices of “Other” Women
in Japanese North America:
Japanese Prostitutes and Barmaids
in the American West, 1887–1920
KAZUHIRO OHARAZEKI
JAPANESE IMMIGRANT WOMEN’S lives have been discussed pri-

marily within the narrative of migration and settlement. Their conventional
portrayal was that of mothers who supported their husbands on farms and
in shops faithfully, caring for their children along with their daily chores,
with some working outside the home, participating in a variety of social
activities, and contributing to the welfare of the family and the development
of the ethnic community.1 As Yuji Ichioka and other historians have shown,
however, the transition from the migration to the settlement period was, in
fact, fraught with conflicts between the immigrant elites and certain groups
of women who deviated from community norms. Prostitutes constituted a
significant part of the Japanese population in the early stage of migration,
undermining Japanese consuls’ efforts to maintain Japan’s reputation as a
“civilized” country. As Japanese brides increased in the 1910s, a consider-
able number of them came to dislike the husbands typically chosen by their
parents and ran away with other men. Concerned about the deteriorating
image of the Japanese in American society, Japanese leaders attempted to
force these “deviant” women to conform to the idealized image of Issei
women as “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo).2
The strength of these studies lies in the authors’ ability to illuminate the
internal dynamics of the early Japanese immigrant community and the re-
form agendas that immigrant leaders had. We learn from these studies how
Japanese leaders dealt with structural pressures imposed by the dominant
society, how they struggled to earn the respect of white Americans, and why
certain women’s behavior did not fit into the self-portrait that immigrant
leaders painted for themselves and fellow countrymen. They do not tell us
much, however, about deviant immigrant women themselves. Prostitutes,
in particular, have been described as victims of male exploitation who had
little control over their lives, and even Yuji Ichioka, who had sought to
Journal of American Ethnic History Summer 2013 Volume 32, Number 4 5

© 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
6 Journal of American Ethnic History / Summer 2013
u nderstand Japanese immigrant experiences in their own terms, focused on

the exploitative relations in which prostitutes were entwined and immigrant
elites’ responses to the problem, failing to bring out the agency of these
women and their perspectives on their lives.3
In a recent article, Cecilia Tsu discusses gender relations among early
Japanese immigrants in rural California. Carefully examining events leading
to the deaths of Japanese men and women in Santa Clara County between
1900 and 1913, she delves into the private lives of ordinary immigrants with
human emotions—lonely migrant laborers who made advances to married
women, husbands consumed with jealousy by wives flirting with other men,
and married women who achieved a measure of freedom and independence
while dealing with the dangers of sexual violence from predatory men in
an immigrant society with few women. Her stories further suggest that lo-
cal restaurants were the meeting places of Japanese laborers and married
working women, and that Japanese women could use divorce court to end
their unsatisfactory marriages. Readers might wish to know more about
Japanese women’s non-agricultural wage work (especially in restaurants)
and married women’s divorce trials, to understand the implications of these
activities for women’s identity construction.4
Drawing on these insights offered by the growing literature on gender and
sexuality in Asian American history in the past two decades, I seek a new
way of viewing the early phase of Japanese immigration history from the
perspectives of prostitutes and barmaids. Although these women themselves
left few written accounts, vernacular newspapers, divorce court records,
Japanese consular reports, U.S. official surveys, and church records provide
a wealth of information about women who sought various options to improve
their life circumstances. Careful analysis of their actions provides access to
women’s thoughts and otherwise unheard voices. Their stories challenge the
conventional images of prostitutes as victims and Issei women as mothers,
illuminating varied forms of gender relations and the disruptive nature of
sexuality in the social formation of the Japanese immigrant community in
the North American West.5
THE CONDITIONS IN JAPAN

AND WOMEN’S OVERSEAS MIGRATION
The majority of Japanese immigrants came to North America primarily

for economic reasons, but in the analysis of prostitutes’ migration, it will be
useful to consider its relation to the history of licensed prostitution in Japan
Oharazeki 7
and various changes that occurred during the Meiji period (1868–1912).
Although Japanese women had engaged in prostitution in various capacities
for centuries, it was during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) when prostitu-
tion was highly institutionalized. After Tokugawa Ieyasu came to power in
the early seventeenth century, the shogunate ordered the establishment of
a licensed quarter, Yoshiwara, to drive scattered prostitutes into one place.
It was part of the authorities’ broader effort to maintain public order and
control crime. Later in the century, brothels and prostitutes increased in the
context of the development of a money economy and with a growing gap
between the poor and the rich in both cities and villages. In order to survive,
poor peasants and urban dwellers sold their daughters to brothels, and the
women were trapped in debt bondage for many years. The authorities were
rarely concerned about moral issues surrounding prostitution or various
hardships women were forced to face in brothels, including diseases and
severe punishments by their masters.6
The modern licensed prostitution system established in the 1870s by the
Meiji government was different from the earlier Tokugawa system in two
important respects. First, the government introduced a system of health
examination of prostitutes that was modeled on similar systems in Europe.
As the “scientific” knowledge of sex spread in Japan toward the end of
the century, concerns about the influence of venereal diseases on public
hygiene increased, and the officials tightened the control of prostitutes to
make sure that all women were registered and inspected. Second, the new
regulations redefined prostitution as a form of contract labor based on
mutual agreement between willing individuals (workers and employers).
This system, however, diverted attention from the social and economic
conditions that forced women into prostitution. The demand for brothels
increased throughout the country with the expansion of the military popu-
lation during the Sino-Japanese (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–1905), and the licensed prostitution system was transplanted into the
occupied territories to protect the health of soldiers and establish Japan’s
foothold in Northeast Asia.7
All these structural changes related to prostitution in the Meiji period
reveal an important link between national expansion and the development
of the licensed prostitution system. This was the framework within which
numerous Japanese women were sent to colonial Korea and Manchuria for
sex work after the turn of the century. In analyzing the actual process of
prostitutes’ migration, however, it is also important to consider the perspec-
tives of women and their families. Certainly, it was unlikely that women
became prostitutes willingly, but as some historians have pointed out, in

the native villages of overseas prostitutes in the southern island of Kyushu,
going abroad for sex work for a limited time was often considered an ac-
ceptable, if not “respectable,” way to alleviate poverty and contribute to the
maintenance of the household.8 Indeed, anti-prostitution reformers were
often disturbed by overseas prostitutes who entered the trade of their own
volition or their families and villagers who appreciated their remittances.9
Structural forces did limit options for lower-class women, but to understand
the nature of their overseas migration, we need to look at the existing pat-
terns of migration and the role of individual agency in their decision to
leave their hometowns.10
Japanese prostitutes appeared in Hawaii and North America in the 1880s,
following Japanese migrant laborers who worked primarily in agriculture,
railroad construction, and domestic service. Their migration to the western
United States increased after the opening of regular trans-Pacific steam-
ship service that connected Japanese ports with Vancouver (1887), Seattle
(1896), and San Francisco (1898), and growing numbers of prostitutes in
Hawaii moved to the West Coast after the annexation of the Republic to the
United States in 1898.11 Some Japanese prostitutes arrived at the U.S. ports
of Seattle and San Francisco as “wives” of procurers to evade the suspicion
of immigration officials. Others first went to Victoria and worked in Canada
or later moved to the western United States, taking advantage of lax enforce-
ment at the border. Vancouver Consul Sugimura Fukashi began to report
on the arrivals of Japanese prostitutes in 1889, and they quickly caught the
local media’s attention in Seattle and San Francisco.12 By the end of the
1890s, Japanese consuls recorded 150 prostitutes in California, sixty-nine
in Washington, seventy-five in Oregon, twenty-three in Idaho, sixteen in
Montana, and twelve in Utah. Japanese prostitutes were also increasing in
British Columbia in this period.13
For some working-class Japanese men and women, going abroad for sex
work was often a strategic response to limited options at home and growing
opportunities abroad. Hirakawa Tōkichi, for instance, was originally a “poor
farmer” in a declining commercial village in Shizuoka Prefecture. He and
his wife took a ship to the United States around 1890 and earned a consid-
erable sum from the management of a brothel in Seattle. After returning to
their village a few years later, they spent more than 10,000 yen to buy large
tracts of land and built a “huge tile-roofed house with large white walls,”
which became known among fellow villagers as “the American House”
(amerikaya). Younger people soon followed in their footsteps. Hirakawa’s
Oharazeki 9
brother, Chōtarō, a “dyer,” sailed for the United States from Yokohama at the
end of 1894 or early 1895 and became a brothel-keeper in Butte, Montana.14
Saitō Yoshi, a sixteen-year old girl, also joined him in Butte to become a
prostitute after working in Yokohama as a domestic servant. She sent money
home from her earnings, and when a police investigator visited the village
in 1896, he reported that Yoshi’s father had “made a large fortune recently
. . . and looks like a wealthy farmer.”15 Over time, the surrounding villages
along the Suruga Bay became a major source of Japanese procurers and
prostitutes in the North American West. Pioneering migrants created a vital
link between these villages and North American brothels.16
Numerous tales of riches spread among Japanese men and women as
the migration to North America increased in the 1890s. At the same time,
however, these tales enabled procurers to persuade women to migrate with-
out telling them what was intended for them at their destinations. Yamada
Waka, a former prostitute in Seattle’s King Street, for instance, was one
of eight children born in a farming family living near Yokohama. After
graduating from elementary school, she started helping with her family’s
sugar-beet farming, and at the age of sixteen, married a commodity broker
who was ten years her elder. Waka often implored her husband to assist her
parents financially, but he ignored her pleas.17 In her memoir, she recalled:
“It was very sad to see the haggard face of my eldest brother struggling to
maintain our family business. . . . We needed a sizable sum of money to
keep the remaining land. I decided to shoulder a part of his financial burden
without thinking about what I could do at that time.”18 In the late 1890s,
she moved to Yokohama and met a woman whose husband “reached high
social standing in America.” Lured by her story, Waka followed her advice,
crossing the Pacific alone. After arriving in Victoria, British Columbia, she
was transferred by the woman’s husband to Seattle, where she was forced
to work in a brothel under the name “Oyae of Arabia.”19
Marriage to American migrants also sounded very attractive to Japanese
women, but some brides ended up working in brothels or bar-restaurants
after their arrivals in the country. One such woman was Nishida Tomi from
Ehime Prefecture. After Tomi graduated from high school, a matchmaker
introduced her to Nishida Shūzō, a fellow villager who was then working
in the United States. Her parents opposed her marriage with a man whom
she and they had never met. Deeply impressed by the photograph of Shūzō
wearing a mustache in the Western style, however, she did not want to pass
up this chance to live in her dream country. She later confessed: “I have
been attracted by the United States since my high school days. I didn’t
hear what my parents said.” After coming to San Francisco, she found that
Shūzō was just a servant working for a white family. She quickly came to
dislike him and proposed a divorce. Shūzō then demanded payment of the
money he had used for bringing her over, ordering her to work in a local
bar-restaurant. When arrested on a charge of prostitution in 1911, she told
a newspaperman: “Please tell picture-brides to take care that they won’t
repeat my mistake.”20 As past studies on Japanese immigrant women have
shown, picture brides often had idealized, romanticized views of the life in
what they envisioned as a “civilized” and “rich” country; many were even
more enthusiastic about the idea of marrying American migrants through
the exchange of photographs than their parents were.21 Taking advantage
of Japanese women’s adoration of the country, procurers created several
versions of “American stories” to lure young women to believe that better
opportunities beckoned across the Pacific.
LIVES AS PROSTITUTES
After arriving in North American ports, Japanese women were transferred

