Butterfly_tsuji on Nostr: “CAGED PROSTITUTES” IN OLD JAPAN – The Faces of Domestic Human Trafficking The ...
“CAGED PROSTITUTES” IN OLD JAPAN – The Faces of Domestic Human Trafficking The bars are made from thin, frail wood, and are more symbolic of the girls “imprisonment” than anything else. Interestingly, many books from this time period call these girls “inmates”.
In reality, the bars acted as un-papered viewing windows, and served to separate the gawking men (and sometimes gawking women and children) from the human merchandise.
See another one of these images in the PROSTITUTES Set (linked to below) that relates how tobacco pipes were passed back and forth through the bars as a means for sealing a “date” with a desired prostitute.
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Although most of my Flickr posts showing Japanese prostitutes were taken during the 1890s, it was a business that only got busier due to increased tourism, and a general increase in the expendable income of Japanese males.
By 1910, there were about 20,000 brothels housing over 250,000 prostitutes — roughly, about 1 % of all Japanese women.
For what seemed like a large sum of money, their Fathers (or both parents) sold them off to the brothels at ages 5 to 8. Their contract lasted about 20 years.
Their “pimps” made sure the girls could never buy out their contract, or pay back the money given to their parents, unless he could extort an even larger sum of money from a customer who fell madly enough in love with one of them to buy them all over again (to become a wife or exclusive mistress) — something that was relatively rare.
If disease didn’t get them first, they generally burned out in their 20s, and as their customers dried up, they eventually found themselves back in their rural homes, with little prospect for having love, marriage, or children, and perhaps cared for their parents as they eked out an existence in their later years.
Numerous books have been written on Japan’s domestic sex trade, and these captions are not the place to give you the full story.
These photos and faces represent hundreds of thousands of Japanese woman and children who were trafficked for sexual purposes during the 1869 - 1912 years of the Meiji era.
Prostitution of a contractual nature was not outlawed in Japan until 1946, by direct order of General MacArthur.
In Japan today (at least down in Okinawa) prostitution is still carried on via various “euphemistic” venues that skirt prostitution laws in many creative ways, thus making it all “legal” as far as the Government and Police are concern.
HOWEVER, generally speaking, Japanese women are now in charge of what goes on, are their own free agents, and can prostitute themselves for any number of reasons without the direct (or even indirect) coercion of the male element of society.
As for the old days of sexual slavery….
Those wanting to know how the girls were recruited, how brothels worked, and the sad anecdotes of ruined lives, please read any number of Web references on the subject or hard-copy books that exist.
C-19 Brothel No.23 Magane-Cho, Yokoham
https://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/14722922858
In reality, the bars acted as un-papered viewing windows, and served to separate the gawking men (and sometimes gawking women and children) from the human merchandise.
See another one of these images in the PROSTITUTES Set (linked to below) that relates how tobacco pipes were passed back and forth through the bars as a means for sealing a “date” with a desired prostitute.
*
Although most of my Flickr posts showing Japanese prostitutes were taken during the 1890s, it was a business that only got busier due to increased tourism, and a general increase in the expendable income of Japanese males.
By 1910, there were about 20,000 brothels housing over 250,000 prostitutes — roughly, about 1 % of all Japanese women.
For what seemed like a large sum of money, their Fathers (or both parents) sold them off to the brothels at ages 5 to 8. Their contract lasted about 20 years.
Their “pimps” made sure the girls could never buy out their contract, or pay back the money given to their parents, unless he could extort an even larger sum of money from a customer who fell madly enough in love with one of them to buy them all over again (to become a wife or exclusive mistress) — something that was relatively rare.
If disease didn’t get them first, they generally burned out in their 20s, and as their customers dried up, they eventually found themselves back in their rural homes, with little prospect for having love, marriage, or children, and perhaps cared for their parents as they eked out an existence in their later years.
Numerous books have been written on Japan’s domestic sex trade, and these captions are not the place to give you the full story.
These photos and faces represent hundreds of thousands of Japanese woman and children who were trafficked for sexual purposes during the 1869 - 1912 years of the Meiji era.
Prostitution of a contractual nature was not outlawed in Japan until 1946, by direct order of General MacArthur.
In Japan today (at least down in Okinawa) prostitution is still carried on via various “euphemistic” venues that skirt prostitution laws in many creative ways, thus making it all “legal” as far as the Government and Police are concern.
HOWEVER, generally speaking, Japanese women are now in charge of what goes on, are their own free agents, and can prostitute themselves for any number of reasons without the direct (or even indirect) coercion of the male element of society.
As for the old days of sexual slavery….
Those wanting to know how the girls were recruited, how brothels worked, and the sad anecdotes of ruined lives, please read any number of Web references on the subject or hard-copy books that exist.
C-19 Brothel No.23 Magane-Cho, Yokoham
https://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/14722922858