And, of course, we have also seen an active movement among prostitutes. Some returned to Japan, some others died.
We will make sure to report on this further later in the series, but for now we can try counting out those who have left: Four left from Nelson; others left from Revelstoke, including Okiku, a wife of a black barber; Okiyo, a wife of Hashimoto; Osuma, a wife of Higashi; Osachi and Yamada’s wife; Iida’s wife; Osachi, prostitute for Iida; Itagaki’s Osaki; Chiba’s Onatsu and Okin; Tsurumi’s Iyo; and Shinjō’s Otori. All have returned to Japan at around the same time. Women such as Kigawa’s wife, Matsuno’s wife, whose English name is Sara, swapped her position for one in the underworld. There was also the dumb fellow Goemon Kashima who, together with his women, was slapped with a repatriation order by an immigration officer after he ventured from the interior to meet the women in Victoria. In another instance, a famous and adept woman called Sachiko left Blairmore two years ago in the spring and joined Asakusa Park Geisha in Tōkyō. She is already over thirty but proud of being able to speak some English. Calling herself by her stage name, Koetsu, she is throwing around English words such as, “Hey you, don’t be snobbish and pay me by ‘cheque.’ ‘Cash’ is less ‘troublesome’ and better.” There are other movements happening if we look over the situation out there, but we will deal with these later. Before finally writing about the situation in the interior, there is something hanging right in front of our eyes that we want to pay a bit of attention to.
Just Around the Corner
While the undercover correspondent was fighting with the extreme cold of some degrees below zero and exercising his skills and traveling everywhere, we had a mayoral election in Vancouver. As a new mayor was elected, there was an about-face and then a robust policy came to fruition, with the roll of the dice. The world was just turned upside down. You might remember all kinds of debates around street prostitutes versus indoor prostitutes, but in any case, the new policy devised a corner of red-light district, or a “warm-and-soft land,” or else, a devil cave, a prostitute cave, a pleasure quarter—how we call it does not matter but its location is somewhat problematic. The quarter extends between the 500 and 600 blocks of Alexander Street, in the neighbourhood of Powell Street. There is a saying: a mulberry field transforms into the blue ocean*, but indeed the news shocked the Japanese more than mountain potatoes would do by transforming into eels. We are not going to discuss this further here but we admit its significance as the location is extremely close to Japantown.