to brothels located in segregated areas in Western frontier towns (e.g., Front
Alley in Spokane, Rose Street in Walla Walla, and Brooklyn Place in San
Francisco). In Seattle, brothels prospered in the area around King Street, the
two blocks between Weller and King Streets, and 5th and 7th avenues, in the
International District. This district was called “Deadline,” where all vices,
including gambling and prostitution, were tolerated by the local police.22
The streets were reported to be “ablaze with many colored lights displaying
the names of notorious ones,” and “painted women in a half-nude condition
came out openly on the streets . . . to solicit passers-by.”23 Okina Kyūin, a
Japanese migrant who visited Seattle in 1911, characterized the district as
“an international flesh market,” where almost five hundred women from
various European and Asian countries were working as prostitutes.24 Black
and Japanese prostitutes were concentrated in the area along lower Jackson
Street.25 Major hotels having Japanese “cribs” included the Eureka House,
Aloha House, Tokyo House, Diamond House, Yokohama House, Eastern
House, Paris House, and Washington House, each of which accommodated
from five to more than twenty Japanese women.26
This seemingly multi-cultural world of prostitution was, in fact, stratified
by race and ethnicity. In Butte, Montana, for instance, French women were
reported to be “in great demand” among the residents, and German, Scandi-
navian, and Irish women were ranked “in the middle of the scale.” Mexican
Oharazeki 11
and South American women were “below them,” and the Chinese were
“consigned to be at the lower end of the rung” along with Native American
and black women.27 This racial hierarchy was often reflected in the prices
that men paid for the services of each group (e.g., $1.00 for native-born girls;
$0.75 for French women; $0.50 for Chinese, Japanese, and black prostitutes;
and $0.25 for Mexican women in late nineteenth-century San Francisco).28
Furthermore, the majority of white women refused to serve Asian men; as
a result, additional pressures were placed on Asian prostitutes to serve men
of their own ethnic groups.29 Japanese women were divided into “White,”
“Japanese ,” and “Chinese birds,” according to the types of customers they
served. As Yuji Ichioka wrote, this division reveals the prejudices of both
whites and the Japanese—white men disliked prostitutes catering to Asians,
and Japanese men disliked women serving Chinese men.30
Among the three groups of customers of Japanese prostitutes, the Chi-
nese appear most frequently in immigrant accounts and public records. The
Chinese began to arrive in the American West in the mid-nineteenth century,
and as an inevitable result of the lack of women, prostitution prospered in
their settlements, reaching its peak around 1870.31 Yet, after the enactment
of the Page Law of 1875 (prohibiting the entry of “Oriental” prostitutes) and
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (restricting the immigration of Chinese
women to the wives and daughters of merchants and U.S. citizens), it became
difficult for brothel-keepers to import women from China. The rising cost of
recruiting women, the dwindling supply of women in China, and the heavily
skewed male-female ratio created by racist immigration policies all pushed
the price of a Chinese prostitute up to as much as $3,000 by the 1890s.32 On
the other hand, there were no restrictions on Japanese women immigrants
before 1907–1908 except the Page Law, which procurers could evade easily
by bringing over prostitutes as their “wives.” The steady supply of women
from impoverished agricultural areas in rural Japan kept their price at about
$500–$600 each.33 As a result, the demand for Japanese prostitutes among
Chinese increased rapidly, and Japanese brothels sprang up on the outskirts
of Chinatowns.34 By the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese brothels
outnumbered Chinese establishments in San Francisco’s Brooklyn Place.35
The relation between prostitutes and masters was exploitative in nature.
Most women were bound by the contracts they entered into with procurers
before coming to North America, and the men forced them to repay their
“debts,” including advances and passage, by working in brothels.36 Japanese
women were placed under constant surveillance and had little freedom to
leave brothels of their own will. Masters resorted to physical force to keep
prostitutes in bondage, and cruel punishments served as warnings to pros-

titutes that their lives could be in danger if they attempted to run away.37
Furthermore, women were exposed to many dangers in the workplace. In
May1899, for instance, a Seattle prostitute named Katsu was strangled to
death and robbed of her money and two gold rings in her brothel, and her
“face was of a livid purple hue, her eyes were closed but swollen and suffused
with black blood, and her neck and face were bruised in several places.”38 As
Lucie Cheng and Judy Yung showed, Asian prostitutes were often relegated
to slum areas with other prostitutes of color, and the low price charged at
their brothels drew common laborers and drinking men who often treated
the women harshly.39
Brothels were not the only places where Japanese prostitutes worked.
Some worked in Japanese restaurants as barmaids (shakufu). Bar-restaurants
began to appear in Pacific Coast Japanese communities in the 1890s, cater-
ing primarily to Japanese men. Barmaids served food and alcohol, talking
to the customers over drinks, and dancing and playing samisen (Japanese
guitar). They included a fair number of literate women who exchanged
tanka, traditional Japanese poems in seventeen syllables, with customers.
The precise number of barmaids who turned to prostitution is subject to
debate. Yuji Ichioka writes: “Not all prostitutes worked in brothels. Innumer-
able small bar-restaurants, which hired shakufu or barmaids, proliferated
in inchoate immigrant communities in the 1890s. Not every shakufu was a
prostitute, but some were, and they worked in these bar-restaurants rather
than brothels.”40 Indeed, the boundary between barmaids and prostitutes
was indistinct. Barmaids, who appeared in immigrant accounts and official
reports, were often former prostitutes.41 This ambiguity of their trade may
explain why bar-restaurants increased rapidly in Japanese communities when
federal officials began to deport foreign prostitutes following the revisions
in immigration law in 1907 and 1910.42
Overcome with homesickness, Japanese men were naturally attracted
to Japanese sake, food, and songs in bar-restaurants after the day’s work.
It was also one of few places where they could enjoy companionship with
women. Gossiping about barmaids was a favorite pastime for Japanese men,
and the immigrant press carried readers’ columns in which male readers
exchanged information about women who debuted in local restaurants.43
Nishikata Chōhei recalled why young men patronized bar-restaurants in
the early twentieth century: “At that time, men came to America with high
hopes, but the reality was too hard. . . . [E]ven if they wanted to sing the
praises of youth, there were no Japanese women to go out with. Even if
Oharazeki 13
they sought sexual outlets in the red-light district, the American style was
boring. So they went to Japanese restaurants and talked of their vague love-
longings to married barmaids.”44 Although the number of Japanese women
increased after the turn of the century, numerous Japanese men were still
living alone.45 Away from their families, excluded from the social world
of Americans, they inevitably suffered from loneliness, and going to bar-
restaurants was a way to relieve it.
The root cause that pushed Japanese immigrant women into the trade
was Japanese men’s inability to support their wives. The story of a bar-
maid, Ochiyo, is a case in point. Like thousands of Japanese women who
migrated to the United States to join their husbands, Ochiyo took a ship
around 1908–1909 to meet a husband, Kunitarō, chosen by her parents.
The husband had come to Seattle in 1907 and worked as a bartender to
save money and set up his own family in the United States. In the course of
time, however, he began to frequent a local Japanese bar-restaurant to see
his favorite barmaid Fumiko, spending a large share of his income there.
By the time Ochiyo arrived in Seattle, he had lost all his money and had
to borrow $150 from his friend to buy new clothing for her. Having a hard
time getting by on his low income as a bartender, he barely supported his
wife. Tragically, their newly married life began in a cheap local inn; all
their property consisted of a gas stove, a bottle of soy sauce, two dishes,
and cups. And what was even worse, Kunitarō was dismissed from his job
and was unable to pay their rent. Economic hardship finally forced Ochiyo
to become a barmaid in a local restaurant, Matsunoe.46
In the case of Fujimoto Harue, it was her husband’s debts that forced her
to work as a barmaid. In 1911, when she exchanged photographs across
the Pacific and migrated to the United States, her husband, Momotarō, was
managing a farm in Walnut Grove, California. After moving to Agnew’s
Village, they continued farming, but as a result of a failure in business, their
debts kept mounting and forced Harue to work in a local bar-restaurant to
supplement their income. She probably entered the trade intending to leave it
after repaying their debts; however, the arrival of her child increased family
expenses, and she had to continue to work to make ends meet. Even worse,
her husband indulged in a gambling habit and began to take advances on
her salary. She also needed to pay the expense of bringing up her first son
placed in another family. Harue later decided to file for divorce from the
husband.47 Because of the stress of poverty and the sense of powerlessness,
husbands often turned to alcohol and gambling and became dependent on
their wives’ earnings from work in bar-restaurants.
Paying Off the Debts

Japanese prostitutes and barmaids who appear in immigrant accounts
are typically portrayed as unfortunate young women who “fell into” lives
of servitude. Their lives were controlled by masters or husband-pimps, and
their hard-earned money was gambled away. Although that grim picture
represents the hardships experienced by many prostitutes, little is known
about how they viewed their lives and how they accommodated to the limits
and opportunities of their life circumstances. My research suggests four
patterns of Japanese prostitutes’ responses that emerge from an examina-
tion of Japanese-language newspapers and various public and institutional
records in the United States, and reveals the fates of Japanese prostitutes
and barmaids in North America.
Most Japanese women owed passage and loans to masters or husbands
when arriving on the American shores; therefore, for those who wished to end
their relations with these men, redeeming debts was the surest way to gain
freedom. Otaka was one woman who resorted to this means. She journeyed
to Seattle in October 1912 to join her husband, Takahashi Mineichi, who had
preceded her. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Otaka began to
discuss a divorce with her husband. The two concluded that Otaka would work
as a barmaid in a local bar-restaurant, Maneki, in order to pay Takahashi her
“consolation money” (tegirekin) for divorce, $700. According to a Japanese-
language newspaper, Otaka had planned to get a divorce from Takahashi
upon her arrival and marry Naitō Toranosuke, a clerk for the Nippon Yūsen
steamship company. The editor summarizes the letter she wrote to Naitō:
[Otaka’s] letter is written in a very complex manner, but its main points are
as follows: I am writing to let you know that I arrived in America safely. I
recently broached the issue of divorce with Takahashi. I have the backing
of a few influential men, so I feel secure. I owe Takahashi $700. We have
fixed that I will pay him $400 in cash and will repay the rest of the debt
by working at a bar-restaurant, Maneki. When I have solved this problem,
I will be relieved of a heavy burden. I am looking forward to seeing you.48
This letter indicates that she used her marriage to Takahashi as a means to
join her boyfriend in the United States. She migrated as a married woman
(rather than a barmaid) to insure her safe entry into the country, and once
reaching Seattle, negotiated divorce with her husband. She offered to pay
him $700 as compensation and knew “a few influential men” who would
help conclude this negotiation. She actually started working in the Maneki
restaurant shortly after her arrival.49
Oharazeki 15
The consolation payment was a kind of compromise between prostitutes

