Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star

A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan

William Johnston

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9780231509152
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In May 1936, Abe Sada committed the most notorious crime in twentieth-century Japan—the murder and emasculation of her lover. What made her do it? And why was she found guilty of murder yet sentenced to only six years in prison? Why have this woman and her crime remained so famous for so long, and what does her fame have to say about attitudes toward sex and sexuality in modern Japan?

Despite Abe Sada's notoriety and the depictions of her in film and fiction (notably in the classic In the Realm of the Senses), until now, there have been no books written in English that examine her life and the forces that pushed her to commit the crime. Along with a detailed account of Sada's personal history, the events leading up to the murder, and its aftermath, this book contains transcripts of the police interrogations after her arrest—one of the few existing first-person records of a woman who worked in the Japanese sex industry during the 1920s and 1930s—as well as a memoir by the judge and police records.

Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star steps beyond the simplistic view of Abe Sada as a sexual deviate or hysterical woman to reveal a survivor of rape, a career as a geisha and a prostitute, and a prison sentence for murder. Sada endured discrimination and hounding by paparazzi until her disappearance in 1970. Her story illustrates a historical collision of social and sexual values—those of the samurai class and imported from Victorian Europe against those of urban and rural Japanese peasants.

1. AN UNREMARKABLE FAMILY HISTORY

Abe Sada’s family and ancestors were quite ordinary, like innumerable other families then living in Tokyo and throughout the country. The ancestors of both her mother and her father had been stable and hard working, if not illustrious. Most had moved to Tokyo from outside the city during the previous century. Little more is known about them except that none left a criminal record. Yet in 1936 many people would have expected otherwise. Common sense dictated that criminal behavior had a hereditary taint. In premodern times, entire families had been extinguished for the felonious behavior of one member, partly because of this belief. So behind any heinous crime police would look for a criminal history, at least of repeated petty offenses, in the accused’s family. A major felon in the family tree helped explain a crime as the outcome of a person’s natural tendencies. Faced with explaining Abe Sada’s deed but finding no sign of inherited criminality, the police attempted to tie it to aberrant behavior related to sexuality, alcohol, mental and physical disease, and gender roles.

The police described her father, Abe Shigeyoshi, as “an honest and upright man, highly circumspect in his dealings with women.” In other words, if he had any affairs outside marriage, he did not allow them to become a legal problem. Serious financial difficulties also would have come to the attention of the police, so their failure to mention anything of the kind suggests that he was always financially stable. The testimony of those who had known him certainly supports that view. There was nothing remarkable about his family, which was from Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo. As a young man he had been adopted into the Abe family in the city and successfully headed its tatami-making business. Because the enterprise dated back three generations, one can assume that the Abe family had adopted him because he showed promise. As far as the business went, they were correct. He did not consume alcohol. Contemporary Victorian values current among many Japanese reinforced long-standing Confucian prejudices against inebriation, so this stood in his favor. When choosing a successor to head his business, Abe gave it to his daughter, Sada’s older sister, because her husband showed more promise than did his own son, who in his early twenties had gotten himself disowned by running off with a prostitute and saying he wanted nothing to do with the enterprise. Despite this inauspicious start, he later become a tatami maker himself and protested his father’s decision to give the business to his sister, whose husband then carried on the Abe line. The police saw Abe Shigeyoshi as morally untarnished. In terms of Confucian as well as “modern” Victorian values, he was consistently upstanding. There was no reason to think that his daughter’s criminal tendencies stemmed from his family.

