Gotō Fumi et al., I Cannot Bear It: Testimonies of Six Survivors Escaping Prostitution, Tokyo: Masu Shobō, 1955. Reviewed by Caroline Norma.
Japan in 1956 enacted a law that condemned prostitution as incompatible with human dignity.[1] The Prostitution Prevention Law outlawed the activities of pimps, condemned those of sex-buyers, and established welfare facilities for women escaping the sex trade. The law’s implementation in 1958 led to the closure of red-light districts across the country. It was achieved through cross-party efforts by female parliamentarians after the end of the war, who had earlier been part of Japan’s prewar anti-prostitution movement.
This law was the first national legislation in Japanese history to prohibit prostitution and protect victims of it, and represented a groundbreaking piece of human rights law in a country where a licensed prostitution system had persisted since the Meiji era. The female lawmakers who championed this legislation initially incorporated penalties for buyers (punters) in their proposed bill, but faced strong opposition from a conservative majority, and so were forced to remove this provision. Today, liberal feminists in Japan and abroad often portray the Prostitution Prevention Law as if it were legislation designed by the state to control female sexuality. This is entirely contrary to the facts. While imperfect, it was a human rights protection law for women. This is evident from the fact that it was promoted by socialist female lawmakers who had fought for women and workers since before the war (as will be discussed).
One of these female parliamentarians was Kamichika Ichiko who, before the law was enacted in 1956, wrote an introduction for a book titled I Cannot Bear It: Testimonies of Six Survivors Escaping Prostitution. It was an early example of collated testimonies written by prostitution survivors. Similar examples in English didn’t emerge till 1976 when Kate Millet’s Prostitution Papers was published, and when an English translation of a French-language collection of six testimonies by prostitution survivors was published after appearing in French in 1970.[2]
I Cannot Bear It is further unique for its indication of what Kamichika and another parliamentarian, Fujiwara Michiko, did in the lead-up to the 1956 law. These two women, with others, endured years of attacks from male politicians and their sex industry benefactors in tabling a string of anti-prostitution bills in the Diet. As shown in the publication in 1955 of I Cannot Bear It, they also went to great lengths to extend personal assistance to individual women escaping the sex industry before the law’s passing.
The book comprises six testimonies written by women known to Fujiwara. Some of them spoke in Japan’s parliamentary Diet in favour of the anti-prostitution bills, according to Kamichika’s introductory chapter, which notes that
two survivors, in response to questions from lawmakers, spoke in Japan’s 22nd parliament, and testified that brothel operators gave them no time off for menstruation, and that their exploitation was so severe they were on starvation rations and suffered chronic sleep deprivation. However, before the parliament and the gallery, they were too cowed to describe their experiences in any greater detail. However, in this book, they speak candidly about their experiences. They lay bare the relentless cruelty and exploitation universally practiced in Japan’s world-renowned human flesh market. (I Cannot Bear It, pp. 2–3)
As this passage clearly shows, Japan’s Prostitution Prevention Law was not enacted by ignoring the wills of those involved, but was based on demands that survivors of prostitution themselves made.
Gotō Fumi
Gotō Fumi, in the first chapter, describes growing up in Kagoshima in a relatively comfortable household, and even attending midwifery school. But, in the immediate aftermath of the war’s chaotic end, she was lured to Tokyo by an ex-soldier who had been stationed in Kagoshima during the war and had afterwards repeatedly returned to sell black-market goods there. This soldier professed love, but back in Tokyo abandoned her with no savings, after which she contracted tuberculosis. It was debt accrued in the medical treatment of this illness that propelled Gotō into a Tokyo brothel where she remained until age 27, when she read discussion of an anti-prostitution bill in the newspaper and learnt of Fujiwara’s rescue efforts. This prompted Gotō to run away from the brothel with three other women and seek refuge with Fujiwara who helped them with accommodation, work, and health checks.
Kase Michiyo
Another woman helped by Fujiwara, Kase Michiyo, was born one of six sisters in Tokyo. Her older sister entered a geisha house after their mother’s early death and their father’s inability to work due to chronic illness. The family lived on remittances from this sister, and Kase and her younger sister worked at a local factory while their younger siblings were still in primary school. In 1952, she married and moved away with her husband, and for a while lived a happy life. But she needed surgery for several ectopic pregnancies, and, while she eventually recovered, the couple fell into debt from medical bills.