and their employers or husbands. Masters agreed to release prostitutes, un-
derstanding that the consolation money would be enough to offset the loss
of expected income and their initial investment in purchasing the women
(the money also allowed them to hire procurers and import other prostitutes
from Japan). Similarly, husbands agreed to let their wives go, typically with
their boyfriends, upon receipt of consolation money that would compensate
for the cost of arranging marriages and bringing their women over. Women
were required to pay off their debts before leaving employers or husbands,
but the burden in these arrangements was probably light for them, consid-
ering that their boyfriends would help pay the consolation money. Interest-
ingly, the consolation payment practice was more popular among Japanese
migrants in western Canada than in the western United States because of
the difficulty of getting a divorce under Canadian law and highly negative
societal attitudes toward divorce in that country.50
One can also argue that the consolation money payment was an exten-
sion of local practices in Japan, because extra-legal dissolutions of marriages
were common in the nineteenth century. Japanese parents allowed sons and
daughters of marriageable age to cohabit and marry casually and see if they
could get along well. If not, the couples dissolved their marriages and reported
divorces to the municipal office. This practice of “trial marriage” resulted in
a high divorce rate in Japan, which surpassed that in other industrialized na-
tions, including France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States, in the period
before 1910. The Meiji government sought to stop the practice of casual mar-
riage, and the Civil Code of 1898 required couples to dissolve their marriages
either by mutual consent (kyōgi rikon) or by filing for divorce in the courts
(saiban rikon). Although the divorce rate began to decline thereafter, few
couples used the courts to dissolve marriages. Between 1900 and 1940, over
99 percent of divorcing couples dissolved their marriages by mutual consent
as they had done in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period.51 Regardless
of the changes in the laws, government arbitration in marital disputes was
infrequent in Japan. Given the popularity of private settlements of marital
disputes in Japan, dissolving an unhappy marriage through the payment of
“consolation money” would have been a reasonable option for married Japa-
nese prostitutes and barmaids in North America.
Running Away from Brothels
For prostitutes tightly controlled by masters, running away from brothels
was often the only option available to them. Yamamoto Kiyo told her story
before a judge in December 1909. Originally she followed her cousin and
her husband to San Francisco in 1904 under a promise that she would work
as a waitress. After their arrival, however, she was sold into a local brothel.
In 1906, when the earthquake destroyed the town, her master took her to
Oregon, and later to Bellingham, Washington, where she was sold to another
master and soon transferred to a brothel in Seattle. A year later, she was
allowed to leave the brothel on the condition that she would repay the rest
of her debt later. She then moved to Seattle, entering a local Protestant res-
cue mission. One day, however, she was caught on the street by a gang and
ordered to work in a labor camp. She ran away and went to her old master
to ask for help. Contrary to her expectation, she was physically abused by
him and confined in a hotel under constant surveillance.52
Fortunately, a stranger who witnessed Kiyo being beaten by the former
master called the police. The master was arrested, and she was protected by
the police. She observed in court: “I practiced prostitution four years and
a half; after all this time I am penniless.” The first master, who brought her
to Astoria, Portland, and later to Bellingham, “took every cent I earned, and
whenever I refused to give him, he threatened to kill me with a revolver,
so I had to give him all the earnings.” Then she appealed to the court: “I
am now seeking protection, and trying to escape from this slavery, for if
I am not taken care of, I will be compelled to go back and lead the life of
a prostitute, or I might be killed by the gang; I want to be decent and re-
spectable, and will work honestly to earn my living, so please help me.”53
As her accounts suggested, she was in a desperate situation. Deceived into
prostitution, burdened by debts, and physically abused by her master, the
only institution she could rely upon was the police.
Going to the police, however, would not have been an option for all Japanese
prostitutes. Until the 1910s, when the “white slavery” hysteria reached fever
pitch, the local police rarely intervened in brothel management so long as pros-
titutes paid fines and would not disturb middle-class neighborhoods. Japanese
masters tried to make sure that prostitutes would adhere to the agreements
they had made with them, and if the women ran away, the masters searched
for them by placing runaway notices in Japanese-language newspapers. For
example, the runaway notice of Fujita Tora, a Sacramento barmaid who ran
away without paying off her debts, read as follows: “Fujita Tora, a.k.a. Fujiye,
from the town of Maebara, Itoshima County, Fukuoka Prefecture, disappeared
on November 29. She is 5–1 tall, with double eyelid, a fair complexion, a
round face, gold teeth, accompanied with a Japanese man. . . . A fifty-dollar
reward will be offered for informing us of her whereabouts” (see fig. 1). The
Oharazeki 17
immigrant press carried these notices not only to help employers to capture
these women but also to control the behavior of “vain” women who disre-
garded their prescribed gender role as dedicated wives.
A key to understanding these disciplinary actions against Japanese women
was the ideology of ryōsai kenbo (“good wives and wise mothers”) pre-
vailing in the immigrant community in the 1910s. Originally, the ideol-
ogy was implemented by the Meiji government in the 1890s as a guiding
principle in woman’s higher education, which defined women primarily as
homemakers who raise loyal sons for the nation. National leaders attached
greater importance to ryōsai kenbo as the need for industrial workers and
military servicemen increased in the context of capitalist development and
Japanese expansionism after the turn of the century.54 However, this ideol-
ogy of womanhood was not simply transplanted into American soil. It was
redefined in a new setting.
As Japanese migrants began to settle in the country in the 1910s, Japanese

leaders noticed increasing numbers of picture brides who asserted individual
freedom and eloped with other men. Worrying that their scandals would
catch the attention of exclusionists, the leaders drew on the ryōsai kenbo
ideology to insist that women be confined within the home and help their
Figure 1: Runaway notice of Fujita Tora. Ōfu nippō, December 2, 1914, 3.
husbands faithfully. Thus, the ideology came to have different meaning from
the original one in Japan, reflecting the concerns of Japanese leaders who
were promoting the steady development of Japanese immigrant families
and communities in the United States.55
At the same time, the extraordinary efforts that employers, husbands, and
Japanese leaders made to discipline Japanese women suggest that they were
actually having difficulty in dealing with runaway prostitutes and barmaids.
First, although masters required prostitutes to pay off debts by prostitution
and women often agreed to do so, these rules were not legally binding in
the United States; therefore, the masters could not turn to the courts to en-
force such contracts, even if the women stole away without clearing debts.56
Second, since the beginning of Japanese migration, Japanese consuls had
been wary of “undesirable” migrants, including gamblers and prostitutes,
who would disgrace Japan’s reputation as a “civilized” nation; therefore,
if prostitutes came to Japanese consuls for help in escaping from brothels,
they were sent back to Japan.57 Finally, there were several institutions that
helped Japanese prostitutes to break away from their masters. To understand
prostitutes’ actions more fully, therefore, one must look beyond the Japanese
community and explore women’s relations with religious institutions and
legal systems in the larger American or Canadian society.
ENTERING RESCUE MISSIONS
One key institution that Japanese prostitutes and barmaids could turn to
was a Protestant rescue mission willing to offer shelter and security. Ya-
mada Waka, known as “Oyae of Arabia” of King Street, escaped from her
Seattle brothel with Tatsui Shinzaburō, a newspaper man, in 1903. After
reaching San Francisco, however, Tatsui sold Waka to a local brothel for
$150. Bitterly disappointed, Waka entered Cameron House, a Presbyterian
rescue mission.58 Considering that Tatsui lost his job and even risked his
life to rescue Waka, his action is difficult to understand. Newspaper articles
show that after selling Waka to the brothel, Tatsui attempted to meet her by
calling and writing letters. However, Rev. Sakabe, a local Japanese minister
supporting the rescue work as an unpaid assistant, turned down his request,
telling him: “Waka does not want to see you, so there is nothing you can
do about it.” Realizing that he would not be able to see Waka, Tatsui com-
mitted suicide by drinking a bottle of poison in December 1903, sending a
message to Rev. Sakabe asking: “[P]lease take good care of Hannah [Waka]
after [my] death and be kind to her.”59 No sources tell what Waka thought
Oharazeki 19
about Tatsui’s death at that time. One can only assume that she was enraged
at Tatsui and Japanese men in general, who had forced her into prostitution
since her arrival in Seattle.
Waka’s escape highlights the importance of the institution to which she
turned. Founded in 1874, Cameron House, headed by its matron, Donaldina
Cameron, rescued Chinese and Japanese women from prostitution with the
help of the local police. Regarding Asian prostitution as a visible threat to
female purity, Protestant missionaries converted the prostitutes to Christian-
ity, inculcated them with Victorian gender values, and encouraged the women
and their suitors to solemnize their marriages and make permanent homes.
The House also provided former prostitutes with domestic and job skills
essential to their independence from their masters. Yet the relation between
the missionaries and Asian prostitutes was not one of equality. Missionar-
ies often exhibited notions of Anglo-Saxon and female moral superiority as
they criticized “heathen” Asian culture for such practices as foot binding and
the selling and buying of women. More important, however, their attitudes
toward prostitutes were different from those of anti-Asian politicians or labor
leaders in that they were more concerned with Asian women’s subordination
within the household than the influx of Asian immigrants.60
Yamada Waka stayed in Cameron House between 1903 and 1905 and
played an important part in supporting its rescue efforts. As a part of sew-
ing and cooking lessons provided by the institution, Waka went to a nearby
sewing school, and learned English from a Japanese teacher, Yamada Ka-
kichi, at his private school.61 Eighteen months after her entry, she was also
baptized and given an English name “Hanna.” 62 Believing in the existence
of a transcendent God and the principle of human equality, she devoted the
rest of her time in Cameron House to rescue work to free other Japanese
women from sexual slavery.63 Cameron characterized Waka as a “clever,
interesting girl, who after sad and bitter experiences in her own life knows
so well how to sympathize with, help and guide her unfortunate sisters who
seek shelter in Our Home.”64 When Waka married an English teacher and
left the Home in 1905, Annie Sturge, Chairman of Japanese Work, observed:
“We have recently lost through marriage the help of a remarkable Japanese
woman [Waka], who, because of her past experiences and unusual educa-
tion, seemed to be especially fitted for such a work as we have in hand.” 65
Clearly, Waka contributed to the rescue work and received high recognition
within this institution.
Japanese women in Canada also turned to rescue missions, the most
famous of which was the Oriental Home and School in Victoria. In 1886,
J. E. Gardner, the son of an American Presbyterian missionary in China,

