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Home / No.20 (Missing)

No.20 (Missing)

No. 20 is missing from UBC’s Tairiku Nippō Open Collection. The following story is retrieved from Brothels in Canada (Tairiku Nippō, 1909).

Currently in Edmonton is devil Toraji Asami and in Winnipeg is Saburō Tanabe at 124 Pacific Avenue, running a teahouse secretly as a brothel. I wrote about this long ago so I will not elaborate on this, but I would just add that in Edmonton there are other few devils beside Asami and their pioneering plans ended in failure two years ago. Takeshi Satō is one of those failures. Satō migrated to Vancouver in 1892 or 93 and was working here and there, but soon he was off toward the interior and engaged in prostitute procurement in the Nelson region. Back then a man called Tsuzuki in Vancouver was procuring quite a lot of prostitutes for the interior and they were all first sent to Satō. However, he was not able to make a living, not as he had expected, so he abandoned it and left for Seattle. That was about 6 or 7 years ago or around in 1901.

In Seattle he pretended to be an interpreter. As he is good at flattery he found a lot of interpretation jobs in brothels and managed to pass his days. But there was a drama that went like this: Satō plotted to take money from a prostitute called Oharu, who returned from Alaska, but the truth was that the prostitute had also calculated that Satō had some pocket money and was trying to extort it from him. As it turned out neither of them achieved their objectives and the drama broke down. Satō went downtown again and wandered about in the neighbourhood with his bird eyes, and then he got involved with his present wife Osaki.

Osaki first migrated to the United States with her husband. When they were in Seattle, her husband got lung disease and asked Satō to come as an interpreter when they visited a white doctor. As he repeatedly accompanied the husband on his visits to the doctor Satō became intimate with Osaki. In the end, he falsely interpreted the doctor as saying that the patient should return to Japan, and finally had the husband pack everything up and leave for Japan. Three days after the husband left Seattle, Satō had a liaison with Osaki. The woman is no better than him.

According to a source, they were already involved with each other before the husband left and they had him return to Japan by giving him false talk. I do not know if that is true but it could be. The ship arrived in Yokohama and the husband finally stepped on Japanese soil, but soon after, he died in a hotel. Poor thing.

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