Japan's Sex Trade. Peter Constantine
a shoten-gai (shopping center). It was common knowledge, however, that nothing had changed, and in 1960 the then young tabloid, Shūkan Taishū, proclaimed to the world that a beer, a snack, and a 40-minute session was available at any of the old Tobita haunts for ¥700. By the end of that year 3,164 Osaka prostitutes and pimps were dragged down to the precinct.
These days most of the action takes place after midnight. Walking around the blocks with their 150 brothels, the unsuspecting pedestrian might think he is in a quaint late-night noodle shop district, with row upon row of tiny weatherworn restaurants conveniently huddled one next to the other. As he looks in, past the colorful and short noren curtains hanging over the top half of the door, he will see an elderly lady in a kimono kneeling silently on a cushion next to a girl he might mistake for her fashion-conscious granddaughter. The pedestrian's suspicions, however, might be aroused as he peeks into the next store and sees yet another traditional matriarch with another young companion, and then further down another and another. As he walks back up the block in confusion, he notices that men are disappearing off the street to be led up staircases by the old women.
Each house has three or four girls who are organized into strict shifts by the elderly woman downstairs. The girls come down from their rooms to sit beside her one at a time, in five-minute shifts, so that passersby, wandering up and down the block, can see who is available. When a client enters the brothel the old lady jumps into action. She bustles about, bowing and uttering pleasantries, asking the client to follow her upstairs so she can "serve him a drink." The silent rule among Tobita madames is never to mention prices or sex before they have dragged the customer to the safety of the second floor. Once upstairs the charade is over, and the old lady rattles down the price list: a 20-minute quickie, $100; half an hour, $200; 40 minutes $250. "All our girls are healthy— here are the weekly blood-test results."
WATAKANO ISLAND
Japan's most brazen center of prostitution lies hidden in a distant corner of the Ise-shima National Park on Watakano, a tranquil and beautiful little island just off the Pacific coast. Watakano has remained the best-kept Japanese sex-trade secret, jealously nurtured by the Yakuza mob, which, since the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1957, has strictly guarded the Matoya Bay area in which the island lies. Men who travel to the national park for a two-day stay at the island's brothels arrive in groups at Anakawa Station on the Kintetsushima line. They have all made reservations in advance, and must state their name and city of origin before they can climb into the Yakuza-monitored vessel which will ferry them half a mile across the bay to the island. As they board, a guard with a cellular phone calls the brothels to confirm the guest list, and bogus customers, reporters, and policemen are dragged off the boat.
The island is flat and green, triangular in shape. It has 14 hotels, 23 red-light bars, and 200 prostitutes. The origin of the name of Watakano is a matter of heated dispute. Some of the prostitutes maintain that wata-ka-no should be written with the characters for "swimming over to set fire to the fields," while others contest this and use the more romantic characters "deer swim over to the fields."
As the boat docks at the concrete pier small parties of women wave energetically to welcome the clients.
WATAKANO—THE EARLY YEARS
Watakano Island has been a distinguished center of prostitution since the early seventeenth century. Legend has it that an impoverished faith-healer saved the dying daughter of Iemitsu, the third Shogun of Edo, shortly after he had come to power in 1623.
"Ask anything of me and it shall be granted!" the islanders report the grateful Shogun to have declared. So the faith-healer, kneeling before the ruler on an exquisite mat, requested 2,000 prostitutes and a license to set up brothels in the bays around Watakano, which lay strategically on the sea route halfway between Japan's largest medieval trading centers, Osaka and Edo (today's Tokyo). In those days, lines of fragile sailing vessels traveled cautiously from inlet to inlet, putting in at the slightest sign of a storm, and the bored sailors would sit on beaches in somber groups, their pockets full of freshly earned coins. The faith-healer changed all that. According to the islanders, the Shogun bought up the daughters and young wives of impoverished local families, and set up a splendid string of sea-view brothels all the way from Toba to Matoya.
These women became the first funajorō (ship whores) of the area. In the early days they were known as the sentakunin (washer-women). Housewives in need of extra cash would carefully fold all their finery into a bundle and, leaving for Matoya Bay, would explain to the neighbors that they were going down to the sea to do their washing. The direct forerunners of today's island prostitutes were mysteriously known as hashirigane, the etymology of which, after more than three centuries, is still unresolved on Watakano Island. Some of the women believe that whenever their predecessors saw a large ship they would hashiri (run) down to the beach, hastily throwing on their gone (the "metal" or jewelry they wore to work). Other women interpret hashirigane to mean "running crab": the prostitutes ran out onto the beach, shuffling like crabs in their tight kimonos and their clattering wooden geta sandals. Still others argue that their predecessors' name meant "fresh money"—they would snatch up a sailor's cash before he could spend it elsewhere—while a more conservative group maintains that hashirigane means "running needles." In the old days the prostitutes were very domestic, and would patch up their customer's clothes by running needles through them.
Today's women stay on the island, walking between the snackbars where they meet the clients and the hotels where they entertain them. The hashirigane of yesteryear were much more enterprising. Before the sailors had a chance to disembark, women would climb into a choro, a small wooden rowboat, and a villager known as a kogoshi, basically a pimp, would row from ship to ship as the men whistled and howled. The hashirigane separated themselves into three categories: anejorō, the senior women, more elegant, beautiful, and accomplished; the younger wakajorō; and the novices, the pinkoro. They scrambled onto the ships according to their rank and took position, the anejorō in the center where they could be admired from all angles, the younger wakajorō at the sides, and the youngest well out of the way by the ship's bow. When everyone was safely on board the women loosened their obi (sashes), stepped out of their kimonos, and struck elegant poses.
The hashirigane prospered for three centuries. Watakano islanders remember with nostalgia romantic tales of prostitutes of the most squalid backgrounds who married rich captains and moved to the capital to become respected matrons. At the height of the trade boom of the late nineteenth century rows of ships were docked next to each other, so that an enterprising hashirigane could hoist herself from deck to deck working her way from Watakano across the bays to Anori.
Prostitutes split up into factions to deal with the mounting workload. Super-elite women remained in their exclusive boudoirs on the island and took calls from captains and wealthy merchants. The less powerful hashirigane who still had to ride out to the boats came to be known as noriko (riding girls). Astute businesswomen, they carefully selected the boats they would target; with the unfortunate boom in the dung-trade between Edo and Osaka, they steered clear of the clumps of grungier vessels. The dung-merchants were serviced by desperate prostitutes who were referred to by their more successful colleagues as guso (shits).
THE LAST OF THE HASHIRIGANE
At the beginning of the twentieth century the era of the sailing vessel came to an end. Large and powerful ships set their sights on international ports, and horrified prostitutes saw all their old customers steam right past the bays. The panicking women were saved by the Suzuki Corporation in Kobe City, which built a gigantic shipyard in the area, bringing in thousands upon thousands of workers. The hashirigane left the beaches and settled inland.
On Watakano Island brothels such as Yokarō, Kinseirō, and Tomoerō soon came into their own, and nightly parties were arranged in the dining rooms of Osakaya and Takashimaya, the island's main hotels. Even respectable local women