discovered that a considerable number of young Chinese girls in Victoria
were kept in “slavery worse than the slavery of the Blacks.” To save them,
Gardner rented a house, appointed a matron, and began to accommodate
Chinese prostitutes in 1887. As in Cameron House, the administrators of
Oriental Home made efforts to save Asian girls from sexual slavery, convert
them to Christianity, and provide them with domestic skills to prepare them
for marriage. The first Japanese residents were two young women from
Hiroshima, Nemoto Fumi and Miura Shime, who were sold to an English
madam in Vancouver, saved by the police, and placed in the Home in August
1895. Both were baptized immediately, and one entered domestic service,
married, and settled in Canada. The Home accepted an increasing number
of Japanese women thereafter: one in 1896, ten in 1898, six in 1899, ten in
1900, nine or ten in 1903, twenty-three in 1905, and eleven in 1906.66
For Japanese women, the Oriental Home functioned primarily as a tem-
porary shelter. Otori, a barmaid who entered the Home in 1909, was one of
the most popular barmaids in Vancouver. She enjoyed a high reputation for
her beauty and had won the first prize in a pageant held by a local newspaper
company. After changing her place of work from one restaurant to another,
she became the proprietress of a bar-restaurant, Shōgetsu. Despite her suc-
cessful career in the bar-restaurant business, she did not get along with her
husband Okajima. On the evening of April 15, 1909, Otori had a fight with
him, left the home, and entered the Oriental Home.67 The Home’s record
book confirms her story. It says that Otori “ran away from her husband, she
said he was going to sell her to a Chinaman. [The] [r]eal reason [is] a man
in the case.”68 The “man” referred here was, a vernacular newspaper account
of this incident reported, a white accountant named Clerk with whom she
became intimate while working in the bar-restaurant.69 When Otori entered
the Oriental Home, she had already conceived his baby, but the record book
says that she “[g]ot rid of a baby last of Aug/09,” suggesting that she had an
abortion after coming to the Home. Clerk visited the Home several times,
but Ida Snyder, the superintendent, did not allow him to see her.70 Snyder
must have disapproved of the couple’s former conduct, particularly their
sexual relations outside marriage.
During her four years in the Home, Otori acquired English skills, learned
cooking, and worked as a servant to a local Canadian family.71 She was
baptized in April 1911.72 A series of newspaper articles suggests, however,
that Otori had not been entirely freed from her complex relations with her
husband and other men. On one evening in August 1913, she went to a
Oharazeki 21
movie with her friend, and on her way back home, she was waylaid by her
husband Okajima, who took her watch and jewelry by force. Luckily, a rail-
road conductor helped her get on a train, and she was unhurt. According to a
newspaper account of the incident, it was the husband’s lingering affection
for her that had made him attempt to see her in person for the past three
years.73 Otori remained in Victoria for a while under the protection of local
institutions, but her life in Canada ended abruptly in the next month with
her departure for Japan. We do not know why she left Canada, except that
sometime between her husband’s imprisonment and her departure, she was
threatened by a man who knew her life and work in Hawaii.74 The Oriental
Home’s record book notes that the barmaid Otori “Married in Japan Spring
of 1916.”75
Despite white reformers’ efforts to “rescue” Japanese prostitutes, Japanese
immigrants were not so enthusiastic about the rescue work itself. The admin-
istrators of Cameron House appreciated the work of unpaid male Japanese
assistants, including Rev. Sakabe Tasaburō, a minister of the San Francisco
Japanese Church of Christ, who offered Japanese residents Christian teach-
ings, held marriage ceremonies, and managed a sewing school for them. No
Japanese churchwomen appeared in the House’s annual reports, and white
missionaries continued to express the need for female Japanese helpers who
would replace Yamada Waka.76 Similarly, in the Oriental Home, the records
included only the names of a few male Japanese ministers cooperating with
the reformers, including Rev. Kaburagi Gorō of the Japanese Methodist
Church in Vancouver, who brought Japanese women to the Home and held
marriage ceremonies for them. There was no indication of strong commit-
ment of the local Japanese community to the rescue work.77 As Rumi Yas-
utake wrote, the primary concern of middle-class Japanese churchwomen and
immigrant leaders from the 1890s to the 1910s was the general reputation
of Japanese residents among middle-class white Americans. To protect the
image of Japanese as men and women of fine moral and civic qualities, they
focused on excluding prostitutes from their community or protecting “vir-
tuous” women from falling into prostitution rather than “rescuing” women
who were already working in the trade.78
Japanese anti-prostitution reforms could be more successful when the
reformers responded to the broader needs of the immigrant community.
In Seattle, for example, Japanese ministers and Mark A. Matthews, a local
Methodist minister, organized the Humane Society ( jindō kyōkai) in 1906 to
save Japanese women from prostitution, place them in the Woman’s Home
(nihon fujin hōmu) attached to the Japanese Baptist Church of Seattle, and
prepare the women for marriage.79 However, the administrators of the Wom-
an’s Home, including its founder, Okazaki Yoshiko, were more interested
in offering newly arrived Japanese women and children a temporary resi-
dence to protect them from vice operators in the nearby red-light district. As
Japanese brides increased after the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907–1908,
the Woman’s Home accommodated a variety of women, including picture
brides who disliked their husbands, self-supporting women, and widows
left with children.80 Japanese ministers also held marriage ceremonies for
former barmaids who wished to marry their boyfriends after divorcing their
abusive husbands.81 These activities also met the needs of immigrant leaders
who wished to solve marital problems among Japanese couples, including
mismatches, domestic violence, and brides’ elopement with other men (ka-
keochi), before these “scandals” reached the American public.82 Although
Japanese ministers and some church members had their own religious mis-
sion to “rescue” women from sexual “slavery,” their anti-prostitution reforms
Figure 2: Japanese
Baptist Woman’s
Home, circa 1917. The
sign above the porch
says “Japanese Wom-
an’s Home.” Courtesy
of the Japanese Baptist
Church of Seattle,
Washington.
Oharazeki 23
needed to be linked to various issues that emerged in the Japanese immigrant

community when its members were trying to adapt themselves to American
society as permanent settlers.
DIVORCING HUSBANDS
Whereas Protestant rescue homes functioned as one common route out

of prostitution and unhappy marriages, more assertive women used the
American judicial system to end their relation with pimp-husbands. They
hired lawyers and Japanese interpreters (tsūben) and filed for divorce from
their abusive husbands.83 Divorce cases filed by Japanese prostitutes and
barmaids in Seattle and Sacramento before 1920 illustrate the point.84
Like prostitutes who appealed to the police for help, the women who
turned to the courts were typically in a desperate situation. Kinoshita Mine,
a sixteen-year-old Japanese bride in Seattle, told her story before Judge
Arthur Griffin in 1908: “I meet Yasuzo in Osako [sic] and my father say
I marry him. I do. We come to San Francisco. He hires me out to another
man. He takes me to Tacoma. [A] Chinese woman tells me that I don’t be a
slave in America. I run away in the night and come to Seattle.”85 Her story
was like those of many other prostitutes. She had married Yasuzo in Japan,
in November 1901, and the couple journeyed to San Francisco in March
1903. Over time, she observed, Yasuzo was “growing tired of [her] and hav-
ing no longer any love or affection for her” and sold her to another Japanese
man “as if she were the slave or property of the said defendant [Yasuzo].”
In early 1907 her new master took her to Portland where she learned from
a Chinese woman that “slavery in any form was not tolerated in the United
States of America and that she need not and could not be held in bondage by
anyone.” She ran away from her master, moved to Seattle, and while working
and supporting herself there, appealed to the court to grant her a divorce in
May 1908. Yasuzo failed to appear in the court, and Mine won the case.86
Husbands often failed to answer their wives’ complaints, and the women
won the suits without difficulty; in some cases, however, husbands did not
remain silent and let their wives win in court. Ōta Kimi, a prostitute in
Sacramento, filed for divorce from her husband on the grounds of extreme
cruelty in 1911. She complained that her husband Shōhei had forced her into
prostitution in several towns in Utah and California during the past three
years. Every time she protested against living in a brothel, her husband took
out a pistol and told her: “If you leave this house, I will kill you.” Next month
Shōhei appeared in court to demur, arguing that Kimi “does not state facts
sufficient to constitute a cause of action.” He also claimed that she had had
an adulterous relation with a man named Higashida and “cohabited with
[him] and had sexual intercourse with him.” He petitioned the court not to
grant her any money and give him the cost of legal action.87 Although Shōhei
did force Kimi into prostitution, the disclosure of her adultery was effective
enough to invalidate a felony charge filed against Shōhei for violating the
state law that penalized husbands placing wives in brothels.88
Subsequent developments forced Kimi to go extremes. After being dis-
charged, Shōhei started hanging around the hotel where Kimi was staying,
seeking an opportunity to talk to her. On February 19, 1912, he finally broke
into her room, and the couple got into a bitter argument, which developed
into a gunfight. An extra edition of the Sacramento Daily News reported:
“Three bullets went through the man’s head and pushed his brain out. He
died instantly in a pool of blood.” Kimi was soon arrested by the order of
the Grand Jury.89 Newspaper accounts revealed that their family lives had
been essentially broken since their marriage. They had two children, but
Shōhei had never worked, living off Kimi’s earnings from prostitution. At
some point, Kimi gave him $800, and Shōhei agreed to return to Japan.
And yet, once Kimi took up with another man, he attempted to restore his
relations with her.90 Kimi might have realized that a divorce would not stop
him from interfering in her life.
Like prostitutes, married Japanese barmaids filed for divorce from their
husbands, usually on the grounds of extreme cruelty and failure to pro-
vide support; oftentimes, however, a more important reason behind bar-
maids’ decision to divorce their husbands—a reason they rarely presented
in court—was their adulterous relations with other men. Oima, a barmaid
in Seattle, attempted to divorce her husband in order to marry her boyfriend
in 1915. Oima and her husband, Tomizō, had married in Japan and managed
a Western-style bar-cum-brothel (chabuya) in Yokohama. They also had a
thirteen-year-old son under the care of their family in Japan. After coming
to Seattle, Oima started working as a barmaid, and over time, became inti-
mate with Kawabata, a foreman in Blaine Cannery, and asked Tomizō for
a divorce. Worrying that her misdeeds would bring disgrace on him and his
family in Japan, he agreed to the divorce on the condition that Oima would
return to Japan. However, Oima refused to obey his order and carried the
struggle into the courtroom to divorce her husband.91
In court, Oima complained that her husband neglected to provide for
her throughout the marriage, and she supported herself by working in
Oharazeki 25
bar-restaurants in Seattle. After coming to the United States, Oima noted,

her husband became an alcoholic, physically abused her several times, and
often took money from her by force. She concluded that she had “lost all love
for the defendant and believes that it will be absolutely impossible for her to
ever again live with the defendant as husband and wife.”92 Her husband, then,
fought back, filing a suit against Oima for adultery. A public prosecutor issued
a warrant for the arrest of Oima and her boyfriend, Kawabata.93 Two weeks
later, a local Japanese-language newspaper reported that someone intervened
in this dispute, and it was decided that Oima would be sent back to Japan.94
Yet, contrary to what the newspaper reported, the court record reveals that
Oima remained in the United States and pursued the divorce case. In the fi-
nal verdict returned on May 21, 1915, Oima won the suit, getting a divorce,
custody of her son, and the right to use her maiden name.95 A year after the
divorce, she married her boyfriend and started a new life in Tacoma.96
One must not view these prostitutes’ and barmaids’ court struggles as
exceptional cases filed by exceptional women. Their actions represent gen-
eral characteristics of Japanese immigrant women’s attempts to break their
marriages in the early twentieth century. Between 1907 and 1920, over 160
Japanese couples filed for divorce in Seattle and Sacramento. In both loca-
tions, plaintiffs were largely women (69 percent in Seattle and 61 percent in
Sacramento). Japanese women typically filed for divorce on the grounds that
their husbands neglected to provide and forced them to seek work outside
the home to support themselves and their children (mentioned 52 times in
Seattle and 17 times in Sacramento, overall in 66 percent of all cases).97
Japanese women rarely provided information about what kinds of work
they did to support themselves, but local Japanese-language newspaper ar-
ticles, which reported on these divorce cases, sometimes did. Of the twelve
female divorce petitioners in Seattle whose occupations were known, eight
worked as waitresses or barmaids, one did domestic service, one worked
as a barber, one worked in a laundry, and one worked first in a restaurant
and later in a barbershop. In Sacramento, five women worked as waitresses
or barmaids, one worked as a prostitute, and one did domestic service.98
These findings give some credibility to a vernacular newspaper account that
reported in 1909 that the vast majority of the wives of divorcing Japanese
couples in the preceding two years were barmaids or actresses.99
The distribution of divorcing women’s employment reflected, to some
extent, the general pattern of Japanese businesses in the two cities. Seattle
developed as a regional trading and supply center in the Pacific Northwest,
and Japanese migrant laborers returned to the city during breaks in their work.
While staying at cheap inns in its Japantown, they enjoyed Japanese food
and conversations with barmaids over drinks in restaurants, played pool with
friends, had their hair cut, and went to Japanese-style public baths (sentō).
Not surprisingly, according to a government survey conducted in 1909, board-
ing houses, restaurants, laundries, and pool halls were the primary Japanese
businesses in Seattle.100 The situation was similar in Sacramento, a regional
“hub” of agricultural laborers working in the Sacramento Valley, a major
fruit- and vegetable-producing region in the American West. As in Seattle,
Sacramento’s Japanese small businesses—including lodging houses, restau-
rants, and barbershops—thrived by caring for the floating male population.101
Accordingly, there would have been good opportunities for married Japanese
women to earn wages in these establishments and support their families.
Remarkably, despite the varying situations in which women decided to
divorce their husbands, what emerges in their accounts was the women’s
growing sense of independence from their husbands.102 Unlike other Japa-
nese immigrant women who contributed to the family economy in the form
of unpaid labor on farms and in shops, barmaids acquired an independent
source of income—wages and tips—which probably amounted to about
$100 a month in the 1910s.103 The figure was two to three times more than
male Japanese workers earned during the same period ($30–40/month).104
Their earnings allowed them to support themselves, their husbands, and their
children, and hire lawyers and interpreters when they filed for divorce. Thus,
as they worked in bar-restaurants, their knowledge and experiences made
them realize a possibility of living without abusive husbands who drank
and gambled away their hard-earned money. Their growing awareness of the
value of their own labor was evident when a Seattle waitress requested the
court to restrain her husband from touching money in their bank account,
or when a Sacramento barmaid asked the court to order her husband to
“restore to plaintiff her gold watch.”105 Through wage-earning experiences,
these women acquired a sense of social and economic independence unusual
among Japanese women in the early twentieth century.106
THE DECLINE OF PROSTITUTION

