Her face is caked in white makeup and her eyes are lined in black. The same woman wearing the same white dress and makeup stands near an elevator in the GM Building in the backstreets of Isezakicho, where she would collect tips in exchange for pressing buttons for customers as they make their way to their appointments. She later sits her belongings and sleeps in a corridor of the same building. At other times, she dozes on a wooden chair, upon which a cushion bears a hand-scratched expression of love in what seems to be Japanese and Chinese.
Mary has over the years almost become something of an urban legend. Rumor has it that she once appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Nakamura, a Yokohama native, first ran into Mary when he was in junior high school. At the time, he was on his way to see a movie.
After that, it became quite normal to see her around. In , however, she suddenly disappeared. Locals thought she had probably died or had gone back to her hometown β supposedly in either Ibaraki, Fukushima or Hiroshima prefecture β and checked into a nursing home. However, no one knew what really happened to her. I started my documentary out of pure curiosity β I just wanted to know what kind of person Mary was.
Nakamura was 22 when he began working on his documentary. He spent a couple of years researching the history of Yokohama, from the arrival of the black ships and the opening of Yokohama to foreign trade in the 19th century to postwar Yokohama. The book provides details on the chabuya , which catered to foreign men as a bar, cabaret, dance hall and brothel as well as the Recreation and Amusement Association organized brothels for the Occupation forces and the so-called pan-pan girls that hit the streets after the RAA was closed down in Nakamura talked to a number of people who either knew Mary or knew of her existence.
He found that those who knew her genuinely seemed to care about her and tried to help her in different ways. These people began to tell him about the ways in which Mary had also had an influence on their own lives.