The family of Katsu, Abe Sada’s mother, was equally without trace of moral turpitude, although many who knew her said she had a somewhat unwholesome patina. Katsu’s father had run a moneylending business in the Ueno part of Tokyo. Although a civilian, he had somehow been slashed to death in the Battle of Ueno in 1868, one of the few fiercely violent confrontations of the Meiji Restoration. Although she remained a single parent, Katsu’s mother had, according to the police report, strictly raised her four daughters.¹ The report does not explain how Katsu herself had come to marry Abe Shigeyoshi or if she had otherwise entered the Abe family. It is possible that the family was entirely childless and so adopted both a daughter and a son, who then as a couple continued both the family line and the tatami-making business. This would not have been an unusual arrangement; for centuries, it had been common for families to adopt capable heirs when a living, but incapable, one already existed. Although the police found Katsu’s family unassailable, they also described her as a self-centered woman who liked gaudy things—a characteristic that gave her a faintly degenerate hue. The police reported no signs of hysteria, an observation that carried the weight of medical diagnosis. She had been faithful to her husband and did not drink alcohol, so despite her peccadilloes she was in all respects morally unblemished. The police concluded that neither parent’s family line suggested criminality.

Among Abe Sada’s siblings, however, the police caught a whiff of moral decay. She was the seventh of eight children, only four of whom lived to adulthood. Of those who did not survive, one was stillborn, one died of beriberi, one died of meningitis, and the last ended in a miscarriage. None of these deaths was unusual. Her oldest brother, Shintarô, was a womanizer. His former sister-in-law accused him of being somewhat abnormal. At the time that Abe Sada committed murder he worked as a tatami maker in Kobe and had no children. Toku, Abe Sada’s eldest sister, had married into a merchant’s family and raised eight children herself. She had never had a brush with the law, and the police described her as “successful.” Teruko, the fifth child in the family, shared a certain characteristic with her youngest sister: both were sexually precocious. At a relatively early age she had an affair with a local craftsman; later, she had three lovers at the same time. Her father then sold her into a brothel, but friends and family soon persuaded him to buy her back. Soon after that Teruko married a tatami merchant and apparently lived a quiet life; her sexual history was no obstacle to marriage for somebody of her natal family’s social class.

To the police, these mild aberrations from contemporary ideals in Abe Sada’s family history did not suggest a hereditary cause for her actions. The main deviations then considered suspect—mental disease, nervous disease, leprosy, hysteria, and alcoholism—were absent. There was, in other words, nothing remarkable about her background to suggest it might produce a woman who would commit murder and mutilation.

2. EARLY CHILDHOOD

Tokyo before the great earthquake of 1923 was still much as it had existed in previous centuries, although modernity had already brought many changes. Many of the oldest buildings dated back to the mid-1850s, constructed after the great earthquake of 1855. Only a few were from before that. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the shogun’s castle became the emperor’s palace and the city of Edo, which literally meant “entry to the estuary,” received the new name of Tokyo, which meant “eastern capital.” By 1900 there had appeared rows of brick buildings, as innovative as steam locomotives and constitutional government. In some neighborhoods traditionally built wooden row houses sprawled next to baroque creations of an imagined or replicated Europe. Few of these buildings survived the great earthquake of 1923; far fewer also survived the firebombings of the Pacific War.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the city was changing from the military and political center of a semifeudal state to the political and business capital of an internationally recognized modern country. Tokyo had lost a large percentage of its population in the mid-nineteenth century when the daimyo, or feudal lords, had moved out during the 1870s. When they left, so did their retainers and support staffs. Many of the townspeople left behind went elsewhere in search of work. Parts of the city remained desolate. In the late nineteenth century, city residents considered the area around what is now Tokyo Station as a home to foxes and badgers. By 1895 Japan had become a constitutional monarchy and won a major war against China; by 1905 the country had defeated Russia in an even larger war. Tokyo was just reaching the crest of its revival, and many inhabitants could not help but feel close to these events. Despite the many changes over these years, Tokyo remained divided into the High City, where the warrior aristocrats of the previous age had lived in their mansions, and the Low City, where those who serviced the aristocracy usually lived.¹

By the early twentieth century, people in the High City, which lived up to its name both metaphorically and literally, had generally embraced the modern. Aristocrats in tuxedos and ballgowns staged elaborate dinner parties serving haute cuisine inside luxurious western-style houses. Men of rank discussed politics and policy. At a time when few women were literate, their wives and daughters were both educated and cultured. They valued chastity highly. Men, however, had considerable contact with women outside marriage, as had been customary from earlier times. Indeed, it required considerable effort for the government to convince some men that they should be monogamous and not accept children born outside wedlock as legitimate.² But men’s values also were changing, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the crown prince who later became the Emperor Taishô declared that he would have only one wife. This imperial pronouncement set a modern example for others, although many men, and especially those of the upper classes, continued to have mistresses, frequent brothels, or do both.