With spiralling amounts of money owed to family and friends, Kase decided independently that she would enter a geisha house in a nearby hot springs resort town, in return for a loan to pay off their debts. She lied to her husband about the live-in work she went away to do. But she ended up each month further in debt at this venue, because of the requirement to buy new kimonos and the like, and so, after 6 months, she moved to another brothel, on the promise her debt to the first geisha house would be paid off.
In this brothel, there was no pretence of entertaining sex-buyers with the arts or dinner banquets, and so Kase was under constant pressure to service large numbers of men, and suffered sleep deprivation and ill-health as a result. She became heavily indebted through fines and fees imposed by the venue, she was not permitted to refuse customers during her heavy, painful periods, and was subjected even to American military sex-buyers who flouted official army rules against visiting brothels.
She began planning to escape and approached other women in the brothel to run away with her. Fortunately, once the two had escaped, Kase contacted a former customer who had been supportive of her, and he informed the two women of the anti-prostitution bills that were being tabled in the parliament, and of the assistance being offered by Fujiwara. Eventually, thanks to this assistance, Kase was able to return to her husband and family, and their financial situation became more stable over time. Fujiwara even helped her father enter a nursing home nearby Kase’s house.
Sawada Fusako
The third of the book’s contributors, Sawada Fusako, grew up in a wealthy family from Kure in Hiroshima. She married at age 20, but divorced soon after. She returned to live with her brother, but was not welcome in his home, so a year later left in search of work.
Without contacts or experience, her only option was bar work, and Sawada was targeted by a trafficker at Yokohama station who tricked her into entering a brothel under the guise of becoming a barmaid. The brothel was patronised by American troops, and the first time she was bought by one of these men she sustained genital injuries, and soon after was both injured again and infected with venereal disease. Because of this, she was detained in a sanitation hospital for 2 weeks. During this time, a fellow patient organised her move to a Yokosuka cabaret bar whose operator paid Sawada’s medical expenses and debts to the former brothel.
This bar operated merely to attract American occupation troops, who would buy women to prostitute in the hotel rooms that were attached to the venue. Sawada continued to sustain injuries through being prostituted by these men, and was eventually infected with gonorrhoea of the mouth. She begged the venue operator to be allowed to repay her debt to the bar through any means other than prostitution, but this prompted him to beat her so badly that she was bedridden for two weeks. Some time after this, she escaped to a nearby church, and its pastor took her to one of the rehabilitation facilities in Tokyo that had been set up under the Prostitution Prevention Law. By this time Sawada was 24 years old, and she went on to work in a similar shelter facility.
Okamoto Sumiko
Another survivor, Okamoto Sumiko, was similarly 24 years old by the time she escaped the sex industry. In her case, as the family’s only daughter, she needed to support her unwell mother who lived with her ailing grandfather after her father had died from tuberculosis. She was lured to Tokyo by a broker who assured her mother she would be working as a barmaid, but, after a few weeks at the venue, she was raped by its manager, and afterwards pimped to customers.
One of these customers took her to a banquet venue in which a woman stripped and inserted items into her body, and then demanded similar acts from her after returning to the brothel. He eventually bought her out of the venue to retain as a ‘mistress’. In these arrangements, she was pressured to acquiesce to increasingly perverse sexual acts, which he eventually forced her to perform in front of other men.
After later being abandoned by this man, she entered an unlicensed brothel where she eventually saw a woman succumb to madness as a result of syphilis infection. This experience was so shocking that it prompted her to run away and seek help.
Terada Yaeko
Terada Yaeko lived on a farm with her mother and grandfather after her father died in the Second World War. The farm had been reduced to a small plot of land after occupation-era land reforms were undertaken in 1946, and afterwards poverty led to much of the remaining land being sold off. Terada’s mother died shortly after this. As a result, she was forced to move to Kobe to live with an uncle, but eventually had to move out of his house and into Osaka city to look for work. There she became homeless, penniless, and starving, and so a broker was able to traffic her into the Tobita red-light district.
There, Terada was used by a customer for the first time in extreme pain. She was prostituted thereafter by between 8 and 18 men a day, and was called back even from the bathhouse to service them. Even during her heavy and painful periods, she was not permitted rest.