AND THE FATES OF PROSTITUTES
Gradually, Japanese prostitution in North America declined over the course

of the 1910s. In 1910, the White Slave Traffic Act, known as the Mann Act,
allowed federal officials to deport foreign women who practiced prostitution
Oharazeki 27
anytime after their entry into the country, and dozens of Japanese prostitutes
were deported from Pacific Coast ports in 1911 and 1913.107 Increasing num-
bers of Japanese men were also prosecuted on the charge of forcing women
into prostitution and transporting prostitutes across state lines during the
same period.108 By the end of World War I, most municipal governments
abandoned the policy of toleration, and major red-light districts—including
Seattle’s “Deadline” and San Francisco’s Barbary Coast—were closed.109
At the same time, reform activities rapidly increased within the Japanese
community, as Japanese leaders struggled to deal with growing hostilities
against the Japanese in American society. Clandestine prostitution did con-
tinue in bar-restaurants, but the demand for such establishments declined as
the number of Japanese women increased in the 1910s. In 1920, the Japanese
government stopped issuing passports to Japanese brides, and it became no
longer possible for Japanese men to bring over women for prostitution.
It is difficult to generalize about the fate of prostitutes and barmaids
because of the lack of their firsthand accounts, but the surviving sources
suggest that there were some patterns. Despite many dangers associated
with the work, some former prostitutes obviously made a large sum and
returned home. Kato Yasu, a former resident in Nelson, British Columbia,
who died in Tokyo in August 1907, left two buildings and furniture valued
at $4,000. In her will she left one of the buildings to her two sons in Tokyo
and the other to a man named Charles Waterman in Nelson. The furniture
was divided among her husband and two sons. She asked Waterman to pay
“the rents and profits issuing from such buildings” to her sons for a period
of five years.110 The will does not say her former occupation in Nelson, but
it seems likely that she worked as a prostitute or madam. When a Japa-
nese journalist visited Nelson in 1908–1909, the only Japanese women he
found were prostitutes; there was no other occupation that enabled Japanese
women to earn such a large sum of money in this period.111 The value of
Yasu’s estate was enormous, considering that Japanese sawmill workers in
Canada earned $0.90 a day in 1902 and relatively well-paid Japanese min-
ers received $1.37 a day in 1905.112 Yasu may have hired and supervised
Japanese girls as a madam and returned to Japan after retiring.113
Former prostitutes could also be effective recruiters of Japanese girls for
sex work in North America. Kawaguchi Masu, for instance, was originally
a daughter of a navy officer in Shinagawa, Tokyo, who left her home at the
age of sixteen to escape from an arranged marriage, followed a Japanese
man to Hawaii, and became a common prostitute. She later moved with
another man to San Francisco, where they managed a brothel. In 1911, when
at the age of thirty-six, Masu returned to Yokohama to recruit girls, she had
become a procuress “stylishly dressed in western clothing.”114 Working un-
der another major procurer in Hong Kong, she was reported to have been
“living in luxury, owning impressive mansions in Hong Kong, and keeping
men in several places.”115 Not all procuresses were as successful as Masu,
but considering some existing patterns of women’s migration from specific
rural villages in Japan to North American brothels, it seems likely that these
“stylishly dressed” procuresses with large sums of money played key roles
in persuading young women to follow their examples.
The majority of common prostitutes were forced to repatriate after the
passage of the Mann Act in 1910. Deputy Consul Abe Kihachi’s brief bio-
graphical sketches of seventeen prostitutes deported from Seattle in 1910
give a glimpse into the careers of Japanese prostitutes in the North Ameri-
can West. The vast majority arrived in Hawaii or the West Coast when they
were in their late teens or early twenties, and their careers spanned eight
to ten years on average. They worked in various parts of the Pacific North-
west and northern California, moving from one place to another with their
“husbands,” who were obviously living off their earnings from prostitu-
tion.116 It appears, however, that these prostitutes could also send some of
their earnings to their families in Japan. One woman was reported to have
remitted over 10,000 yen to her family in Japan, and another woman had
supported her brother in Japan throughout the time when he had attended
college.117 Their lives after repatriation are not known, but considering their
financial contribution to their ancestral households during their stay in North
America, they would have received recognition from their families and vil-
lagers, as seen in the cases of former prostitutes who had worked in China
and Southeast Asia during the same period.118
Unlike prostitutes, barmaids could continue to stay in the United States
after 1910, and the high wages offered in restaurants permitted them to live
independently. In January 1914, Ishibashi Kiyo filed for divorce from her
husband on the grounds of extreme cruelty, demanding custody of her two
children and $6,000 saved in the couple’s account. No decision was made
for this case, and she disappeared from public records.119 Thirty-one years
later, however, she reappeared in the War Relocation Authority records as an
internee of the Tule Lake Relocation Center, California. She was recorded
as “single,” but according to the staff who filled out her form, “[her] hus-
band went to Japan about 15 years ago for medical reasons and has never
returned,” and she also had a grown-up daughter who “has a family of 5.”
Before the war, she had lived in King County, Washington, for thirty years,
Oharazeki 29
during which she lived at two hotels and “worked as a waitress at the Ki-
yomizu Restaurant for two years.”120 Although she does not appear to have
maintained good relations with her husband, her work in bar-restaurants
enabled her to support her children and live in hotel rooms for many years.
There was also a chance for barmaids to take over the restaurant business
from former employers or deceased husbands. These proprietresses (okami)
gained some respect for their management and supervisory skills; many
of them were actually popular figures in the Japanese community. Fellow
immigrants often recalled the proprietresses as women with the spirit of
chivalry (ninkyō or kyōki) who always sympathized with the plight of pio-
neering migrants and helped them out.121
Japanese women became barmaids for various reasons, but for the majority
of barmaids who met suitors at work, their stays in North America appear to
have become permanent. Recall the barmaid Ochiyo who started working in
a local restaurant because of her husband’s unemployment. She soon became
close to a customer and fled from her husband with him. The enraged husband
and his friends tracked her down, captured Ochiyo, and decided to send her
back to Japan. Ochiyo consistently opposed doing so on the ground that she
had no face to show her mother-in-law. She deserted her husband once again
in February 1912 and filed for divorce from her husband nine months later. In
July 1914, she married her suitor, and according to their marriage certificate,
the couple was managing a lodging house in Seattle.122 Barmaids reported
in newspaper articles often resisting deportation, and their decisions to seek
divorce under American law indicated their wish to remain in the country
with suitors (otherwise, the couples would be charged with adultery). It is
also important to note that Japanese immigrant society did not necessarily
discourage barmaids from getting married. Rather, barmaids’ marriages were
described as happy occasions in immigrant accounts and newspaper articles
so long as these women showed signs of becoming good housekeepers and
mothers.123 The lack of women and the tendency toward permanent settlement
among Japanese migrants in the 1910s permitted barmaids to blend into the
immigrant community and find security through marriage.
In concluding this analysis of Japanese prostitutes in the American West,

