Clean, safe and green, Singapore is one of the most favored destinations for modern Japanese women who want to work and play hard. Some of the streets that formed the former Japanese red-light district in Singapore remain in a huge commercial complex called Bugis Junction.
In Japan, women often find it difficult to get into key corporate positions and face pressure to quit once they get married or give birth. So the city-state's female-friendly working environment is quite attractive to them.
But it's easier to get one here," said Mayo Omura, a year-old accountant at the local unit of Hewlett-Packard Co. She and many other Japanese women interviewed for this article seemed well-informed about present-day Singapore -- who to speak to for business, where to go for leisure, and what to buy at which shops.
What an overwhelming majority of them don't know about Singapore, however, was the countless Japanese women who worked here as prostitutes between the late 19th century and early 20th century, women who were referred to simply as "Karayuki-san. Karayuki-san were Japanese peasant girls -- mostly from the Shimabara Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture and Amakusa Islands in Kumamoto Prefecture -- who were sold into the flesh trade in colonial Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia.
Japan, the world's second-largest economy, was a poor country a century ago, and women were one of its major exports, along with silk and coal. Former "Karayuki-san," or Japanese prostitutes, are buried under a number of small tombstones at Japanese Cemetery Park in Singapore. Karayuki-san, together with other Japanese women who served as prostitutes elsewhere, including Siberia, Hawaii, Australia and some parts of India and Africa, were said to be the third-biggest foreign currency earner for Japan at the turn of the 20th century.