The ancient rhythms of Edo continued in many other ways. European Victorian values were certainly felt in the Low City, the geographical part of Tokyo where Abe Sada’s family lived, but many centuries-old traditions also remained vibrant. The festivals that Shinto shrines sponsored frequently had the characteristics of carnival and remained highlights of the year for entire neighborhoods. Workmen in the various trades often lived close together and remained proud of their crafts. They could also be boisterously bawdy. The songs of Yoshiwara, the licensed brothel district, were sung widely and the highest ranking of the geisha and prostitutes won considerable esteem. They set fashion styles that many Tokyo women emulated.³

Kanda, the Tokyo neighborhood into which Abe Sada was born in 1905, was in the heart of the Low City. At that time her father, aged 52, was relatively advanced in years. He hardly appeared in Abe’s own retelling of her childhood and until her teenage years seems to have shared few intimacies with his youngest daughter. Her mother, on the other hand, had a close relationship with Sada, to whom she passed on her own enjoyment of the gaudy culture that Confucian and Victorian values alike tended to disparage: bright, elaborate kimono, heavy makeup, stylish hair, and music and dance from the pleasure quarters, as the brothel district was euphemistically called.

In their search for possible explanations of Abe’s later criminal behavior, the police pieced together a finely detailed picture of her birth and early childhood. Little seemed unusual. While pregnant with Sada her mother experienced no difficulties. The birth was normal except that the baby was slow to begin breathing. Katsu had trouble nursing and Abe was sent to a wet nurse who became her foster mother, a common practice at the time. After a year she returned to live with her birth parents. Her subsequent development was normal except that she did not acquire speech skills until age four. She experienced few childhood health problems other than an ear infection, which permanently affected her hearing in her left ear.

The police found little to fault in Abe’s physical development but were quick to see problems in her upbringing. They described her early years as follows:

Being the youngest child, however, she was badly spoiled. Her mother, who wanted to live out her desires through her child, loved her blindly and raised her so that she could have anything she wanted. According to [her older brother] Shintarô, her mother was proud of her child’s beauty and often dressed her up and took her out. Following her admission to Kanda primary school she followed the custom of people living in that area and took lessons for the shamisen. She tended to be lazy in school and her grades invariably were poor. She mostly had Bs and Cs but few As. Her only As were in singing, and she received Cs in deportment. Naturally, she increasingly disliked school. Her teachers told her to quit taking [shamisen] lessons, but both mother and child disagreed and she continued to take lessons the entire time she was in primary school.⁴

In her police interrogation, Abe said that her parents had spoiled her. They were relatively rich, and as she was the youngest child, it seemed natural that she should be spoiled. The shamisen and singing lessons became her main focus of attention while she was in school. Today the musical skills that she learned would be considered “classical” and valued as such, but contemporary educators frowned upon them. They brought to mind the decadent worlds of geisha and prostitutes. On the other hand, Kanda had a reputation for its emphatically Low City culture, in which the geisha world with its arts of dance and shamisen-accompanied singing was still held in regard. In other words, the neighborhood where the Abe family lived retained a strong flavor of Edo with its traditional customs and values.⁵

Abe’s own interests were rooted more in a romantic past than in an academic future; graduation from primary school ended her institutional education. While she continued to live at home she took sewing and calligraphy lessons from tutors who came to the house, skills considered necessary for any woman who hoped to marry a respectable husband. Apparently she became proficient in both. In addition, she continued to visit a teacher outside the house for shamisen and vocal lessons. Although these were hardly skills expected of a respectable wife, they were by no means unusual subjects of study for any young woman with her background.