I want to stress that the vast majority of Japanese immigrants had stable
family lives. Japanese brides, although often shocked by the hard realities
in the United States, typically decided to stay with their husbands and raised
their children, and by 1924, when the U.S. government closed its doors to
the Japanese, most immigrant parents had made up their minds to make the
country their permanent home. At the same time, however, one must also
keep in mind that the adaptation to the American environment varied from
person to person. Some prostitutes viewed migration to North America as
a temporary measure to earn money and help their families in Japan. There
was a large demand for them among lonely Japanese laborers who could
not earn enough to start their own families. Some prostitutes worked until
clearing off their debts or redeemed their freedom through the payment of
consolation money; others, dissatisfied with abusive masters, ran away with
boyfriends or entered Protestant homes. Japanese brides agreed to work in
bar-restaurants to help the household economy, but if the husbands became
abusive or remained indolent, they chose to file for divorce to start new lives
with their suitors in a new land.
To make sense of these prostitutes’ and barmaids’ experiences, it is neces-
sary to consider the nature of the American economy that historically had
exploited Asians as disposable labor, race-based immigration policy that had
prevented family formation among Asians, and the continuing influence of
the patriarchal family system carried from Japan. But one must also be care-
ful not to subsume their diverse experiences into any particular framework
of working-class formation, racial formation, or feminist struggle because
these women had different problems and took actions based on their own
needs. Indeed, what is striking in the analysis of their stories is the women’s
clear understanding of their life circumstances, their pragmatic attempts
to improve their lives by using available resources, and the absence of any
particular class, racial, or feminist rhetoric. Admittedly, immigration his-
torians need to be mindful of major issues and paradigms specific to their
“fields” or “groups,” but as Dirk Hoerder writes, they also sometimes need
to “immerse” themselves in the life-worlds of their subjects and embrace
the full complexity of human experiences at the individual level in order to
recover the “total experience” of immigrants.124 This would be a practical
way to go beyond compartmentalized approaches and pursue a more holistic
understanding of immigrant life in America.125
NOTES
In writing Japanese names, this article follows East Asian practice—surnames first. For
scholars whose works were published in English, or individuals whose names appeared in
English-language sources, I follow Western practice—given names first. I use pseudonyms
for the individual names of prostitutes, barmaids, and men related to them, except Yamada
Waka, whose career has already been widely known in the public. I use macrons to indicate
long vowel sounds in Japanese words. If Japanese names appear only in English-language
Oharazeki 31
sources (i.e., without macrons), I leave them as they are. I use “[sic]” to indicate that the
name is wrongly spelled.
For useful critiques and suggestions, I would like to thank JAEH reviewers and Editor
John J. Bukowczyk. I am greatly indebted to Professor Thomas Dublin for providing help
and guidance at various stages of research and writing.
1. Sylvia J. Yanagisako, Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship among Japanese
Americans (Seattle, 1985); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, and War Brides: Three Genera-
tions of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia, PA, 1986); May T.
Nakano, Japanese American Women: Three Generations, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, CA, 1990),
Parts I and II; Valerie J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Com-
munity in California (Ithaca, NY, 1993); Linda Tamura, The Hood River Issei: An Oral
History of Japanese Settlers in Oregon’s Hood River Valley (Urbana, IL, 1993); Brian Ma-
saru Hayashi, ‘For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren’: Assimilation, Nationalism, and
Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942 (Stanford, 1995), chap. 6;
Eileen Sunada Sarasohn, Issei Women: Echoes from Another Frontier (Palo Alto, CA, 1998);
Susan L. Smith, Japanese American Midwives: Culture, Community, and Health Politics,
1880–1950 (Urbana, IL, 2005).
2. Yuji Ichioka, “Ameyuki-san: Japanese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,”
Amerasia Journal 4, no. 1 (1977): 1–21; Donald Teruo Hata Jr., “Undesirables,” Early
Immigrants and the Anti-Japanese Movement in San Francisco, 1892–1893: Prelude to Ex-
clusion (New York, 1978), chap. 2; Yuji Ichioka, “Amerika Nadeshiko: Japanese Immigrant
Women in the United States, 1900–1924,” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 2 (May 1980):
348–54; Kei Tanaka, “Japanese Picture Marriage and the Image of Immigrant Women in
Early Twentieth-Century California,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 15 (2004):
127–38; Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in
Japanese America (New York, 2005), chap. 2.
3. Ichioka, “Ameyuki-san.”
4. Cecilia M. Tsu, “Sex, Lies, and Agriculture: Reconstructing Japanese Immigrant Gen-
der Relations in Rural California, 1900–1913,” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 2 (May
2009): 171–209.
5. On the call for more attention to gender in the social formation of Asian Americans,
see Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture
(Seattle, 1994), chap. 3; Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and
Love (Lanham, MD, 2008). Historians may also learn much from literary scholars making
efforts to tease out gender differences and sexual tensions often hidden in Asian American
political writing. As an example of the approach, see Rachel C. Lee, The Americans of Asian
American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton, NJ, 1999).
6. The primary source for my analysis in this paragraph is Sone Hiromi, Shōfu to kin-
sei shakai [Prostitutes and early modern society] (Tokyo, 2003), 12–17, 46–66, 185–200.
See also Yamamoto Shun’ichi, Nihon kōshō-shi [History of Japanese licensed prostitution]
(Tokyo, 1983), 4–5, 10–18; Usami Misako, Shukuba to meshimori onna [Post-stations and
serving girls] (Tokyo, 2000), 16–19.
7. For a good overview of the reorganization of the licensed prostitution system in the
Meiji period, see Fujime Yuki, Sei no rekishigaku: Kōshō seido, dataizai, taisei kara bais-
hun bōshihō, yūsei hogohō taisei e [Historical study of sex: From licensed prostitution and
criminalized abortions to the Prostitution Prevention Law and the Eugenic Protection Law]
(Tokyo, 1997), 89–93, 96–99. On the changing conception of male sexuality, prostitution,
and venereal diseases, see Fujino Yutaka, Sei no kokka kanri: Baibaishun no kingendaishi
[State management of sex: Modern history of prostitution] (Tokyo, 2001), 29–47; Sabine
Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley, 2003),
chap. 1.
8. Shigekazu Morikuri, “Karayuki-san and Shingintori: Prostitution and the Industrial
Economy in Amakusa at the End of the Edo Period,” in Gender and Japanese History, Vol. 1,
ed. Haruko Wakita, Anne Bouchy, and Chizuko Ueno (Osaka, 1999), 331; Bill Mihalopoulos,
“Ousting the ‘Prostitute’: Retelling the Story of the Karayuki-san,” Postcolonial Studies 4,
no. 2 (2001): 180–84.
9. For example, Iwamoto Yoshiharu, “Kaigai nihon fujoshi no shūbun” [Scandal about
Japanese women abroad], Jogaku zasshi 265 (May 1891): 4–5; “Shimabara Amakusa no
shisatsu” [Investigation of Shimabara and Amakusa], Fujin shimpō [Woman’s herald] 266
(September 1919): 12–13; Kubushiro Ochimi, Haishō hitosuji [My continuous fight against
prostitution] (Tokyo, 1973), 65–66. Similar accounts appeared in a newspaper published
in colonial Manchuria as well. For instance, see “Furyōken naru onna domo” [Thoughtless
women], Manshū nichi nichi [Manchuria daily news], November 15, 1907: 5; “Daitan na
bishōjo” [Audacious beautiful girl], Manshū nichi nichi, October 19, 1913: 5.
10. The link between women’s labor migration within Japan and prostitutes’ overseas
migration has been pointed out by historians. See Mori Katsumi, Jinshin baibai: Kaigai
dekasegi onna [Selling and buying of people: Female labor migrants overseas] (Tokyo,
1959), chap. 3; Shimizu Hiroshi and Hirakawa Hitoshi, Karayuki-san to keizai shinshutsu:
Sekai keizai no naka no shingapōru nihon kankei-shi [Karayuki-san and economic advance-
ment: Singapore-Japan relations in the world economy] (Tokyo, 1998); Tang Quan, Umi wo
koeta tsuyagoto: Nicchū bunka kōryū hishi [Love affairs beyond the ocean: Secret history
of Japan-China cultural relations] (Tokyo, 2005), 120–21, 127–30.
11. For example, according to Vancouver Deputy Consul Abe’s biographical sketches of
seventeen Japanese prostitutes deported from Seattle in 1910, seven first arrived in Hawaii
and later moved to the mainland between 1898 and 1903. Others migrated directly to Vic-
toria, Seattle, or San Francisco. Report of Seattle Consul Abe Kihachi, January 14, 1911,
Japanese Foreign Ministry Archival Documents (hereafter cited as JFMAD), 3.8.8.6., Vol.
2, the Diplomatic Record Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo. On Japanese
prostitution in Hawaii, see Joan Hori, “Japanese Prostitution in Hawaii during the Immigra-
tion Period,” Hawaiian Journal of History 15 (1981): 113–24; Miyamoto Natsuki, “Keiyaku
imin jidai no honoruru nihonjin shakai to nihonjin baishunfu” [Japanese immigrant society
and Japanese prostitutes during the labor immigration era], Hikaku shakai bunka kenkyū 12
(2002): 47–57.
12. The first consular report on Japanese prostitutes that I found was dated March 16,
1890. However, Consul Sugimura Fukashi wrote in the report that he had sent another report
one year before. So the arrivals of prostitutes pre-dated this report. Report of Vancouver
Consul Sugimura, March 16, 1890, JFMAD, 3.8.5.11, Vol. 1. For a few examples of the
sensational coverage of Japanese prostitution in American newspapers in this period, see
“Japanese Women—The Importation for Immoral Purposes,” San Francisco Bulletin, Janu-
ary 10, 1890: 1; “Whitechapel Cleaned Out,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 19, 1891: 8.
13. Report of San Francisco Consul Mutsu Kōkichi, August 11, 1898, Report of Tacoma
Oharazeki 33
Consul Saitō Miki, April 2, 1897, and Report of Vancouver Consul Shimizu Seizaburō,
January 5, 1899, all in JFMAD, 4.2.2.99.
14. Letter of Yoneda Itsushū, December 14, 1895, JFMAD, 3.8.2.49, Vol. 1.
15. Report of Officer Kawasaki Matsutarō, June 21, 1896, JFMAD 3.8.2.49, Vol. 1.
16. For the analysis of the origins of Japanese prostitutes and procurers in North America
from the 1890s to the 1910s, see Kazuhiro Oharazeki, “Japanese Prostitutes in the Pacific
Northwest, 1887–1920” (PhD diss., Binghamton University, 2008), chap. 2.
17. Yamazaki Tomoko, Ameyuki-san no uta: Yamada Waka no sūki naru shōgai [Story of
ameyuki-san: The Life of Yamada Waka] (Tokyo, 1978), 48–59.
18. Yamada Waka, “Sanjū yonen mae” [Over thirty years ago], Fujin to shakai 105 (Oc-
tober 1929): 14–15.
19. Yamada Waka, “Amerika no fujin e” [To American ladies], Renai no shakaiteki igi
[Social significance of love] (1920; Tokyo, 2000), 185; Yamazaki, Ameyuki-san no uta,
60–62.
20. “Moto wa rippa na jogakusei” [She used to be an honorable student], Shin sekai, Janu-
ary 23, 1911, 5; “Tomi no zange dan” [Confession of Tomi], Shin sekai, April 6–8, 1911, 3.
For more on this case, see “Shuzo Nishida,” February 1911, file no. 4879, the United States
District Court, the Northern District of California, Record Group 21, the National Archives
and Record Administration (hereafter cited as RG 21, NA), San Bruno; “Japanese Cook
Held for Serious Crime,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 11, 1911: 16; “White Slaver
Gets a Long Prison Sentence,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 7, 1911: 11.
21. Iino Masako, “Amerika e no imin: Issei no josei tachi” [Immigrants to America: Issei
women], Rekishi hyōron 1 (1993): 68; Tanaka, “Japanese Picture Marriage,” 123; Yanagi-
sawa Ikumi, “‘Shashin hanayome’ wa ‘otto no dorei’ dattanoka?” [Were “picture brides”
“husbands’ slaves”?], in Shashin hanayome, sensō hanayome no tadotta michi [Paths picture
brides and war brides followed], ed. Shimada Noriko (Tokyo, 2009), 56–60.
22. Richard Berner, Seattle 1900–1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence, to Restora-
tion (Seattle, WA, 1991), 57.
23. The account of Nellie Fife, the matron of the Japanese Woman’s Home, quoted in
Frances M. Schuyler, Japanese Women and Children in Seattle (Chicago, 1910), 17–18,
courtesy of the Japanese Baptist Church of Seattle.
24. Okina Kyūin, Okina Kyūin zenshū [Complete works of Okina Kyūin], Vol. 2 (Toyama,
1972), 146.
25. Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from
1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle, WA, 1994), 28.
26. Itō Kazuo, Hokubei hyakunen-zakura [Hundred-year-old cherry blossoms in North
America] (1969; Tokyo, 1973), 891; Okina, Okina Kyūin zenshū, Vol. 2, 146.
27. Jay Moynahan, Butte’s Sportin’ Women, 1880–1920: The Famous Red Light District
and a List of Over 1,200 Names (Spokane, WA, 2003), 20.
28. These figures come from Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of
the San Francisco Underworld (1933; New York, 2008), 259. See also Judy Yung, Unbound
Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1995), 31.
29. A former Japanese sawmill worker in Spokane recalled: “high-class white prostitutes
rejected to meet the Japanese as customers,” but “Japanese customers were allowed to have
the service of ‘third-grade’ white women, who charged $2.00.” See Itō Kazuo, Zoku hokubei
hyakunen-zakura [Sequel to hundred-year-old cherry blossoms in North America] (1969;
Tokyo, 1973), 176. In Butte, according to Jay Moynahan, “[m]any non-Chinese sportin’
women would not sell their services to Chinese men, thus forcing these men to seek out
Chinese women.” See Moynahan, Butte’s Sportin’ Women, 20.
30. Ichioka, “Ameyuki-san,” 10.
31. Lucie Cheng, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century
America,” in Labor Immigration Under Capitalism, ed. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich
(Berkeley, 1984), 421. The male-female ratio among Chinese in the three Pacific Coast states
was 24:1 in 1890 and 14:1 in 1900. Department of Interior, Census Office, Eleventh Census
of the United States: 1890, Vol. 1: Population (Washington, DC, 1895), 488; Twelfth Census
of the United States: 1900, Vol. 1: Population (Washington, DC, 1901), 492.
32. Yung, Unbound Feet, 32–33; Cheng, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved,” 410, 422.
33. The figure is estimated from the average amount of debts prostitutes owed their pimp-
husbands, which appeared in Shin sekai articles on February 26, 1907: 3, March 8, 1909:
6, September 19, 1910: 4, and February 2, 1911: 3. The debts typically included advances
and passage. For popular women, the amount of debts came to as much as $2,000–$2,700.
34. Report of San Francisco Consul Mutsu Kōkichi, August 11, 1898, JFMAD, 4.2.2.99.
35. Joan S. Wang, “The Double Burdens of Immigrant Nationalism: The Relationship
between Chinese and Japanese in the American West, 1880s–1920s,” Journal of American
Ethnic History 27, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 33–34.
36. Report of Secretary Fujita Toshirō, JFMAD, 3.8.2.12, Vol. 1; Osada Shōhei, Kanada
no makutsu [Red-light district in Canada] (Vancouver, BC, 1909), 25–26.
37. See, for instance, the account of Tamesa Uhachi, a former deliveryman in Seattle who
had been acquainted with local Japanese prostitutes at the turn of the century, quoted in
Yamazaki, Ameyuki-san no uta, 97–98; Hearing of Ogata Rise, March 25, 1909, and Report of
Inspector J. H. Barbour, November 23, 1908, in File No. 52241/33, Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Series A: Subject Correspondence Files, Part 5: Prostitution and
“White Slavery,” 1902–1903, ed. Alan Kraut (Bethesda, MD, 1996), microfilm reel 1.
38. See the series of coverage of this murder: “Strangled and Robbed,” Seattle Post-
Intelligencer, May 31, 1899: 12; “Strangler’s Victim Dead,” June 1, 1899: 5; “Death and
Funerals,” June 10, 1899: 10; “Tracing the Strangler,” June 13, 1899: 6. The same year,
another Japanese prostitute in the Cosmo House was choked to death and robbed of her gold
bracelets. “Japanese Woman Choked,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 30, 1899: 12.
Similar brutal murders of Japanese prostitutes were also reported in Canada. See Constable
Upper, “Re murder of Jennie Yoshihara at Revelstoke on 19th April, 1905,” in GR-0429, Box
12, File 1, Folio 1316/05, the British Columbia Archives (hereafter cited as BC Archives),
Victoria, British Columbia.
39. Cheng, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved,” 411; Yung, Unbound Feet, 31–32.
40. Ichioka, “Ameyuki-san,” 10–11.
41. Okina, Okina Kyūin zenshū, Vol. 2, 154. See also Report of Immigration Inspector
F. N. Steele, August 10, 1908, JFMAD, 3.8.8.6, Vol. 2.
42. The revised act of 1907 and 1910 granted officials power to deport foreign women
who practiced prostitution after their entries. The implication of these changes for Japanese
women will be discussed later in the last section of this article.
43. “Hakkeitei no Bijin” [Beautiful woman in the Hakkeitei restaurant], Tairiku nippō
[Continental news], July 14, 1908: 5; and “Dengon” [Message from the readers], Tairiku
nippō, July 15, 17, 20, 22, 1908: 4.
Oharazeki 35
44. Itō, Zoku hokubei hyakunen-zakura, 88.

