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Home / No.50 (January 19, 1909)

No.50 (January 19, 1909)

Miscellany (cont’d)

Severance Pay and Human Trafficking

The words ‘severance pay’ do not sound nice, but they are often spoken even among the general public and not necessarily rarely-used words, so to speak. However, the words ‘human trafficking’ literally contain barbaric meanings. In fact, these two sets of words mean almost the same thing in the interior cave. We cannot let it pass that ‘severance pay’ means ‘human trafficking’ to them.

For example, there was a case like this. When he was in the interior, Mr. America, or Shirahashi, whom I mentioned a long time ago in the series, used to have a wife called Oshin. She is of course a prostitute and still lives in this country. Oshin was born in Shishihama, Shizu’uramura, Suntogun, Shizuoka Prefecture, as a daughter of a fisherman. Shishihama is actually a noble name, which village residents received from a monk in Koyasan in Kishū when they visited it, but that is not relevant. When Oshin was in an interior cave with Shirahashi, some conflict occurred and she was passed on to someone else in exchange for 500 dollars. They called it severance pay but it was the man who received the money and Oshin was not the payer, either. It was someone else, whose English name was Kitty. She looks like a huge panther rather than a kitty, but anyway, this prostitute obtained Oshin with 500 dollars, and Oshin became a debtor to Kitty. Simply put, it means that Oshin became Kitty’s prostitute on that day. Virtually this deal would be called human trafficking.

Oshin traveled from Calgary, Edmonton to Fernie. In Edmonton, she had a serious illness, had an operation at a hospital and escaped death. Last summer, she was in Lethbridge with Sugabe’s Osachi, but left there for Cranbrook and temporarily lived off Matsumoto. But Matsumoto made an arrangement with his number three, Jirō Hashimoto from Gōshū, and sent Oshin to his cave, which he co-managed (!) with his wife Okiyo.

In the meantime, while she was living off Matsumoto for a short period of time, she got involved with a man called something like Tsurumi from Kumamoto Prefecture. After she entered Jirō’s cave, she started to see Yakichi Murata from Gōshū, who is Jirō’s relative and was working at a sawmill in Wattsburg five or six miles away from Cranbrook. After Yakichi visited the city to see Jirō two or three times, Oshin quickly developed a relationship with him and Yakichi started to stay in the cave kitchen. Tsurumi was upset.

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