Route of Cave Pioneering (cont’d)
Besides Kawamoto and Shiraishi, Nelson also has two houses of Inada and Terada, but this has little to do with the pioneering so I will not go any further about them. But there is one thing I would like to mention about Terada: when his son Shin died in Seattle seven or eight years ago, people whom you know like Hachibei Tanaka and Mantetsu were concerned about his funeral and other things and consulted with Terada, who was then in Kaslo. But Terada did not even send them five cents of money and made them furious. Devils do not even care about their own children when they pass away. Let us wrap up Nelson and move on to Cranbrook.
Cranbrook currently has four devil caves and in total about ten prostitutes. Cranbrook has a well-known cave district, which is often spoken together with Nelson, and its pioneering history is also complex. However, its way of doing things is very different from that of Nelson and Cranbrook is relatively more open. Of course, Cranbrook acquired such an open attitude because there are stores run by straight Japanese people nearby, which have their workers mixed with vagabonds, and they went through a number of troubles because of these relations. This is the primary difference from Nelson. The wives in Nelson only serve alcohol and never get involved in prostitution, but in Cranbrook everyone has their clients. In Nelson some prostitutes do not have their own men, but those in Cranbrook all have men. These men can vary from the lovers they made in this country, devils brought from Japan, to their actual husbands. Simply put, there are no women who are single. In Cranbrook many straight business people visit caves. They are rarely embroiled with each other. In fact, when Yurinkai, an association that organizes all Japanese residents, was established this year, there were both straights and devils, and its president is Shinpei Matsumoto, who was a skillful cave pioneer. The situation in Cranbrook is so bizarre that it is hard to imagine from afar.
This section describes the route of cave pioneering, so I will quickly get into that, but we also cannot ignore Shinpei Matsumoto to introduce Cranbrook.
There is Matsumoto Timber Corporation in front of Cranbrook Station. Shinpei Matsumoto commutes to this office everyday from a countryside three miles away from there. Does this mean that he is a respectable straight businessman? I will analyze the character of Shinpei Matsumoto frankly.