45. In 1910, Japanese men outnumbered Japanese women by 7 to 1. As late as 1920,
there were almost twice as many Japanese men as women (189.8:100). See Department of
Commerce, Bureau of Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Vol. 1: Popu-
lation (Washington, DC, 1913), 273; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Vol. 2:
Population (Washington, DC, 1922), 110.
46. This story of Ochiyo and Kunitarō appeared in the following issues of Taihoku nippō
[Great Northern daily news]: January 30 and February 6, 1911: 5.
47. “Ninpu no rikon soshō” [Pregnant woman’s divorce case], Shin sekai, March 12,
1915: 5.
48. “Otaka to sono kuromaku” [Otaka and her wirepuller], Part III, Taihoku nippō, Febru-
ary 24, 1913: 5.
49. “Otaka to sono kuromaku,” Part IV, Taihoku nippō, February 25, 1913: 5.
50. Canada actually maintained one of the lowest divorce rates in Western societies until
the 1960s. More on the comparison between Japanese divorce in the western United States
and Canada, see Oharazeki, “Japanese Prostitutes in the Pacific Northwest,” 157–61.
51. Harald Fuess, Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender, and the State, 1600–2000 (Stanford,
CA, 2004), 4, 6, 57–67, 82–91, 114–18, 127, 130, chap. 3 passim.
52.  Importation and Harboring of Women for Immoral Purposes (Washington, DC, 1909),
42–43, available in the collection of the reports of the Immigration Commission at Stanford
University Libraries’ website, http://collections.stanford.edu/serialset/bin/page?forward=home
(accessed February 12, 2012) (hereafter cited as Stanford University Libraries’ Collection).
53.  Importation and Harboring of Women, 43.
54. Etsuko Yasukawa, “Ideologies of Family in the Modernization of Japan,” in East
Asian Cultural and Historical Perspectives, ed. Steven Totosy de Zepetnek and Jennifer W.
Jay (Edmonton, 1997), 193–94. As Kathleen Uno writes, however, the transformation of the
ryōsai kenbo ideology needs to be understood in relation to various issues that emerged in
Japan after the turn of the century, including the growth of women’s enrollments in second-
ary education, women’s increasing participation in wage labor, the spread of companionate
family ideals, and the emergence of the urban middle class. Kathleen Uno, “Womanhood,
War, and Empire: Transmutations of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ before 1931,” in Gendering
Modern Japanese History, ed. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA, 2005),
503–13.
55. Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants,
1885–1924 (New York, 1988), 170–71; Tanaka, “Japanese Picture Marriage,” 127–30.
56. As an example, see Secretary Fujita’s report on a thirteen-year-old girl who escaped
and went to the police after being forced into prostitution in Salem, Oregon, in 1891. JFMAD,
3.8.2.12, Vol. 1.
57. For instance, two girls deceived into prostitution sought the help of Vancouver Consul
Sugimura immediately after arriving in the port. See “Fujin yūin no chiakkan” [Shameless
man who kidnapped women], Tōkyō fujin kyōfū zasshi 40 (August 1891): 15.
58. “Arabia oyae shusse monogatari” [Success story of Oyae of Arabia], Amerika shin-
bun [American Newspaper], February 16, 1938, 3. The Japanese American Research Project
Collection, the University of California, Los Angeles; Yamazaki, Ameyuki-san no uta,
107–16.
59. “Unrequited Love Leads to Suicide,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 1903,
13; “Arabia Oyae shusse monogatari,” Amerika shinbun, March 5, 1938, 3; Yamazaki, Ameyu-
ki-san no uta, 117–24.
60. Peggie Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the
American West, 1874–1939 (New York, 1990), 4, 13–17, 50–56, 95.
61. “Arabia Oyae shusse monogatari” Amerika shinbun, March 5, 1938, 3.
62. Report of Donaldina Cameron, Annual Report, 1904: 56–57, Woman’s Board of For-
eign Missions (hereafter cited as WOBFM), San Francisco Theological Seminary (hereafter
cited as SFTS), San Anselmo, California.
63. See Yamada’s recollection of her life in Cameron House in her Renai no shakaiteki
igi, 108; Yamazaki, Ameyuki-san no uta, 137.
64. Report of Donaldina Cameron, Annual Report, 1904: 57, WOBFM, SFTS.
65. Report of Mrs. E. A. Sturge, Annual Report, 1905: 68, WOBFM, SFTS.
66.  For the quote and Gardner’s rescue efforts, see “1887,” a letter sent from Rev. J. E.
Starr, Metropolitan Methodist Church, Victoria, BC, to Mrs. E. S. Strachen, President of
Women’s Missionary Society, in September of that year, 2–4, available in Oriental Home and
School Fonds, the United Church of Canada, British Columbia Conference Archive (UCA),
School of Theology Library, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. I thank Blair Galston
for opening the Archives for my visit despite a heavy snowstorm. The information about
Japanese residents in the Oriental Home can be found in “History of Japanese in Oriental
Home,” UCA, and Letter of Vancouver Consul Nose Tatsugorō, August 30, 1895, JFMAD,
3.8.8.4, Vol. 2.
67. “Otori no yukue” [Otori’s whereabouts], Tairiku nippō, April 19, 1909: 5; “Bifu fujin
hōmu” [Woman’s home in Victoria], Tairiku nippō, October 28, 1910: 5.
68. Home, Record 3a., resident no. 175, UCA.
69. “Otori no ninshin” [Otori’s pregnancy], Tairiku nippō, January 25, 1910: 1.
71. “Bifu fujin hōmu,” Tairiku nippō, October 28, 1910: 5.
73. “Miren wa koi yo” [Lingering affection], Tairiku nippō, August 16, 1913: 1.
74. “Otori-san kaeru” [Otori returned to Japan], Tairiku nippō, September 19, 1913: 1.
76. Report of Mrs. E. A. Sturge, Annual Report, 1905: 67–68, WOBFM, SFTS.
77. Home, Record 3a., resident no. 37, 89, 90, UCA.
78.  Rumi Yasutake, Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japa-
nese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York, 2004), 111–16. See also
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 35–39.
79. Itō, Hokubei hyakunen-zakura, 896. Japanese Methodists took active part in moral
reforms among the Japanese after the establishment of the church in 1904. They also managed
their own Woman’s Home from 1907. The church’s early history can be found in Journal,
1904–07, the Blaine Memorial United Methodist Church, Seattle, Washington. I thank the
church for permitting me to read this material and Barbara Nagaoka and Pearl Yamamoto
for their assistance in research.
80. On the Baptist Woman’s Home, see Frances M. Schuyler, Japanese Women and Chil-
dren in Seattle, “Taped Interview of May Herd Katayama by Delores Goto, University of
Washington Graduate Student,” September 20, 1972; “Japanese Woman’s Home,” The 75th
Anniversary Booklet (1974), 8, courtesy of the Japanese Baptist Church of Seattle. I would
Oharazeki 37
like to thank Brooks Andrews, Hideo Hoshide, and Yosh Nakagawa for offering various
help during my research in the church. See also Fiftieth Anniversary, 1899–1949, Seattle
Baptist Church, Manuscripts Special Collections, University of Washington; Itō, Hokubei
hyakunen-zakura, 760–61; “Shigeko Uno,” September 18, 1998, Segment 7, in Densho: The
Japanese American Legacy Project, 1996–1998, the Wing Luke Asian Museum, Seattle,
Washington, http:www.densho.org/archive/default.asp (accessed February 11, 2012).
81. License no. 43914, King County Marriage Certificates, 1855–1990, Washington
State Archives, Digital Archives (hereafter cited as WSADA), http://www.digitalarchives.
wa.gov (accessed February 11, 2012); Certificate of Marriage, no.19695, May 11, 1916,
Pierce County Auditor, Marriage Records, 1889–1947, WSADA. The cases of the women
who appeared in these marriage licenses will be examined later in this article.
82. On Japanese leaders’ attempts to control the behavior of immigrant wives and the ide-
als of womanhood that they expected Japanese women to conform to, see Tanaka, “Japanese
Picture Marriage,” 127–33; Azuma, Between Two Empires, 53–58.
83. Rumi Yasutake suggests that the availability of help from interpreters was a key factor
behind the increase in the number of divorces among Japanese immigrants in Sacramento
in the early twentieth century. Yasutake, Transnational Women’s Activism, 124–25.
84. In San Francisco, we know from the index of civil cases that at least seventy-four
Japanese couples filed for divorce in the Superior Court from 1907 to 1920. Unfortunately,
however, the original case files before World War II were all destroyed.
85. “Wife Says She Was Sold as Slave,” Seattle Times, July 25, 1908: 4.
86. Civil case no. 61218, May 1908, King Country Superior Court (hereafter cited as
KCSC). I thank David Takahashi and Mike Hidalgo for their help in locating over one hun-
dred Japanese divorce cases during my research in the court.
87. Civil case no. 15192, October 1911–March 1912, Sacramento Superior Court (here-
after cited as SSC), the Center for Sacramento History (formerly Sacramento Archives &
Museum Collection Center), Sacramento, California. I thank Pat Johnson and other staff in
the Archives for their assistance in research.
88. “Shūkan Ōta jyūsatsu” [Shameless man, Ōta, was shot to death], Ōfu nippō, an extra
edition, February 19, 1912.
89. “Shūkan Ōta jyūsatsu”; “Ōta Kimi kōin” [Ōta Kimi was arrested], Ōfu nippō April
17, 1912: 3.
90. “Shūrui no pisutoru sōdō” [Uproar about the shooting of a shameless man], Part II,
Shin sekai, February 21, 1912: 7.
91. “Oima rikon no kontan” [Oima’s hidden reason for divorce], Parts II and III, Taihoku
nippō, January 11 and 12, 1915: 5.
92. Civil case no. 105849, January 1912, KCSC.
93. “Kanpu Oima kōin” [Adulterer, Oima, was arrested], Taihoku nippō, January 15,
1915: 5.
94. “Oima jiken rakuchaku,” [Oima’s scandal was settled], Taihoku nippō, February 2,
1915: 5.
96. Certificate of Marriage, no.19695, May 11, 1916, Pierce County Auditor, Marriage
Records, 1889–1947, WSADA.
97. This analysis is based on my examination of 105 Japanese divorce cases in Seattle
and fifty-six similar cases in Sacramento between 1907 and 1920.
98. The newspapers referred here are Taihoku nippō (Seattle), Shin sekai (San Francisco),
and Ōfu nippō (Sacramento).
99. “Kekkon mo rikon mo fueru” [Both marriages and divorces increase], Ōfu nippō,
May 27, 1909: 3.
100.  The Dillingham Commission Reports, Part 25 (Washington, DC, 1911), 274, Stanford
University Libraries’ Collection.
101.  The Dillingham Commission Reports, Part 25: 249–50.
102. For the discussion of these “contradictions” that occurred when Asian immigrant
women worked outside the home, see Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride, 114–15, 192, 217–18;
Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams, 84; Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men, 5–6.
103. For information about the wages of barmaids, see “Shakukai katakoto” [Talk of
bar-restaurants], Ōfu nippō, June 8–9, 1915: 2; “Otaka to sono kuromaku,” Part IV, Taihoku
nippō, February 25, 1913: 5.
104. For information about the wages of Japanese male migrant laborers in the first two
decades of the twentieth century, see Itō, Hokubei hyakunen-zakura, 441–43; The Dillingham
Commission Reports, 25: 275, 283, 285.
105. Civil case no. 98795, January 1914, KCSC; Civil case no. 20447, December 1915,
SSC.
106. It will also be useful to link the experiences of Japanese prostitutes and barmaids in
North America to the lives of Japanese women workers in other overseas Japanese communi-
ties. For instance, Barbara Brooks, in her reading of Japanese colonial discourse on Japanese
women in Korea and Manchuria before 1932, discusses some positive images assigned to
Japanese women engaged in prostitution or other service work, suggesting growing autonomy
among these women. She also finds some journal articles reporting that a wider range of jobs
were available to Japanese women in colonial Korea than in metropole (naichi). Her find-
ings are important in thinking about the influences of overseas migration and wage-earning
experiences on the identity formation of Japanese women. At the same time, however, it is
important to note that Japanese women in Korea and their counterparts in North America
were working in radically different contexts. In colonial Korea and Manchuria, as Brooks
writes, the activities of prostitutes and service workers were often evaluated in terms of their
contribution to the Japanese empire. In contrast, in North America, the immigrant press
and Japanese leaders generally viewed the assertive behavior of prostitutes and barmaids
as harmful to the sound development of the immigrant community and the general reputa-
tion of the Japanese in American society. This difference probably comes from the basic
difference in the status of Japanese migrants in the two societies (the colonizer in Korea and
Manchuria; an oppressed minority in North America). I plan to pursue this line of analysis
in my ongoing comparative study of Japanese prostitution in Japan’s colonies (Korea and
Manchuria) and non-colonies (Canada and the United States). The article referred here is
Barbara J. Brooks, “Reading the Japanese Colonial Archive: Gender and Bourgeois Civility
in Korea and Manchuria before 1932,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, 295–317.
I would like to thank a JAEH reviewer for drawing my attention to her work.
107. “Shūgyōfu no sōkan hinpin” [Frequent deportations of women of a shameful occupa-
tion], Tairiku nippō, December 23, 1910, 1. Report of Kanagawa Prefecture Governor Sufu
Kōhei, December 8 and 19, 1910, JFMAD, 3.8.8.6, Vol. 2; Report of Kanagawa Prefecture
Governor Ōshima Hisamitsu, December 18, 1913, JFMAD, 3.8.8.6, Vol. 3.
108. “Jaguro [sic] Ito,” October 1912, file no. 5134, “Kyugoro Ito and K. Umeda,” May–
Oharazeki 39
June 1913, file no. 5295, the United States District Court, the Northern District of California,
RG 21, NA, San Bruno; “Frank Yodagowa [sic],” April 1912, file no. 1327, the United States
District Court, Eastern District of Washington, RG 21, NA, Seattle.
109. In Seattle, for instance, Mayor Hiram Gill, who had advocated the “open-town”
policy, was recalled in 1911. See Murray Morgan, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Se-
attle (New York, 1951), 180–81. In California, the Red Light Abatement Act was enacted in
1914 to penalize building owners who housed prostitutes. See Asbury, The Barbary Coast,
chap. 12. On the closing of red-light districts in the United States, see David J. Pivar, Purity
Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control (Westport, CT, 1973), 131–46.
110. “In the goods of Yasu Kato, deceased,” her will (copy), and “In the matter of the
estate of Yasu Kato,” March 1908, in GR-2214, File S2/1908, BC Archives.
111. Osada, Kanada no makutsu, 14, 38–39.
112. Information about the wages comes from W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever:
Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia (1978; Montreal,
1990), 112.
113. Certainly, other independent prostitutes did not earn as much as Yasu did. For example,
Hatsu (Lily) Hosokawa and Tomi (Irene) Takimoto died in Revelstoke on consecutive days in
November 1918. Hatsu left one half of a lot (valued at $250) and furniture, personal items,
and cash ($242.60 in total). Tomi left the other half of the lot (valued at $250) and furniture
and cash ($100 in total). Obviously, they had lived and worked together. The absence of their
will and the timing of their death suggest that the cause of their death was murder. “In the
Matter of the Estate of Hatsu Hosokawa,” November 23, 1918, GR-2219, Folio 53/1918, BC
Archives, and “In the Matter of the Estate of Tomi Takimoto,” November 23, 1919, GR-2219,
Folio 54/1918, BC Archives.
114. The original Japanese expression for the quoted part is “hai kara sugata,” which
literary means “wearing a high collar.” A high collar was considered “stylish” clothing, a
symbol of Western fashion, in Japan at that time; therefore, the expression is translated here
as “stylishly dressed in Western clothing.” I thank a JAEH reviewer for pointing this out.
115. The arrest of Kawaguchi was reported in the articles that appeared in Shin sekai on
March 18, 19, 26, and 27, 1911. A more detailed, but fictionalized, account of her life can
be found in Hara Hiroshi, “Mikaduki Omasu: Jinniku shijō no ōbosu” [Omasu of Crescent
Moon: The big boss of a flesh market], Uramado [Rear window] 2, no. 2 (March 1957):
238–44.
116. Report of Seattle Deputy Consul Abe Kihachi, January 14, 1911, JFMAD, 3.8.8.6.,
Vol. 2.
117. “Sōkan saretaru shūgyōfu” [Deported women of a shameful occupation], Shin sekai,
January 13, 1911: 3.
118. For example, in the native villages of overseas Japanese prostitutes in the southern
island of Kyushu, the women’s names were carved on the stone walls and pagodas of shrines
and temples to honor their contributions to the village welfare. Morikuri, “Karayuki-san and
Shingintori,” 331; Mihalopoulos, “Ousting the ‘Prostitute,’” 183.
120. Family no. 12006, Public Welfare/Social Security Department, Evacuee Referrals
for Resettlement and Assistance, 1945–1946, WSADA.
121. For instance, see Takeuchi Kōjirō, Beikoku seihokubu nihonjin iminshi [History
of Japanese immigrants in the Pacific Northwest] (Seattle, WA, 1929), 788; Itō, Hokubei
hyakunen-zakura, 953, 1005; “Ninki kurabe tōsen-sha” [Persons chosen by a popular vote],
Shin sekai, February 26, 1909: 2; “Yayoi no mama sōbetsu kai” [Farewell party for the
proprietress of the Yayoi restaurant], Taihoku nippō, March 6, 1913: 5.
122. “Ochiyo mondai no gobun shōhō” [Sequel to the problem of Ochiyo], Taihoku nippō,
January 30 and February 6, 1911: 5; Civil case no. 90216, October 1912, KCSC; License
no. 43914, King County Marriage Certificates, 1855–1990, WSADA.
123. “Nobana hito taba” [Bundle of wild flowers], Taihoku nippō, August 9, 1911: 3;
Okina, Okina Kyūin zenshū, Vol. 2, 386.
124. Dirk Hoerder, “Immigration History and Migration Studies since the Polish Peas-
ant: International Contributions,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 1 (Fall 1996):
26–36. For a recent critical assessment of group formation theories in immigration and ethnic
studies, see Virginia Yans, “On ‘Groupness,’” Journal of American Ethnic History 25, no.
4 (Summer 2006): 119–29.
125. On the call for this type of holistic approach in the study of immigration and ethnic-
ity, see Jon Gjerde, “New Growth on Old Vines—The State of the Field: The Social History
of Immigration to and Ethnicity in the United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History
18, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 40–65; Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Comment: We Study the Present to
Understand the Past,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 118.