After 1.5 years in these circumstances, Terada managed to escape to Kobe, but there she was trafficked into a geisha venue. At this venue, the number of buyers per day declined to five, but the fees and charges exacted by the venue were much higher than the Tobita brothel, and included furniture for the room in which she was prostituted. As a result, Terada fell into serious debt. Her ordeal came to an end only after she contracted syphilis at the same time as falling pregnant, which led her to end up stranded on the streets, where she was eventually helped by the Salvation Army.
Yamashita Tomoko
Yamashita Tomoko wrote her testimony only a few months after escaping a red-light district brothel. She was born in 1929 in a family of four children in Shizuoka prefecture to a loving mother and a violently drunk, absent father. Her mother became involved in a cult, and the family’s small retail business fell into ruin. She moved to Tokyo at age 17 with her grandmother, and then began working at a restaurant in Asakusa in 1952 where she was raped. To escape this venue, she responded to an ad in the newspaper that she thought was maid work. It ended up being a cabaret bar. The manager tricked her into buying expensive furniture for her room, and this became her indenturing debt, but she did not realise she was to be prostituted at this venue until the moment she was bought by a customer. The shock of her life following this sent her into depression, where she cried most of the time, even though her debts were so high that she could never refuse customers.
She left the brothel after 6 months in September 1953 by moving to another venue whose owner paid off her debts, but, in the process of so doing, added substantially to them. Eventually, a customer attempted to pay off these debts and set her free, but the violent reaction of this pimp led to police intervening in Yamashita’s case. Fortunately, this meant she was rescued from prostitution by a human rights organisation formed in 1928 called Nihon Kokumin Kyūenkai which introduced her to Fujiwara and others. These women helped her retrieve her possessions from the brothel and find accommodation.
Two female parliamentarians
The two female lawmakers who contributed most to the enactment of the Prostitution Prevention Law were, as mentioned, Kamichika Ichiko and Fujiwara Michiko. Both were militant activists from before the war, and, after the war, they became lawmakers running as candidates for the Socialist Party, as left-wing socialists. At that time, the Socialist Party was the largest opposition party in Japan’s House of Representatives, consistently holding around 100 seats. Unlike its successor, the Social Democratic Party, which today holds only a handful of seats and has a pro-sex work platform, the Socialist Party clearly stood on an abolitionist position. Here, we briefly discuss the backgrounds of these two women.[3]
Kamichika was born in 1888 into a family of doctors in Nagasaki. However, her father and her elder brother, who had taken over the family practice, died in quick succession when she was very young, plunging the family into severe financial hardship. Despite this, after graduating from an English school for women founded by Tsuda Umeko, she became a newspaper reporter—a rare career for a woman at the time—and grew increasingly concerned with social issues. However, in 1916, she was involved in an assault incident against Ōsugi Sakae, a prominent anarchist, and ended up spending two years in prison.
At the time, this incident caused a huge uproar in newspapers and magazines, and would normally have been a career-ending event. But possessing remarkable literary talent and a strong will, Kamichika made an immediate comeback as a writer and literary critic after her release from prison in 1919. She continued to be active in various opinion journals and literary magazines, eventually becoming a Marxist and gaining renown as a champion of women’s liberation. From that time onward, she took a keen interest in the issue of prostitution and passionately advocated for the abolition of the licensed prostitution system. She had been close friends with Yamakawa Kikue, another proponent of abolition, since their days at the women’s English school.
After the war, she continued her activism as a women’s liberation movement leader. In 1953, she was elected to the House of Representatives as a candidate for the Socialist Party. Her first major initiative was to push through the Diet the Prostitution Prevention Law, whose drafts had been repeatedly tabled in the parliament but consistently defeated by conservative parties. Without her, this law would never have been enacted.
Fujiwara Michiko was born in 1900 into a family of small landowners in Okayama. When she was very young, her family’s business collapsed, and they fell into poverty. Consequently, she dropped out of elementary school in 1912 and began working as a factory girl at just eleven years old. She later moved to Tokyo, studied intensively, and became a nurse. Through this work, she observed that, in the world, some people died without seeing a doctor due to poverty even when very ill, while the wealthy could always call doctors and nurses to their homes for the best treatment. This experience gradually deepened her interest in socialism.
In 1925, Fujiwara married Yamazaki Kenji, who was already a socialist (from that time her name became Yamazaki Michiko), and, together with him, she began working tirelessly for poor tenant farmers and factory girls. Her husband ran for the House of Representatives as a candidate for the Socialist Mass Party in 1936 and was elected. However, in 1942, he moved to Southeast Asia, leaving Michiko and their two children behind in Japan. Eventually, amid the chaos of the war’s end, contact with her husband was lost.
