Karayuki-sans were Japan’s comfort women, trafficked in the late 1800s to the mid-1900s across Asia to serve as indentured sex workers. Here, Shohei Imamura continues his search for the “unreturned soldiers” of his earlier documentaries in a different form, looking for the women who had been deliberately forced to become “Japanese products at the front of Japan’s overseas development”, before prostitution was outlawed in the country.

The documentary follows Zendo Kikuyo, a septuagenarian who had been tricked into leaving her hometown for Malaysia at 19; she never returned to Japan. Imamura visits the former brothel on Malay Street where Kikuyo once worked, and they discuss, with bracing frankness the day-to-day reality of her trade, her former marriage to an Indian shopkeeper, and her youth in a rural town in Japan where she faced discrimination, which perhaps shaped her desire to remain in Malaysia. By following Kikuyo’s journey, and those who shared similar fates, Imamura exposes how prostitution became an export commodity that contributed to Japan’s economic and military expansion across South East Asia during the early 20th century, a theme Imamura will further explore in his fiction film Zegen. 

This screening is presented in partnership with The Japan Foundation.