Oharazeki - Listening To The Other Women in Japanese North America

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Listening to the Voices of "Other" Women in Japanese North America: Japanese

Prostitutes and Barmaids in the American West, 1887-1920

JAPANESE IMMIGRANT WOMEN’S lives have been discussed pri-

Journal of American Ethnic History Summer 2013 Volume 32, Number 4 5

u­ nderstand Japanese immigrant experiences in their own terms, focused on

THE CONDITIONS IN JAPAN

The majority of Japanese immigrants came to North America primarily

became prostitutes willingly, but as some historians have pointed out, in

After arriving in North American ports, Japanese women were transferred

prostitutes in bondage, and cruel punishments served as warnings to pros-

Paying Off the Debts

The consolation payment was a kind of compromise between prostitutes

As Japanese migrants began to settle in the country in the 1910s, Japanese

Figure 1: Runaway notice of Fujita Tora. Ōfu nippō, December 2, 1914, 3.

ENTERING RESCUE MISSIONS

J. E. Gardner, the son of an American Presbyterian missionary in China,

needed to be linked to various issues that emerged in the Japanese immigrant

Whereas Protestant rescue homes functioned as one common route out

bar-­restaurants in Seattle. After coming to the United States, Oima noted,

THE DECLINE OF PROSTITUTION

Gradually, Japanese prostitution in North America declined over the course

In concluding this analysis of Japanese prostitutes in the American West,

44. Itō, Zoku hokubei hyakunen-zakura, 88.

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u nderstand Japanese immigrant experiences in their own terms, focused on

bar-restaurants in Seattle. After coming to the United States, Oima noted,

44. Itō, Zoku hokubei hyakunen-zakura, 88.