As a young girl, Abe was strong-willed and brave. When she argued with other children, even if her opponent was an older boy who struck her, she never cried and always held her ground. As an older child, she took a liking to going to the public baths although her family had a bath at home. People considered her wasteful for doing so. She also had a way of provoking her young friends. Once, while she was at the public bath, a boy of her own age had challenged her to come over to the men’s side, saying that he would put his hands together in apology and eat soap if she was brave enough to do so. With neither hesitation nor a stitch on her body she charged over to the men’s side and told her friend to apologize and eat soap.⁶ While this behavior was by no means criminal or even decadent, it did reflect a lack of respect for what many at the time considered proper decorum for a girl.

At this point in time, Abe Sada’s older brother Shintarô was once again the focus of domestic troubles that had an effect on her life. Her graduation from primary school occurred when the family was continuing its longstanding argument over whether he or his sister, Teruko, should inherit the Kanda property and the tatami-making business. This dispute itself suggests that women in the family had significant economic and decision-making power. In any event, Abe’s parents thought it better that she not witness some of the bickering, so they frequently sent her out to play. This gave her the habit of staying outside the house, which was located in the middle of Tokyo, without supervision for extended periods of time.

A doting mother, selfishness, local customs, poor academic performance, little respect for a “proper” girl’s social skills, a love of “decadent” music: none of these was criminal. However, when Abe became the subject of police scrutiny later in her life, they found in this combination a fitting backdrop for criminal behavior.

3. MAIDENS OR HARLOTS ONLY

Abe Sada grew up at a time when sex education and sexuality in general were subjects of intense scrutiny and debate, both in public and in private. During the nineteenth century and before, sexual customs depended on social class and region. Among the samurai and aristocratic classes, concerns of identity and loyalty made lineage an issue of prime importance. The integrity of the family line or ie was paramount. Hence the sexuality of women in those classes was closely controlled. Virginity until marriage and chastity thereafter ensured a pure family line, at least where patrilineage was concerned. However, among the urban working classes and rural peasantry there existed a broad range of sexual values.¹ For some commoners, wealth demanded attention to a patrilineal family that rivaled samurai rigor regarding the control of women’s sexual lives. Urban working-class and farm and other rural women, on the other hand, had less money and status but often also far more freedom than women of the samurai or the more affluent classes of commoners. For many, either a patrilineal house was not an important issue until modern times, or they had ways of resolving differences by giving women household power.² Furthermore, in rural villages and some urban settings, sexual experience before marriage was expected for women and men alike. Indeed, if a village woman had never had a sexual encounter before marriage, prospective partners often questioned what might be wrong with her.³

Although it seems modern for women to have economic independence, many women in premodern Japan were much more independent than their granddaughters who lived in the early twentieth century. Until the late nineteenth century, in urban and rural locales alike many women had their own viable means of earning a living or owned substantial property, which gave them some degree of financial independence.⁴ In these circumstances divorce and remarriage were not stigmatized. Able to depend on more than their reproductive abilities to support themselves, many women had considerable power over their lives, including their sexuality.

Modernity changed all that. The most powerful blow came with the promulgation of the Civil C...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction
• Prologue: A Murder Grips the Nation
• 1. An Unremarkable Family History
• 2. Early Childhood
• 3. Maidens or Harlots Only
• 4. Geisha and Prostitute
• 5. Acquaintance Rape
• 6. Acting Up
• 7. Becoming Professional
• 8. Changing Saddles
• 9. Legal Prostitution and Escape
• 10. From Prostitute on the Lam to Mistress
• 11. A Search for Stability
• 12. Discovering Love
• 13. Love’s Intoxication
• 14. Murder
• 15. No Longer Private
• 16. Interrogation and Investigation
• 17. Judgment
• 18. Imprisonment and Release
• 19. Celebrity, Hardship, and Escape
• Epilogue: A Trail of Re-creations
• Notes from the Police Interrogation of Abe Sada
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index