After the war, Michiko participated in the formation of the Japanese Socialist Party. In 1946, she ran for the House of Representatives—the first to recognize women’s suffrage—and was elected. Shortly thereafter, she divorced her husband and returned to the name Fujiwara Michiko. From 1948, she worked tirelessly for the enactment of the Prostitution Prevention Law, but lost her seat in the 1949 election. In 1950, she became a member of the House of Councilors. There, alongside Kamichika, she continued her efforts to enact the Law.
As such, these left-wing female socialists, who consistently fought for women and the poor from before the war, endeavored to enact the Prostitution Prevention Law. Despite the abolition of the licensed prostitution system during the post-war occupation, they were deeply disturbed by the reality that prostitution continued effectively unregulated. It was as part of their constant struggle for human rights protection and women’s liberation that they worked to enact the Law, supported survivors who had escaped from prostitution, and published a collection of their testimonies.
Conclusion
The achievement of publishing a collection of first-person testimonies from six women surviving prostitution in Japan in 1955 is difficult to overstate. This was only a few years after the end of the country’s foreign occupation, and barely ten years after the bombing of most of Japan’s cities in the Second World War. Women had won suffrage in Japan only in 1946. Nonetheless, there existed a women’s movement against prostitution in the country that was so successful it achieved the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law through activities that incorporated survivors who were prepared to write explicitly of their experiences, and even testify in the national parliament.
These extraordinary feats of political activity were undertaken by young women whose lives, as shown in the book, had been marred by sexual torture, violence, severe illness, and intense deprivation. Without the devotion of female parliamentarians like Fujiwara and Kamichika to the cause of abolition, these testimonies of enslavement would never have been recorded, and, in some cases, perhaps neither would their lives have been spared.
Seventy years after the publication of I Cannot Bear It, we live in a world in which the globe’s female population falls victim to sexual exploitation at rates likely even higher than that of occupation-era Japan, but very few record their experiences.[4]
Explaining this shift, especially in the Western world, is likely the tendency now to see prostitution as work and not enslavement. Different from the approach taken by Fujiwara and Kamichika, there are few people even among feminists today who see any need to collect testimony from prostitution survivors. In today’s world these women are workers, not slaves, and their experiences of hardship are little more severe than low-paid migrant cleaners. But, as the testimonies of I Cannot Bear It show, prostitution is an activity of debt bondage, violence, and sexual torture. Whatever the hardships of women’s work, the testimonies of women escaping prostitution are vital to understanding the wholly different harm that sexual exploitation inflicts on women and girls as the human population that men thereby make unfree.
Kamichika’s closing words in the preface to this collection must remain our shared cry to this day.
I ask those who read these testimanies: When it is estimated that approximately 130,000 women in Japan today find themselves in circumstances nearly identical to those described here, can we possibly allow this situation to continue unaddressed? I believe the wish of the six women who wrote their experiments was precisely that it should not be left unaddressed. Something must be done urgently! (p. 8.)
[1] This is based on the provision in the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, adopted by the United Nations in 1949, which states that “prostitution…[is] incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person.”
[2] See Kate Millett, The Prostitution Papers: A Quartet for Female Voice, 1st ed., Paladin, 1975; Claude Jaget, Prostitutes, Our Life, Falling Wall Press, 1976 [1980]. The author co-edited with Melinda Tankard Reist a similar collection of prostitution survivor testimonies in 2016 titled Prostitution narratives: Stories of survival in the sex trade, Spinifex Press, 2016.
[3] See Kamichika Ichiko, Kamichika Ichiko Jiden: Waga Ai, Waga Tatakai [The autobiography of Kamichika Ichiko: My love, my struggle], Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1972; Fujiwara Michiko, Hitosuji no Michi ni Ikiru [My life lived my own way], Tokyo: Shūdan Keisei, 1972. Sadly, neither these (direct outreach) activities nor the publication of the book itself are mentioned in the autobiographies of either woman.
[4] Although, video testimony is widely available, especially through the ‘Soft white underbelly’ series. See ‘My life expectancy is short’: America’s most vulnerable – in pictures, The Guardian. However, given that some victims appear with their pimps in this series, the depth of the testimonies is limited. They are further limited by the rates at which women who have not yet escaped prostitution give testimony in the series.
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