Paper short abstract:

Kimura Sotoji’s seminal Karayuki-san (1937) was the first film to deal with the controversial issues of prejudice and discrimination against returning prostitutes and children of mixed heritage. This paper performs a close reading on the film as well as contextualizing its production and reception.

Paper long abstract:

The name "karayuki-san" was originally rendered in Chinese kanji characters meaning "going to China," and in the latter half of the 19th century became a name used for people who went abroad to earn money. However, it gradually began to be used to refer to Japanese girls and women who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were trafficked from often impoverished agricultural prefectures in Japan to destinations in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Siberia (Russian Far East), Manchuria, British India, and Australia, as sex workers.

In post-war films and documentaries such as Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute (Karayuki-san, Shohei Imamura, 1975), Sandakan No. 8 (Kei Kumai, 1974) and Whoremonger (Zegen, 1987) the brutal realities of the Japanese sex trade in South-East Asia is examined in great detail. Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, there were already films negotiating this problematic legacy. The first, and arguably the finest, among the pre-war films is 1937 Kimura Sotoji’s masterpiece Karayuki-san.

Kimura tells the story of Yuki, played by star Irie Takako, who returns to Shimabara, Kyushu, after having lived for 12 years in Singapore as a prostitute. She returns home together with her mixed blood son Anton, after her English husband has passed away. Having returned in a state of relative wealth, Yuki, Anton, and the other former prostitutes that came back together with them, are ostracized from the local community and continuously suffer from discrimination.

Kimura, a director previously linked to the Japanese proletarian film movement, and famously of a progressive political orientation, depicts the fate of Yuki and Anton with a shocking level of detail and frankness, and at its release, the film was the subject of widespread debate within both film journals and the daily press. This paper performs a close reading on the film as well as contextualising its production and reception.