Government agencies communicate via. Trusted website s. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The auction took place in front of the go-downs at the port. The zegen [pimp] took the girls out of the hold, ordered them to change their clothes and lined them up in front of a warehouse. The brothel-owners bought them on the spot in [the] auction. Good looking girls were priced between one and two thousand yen, and ordinary girls from four to five hundred yen.
This account by Tomijiro Onda, a Japanese barber in Singapore, describes how the trade in young girls operated here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ships carrying girls from Japan and China reached Singapore after three weeks to a month, while junks from Hong Kong took slightly more than a week. In , there were 60, Chinese men but only 6, Chinese women, of whom an estimated 2, — mainly Cantonese and Teochew — worked as prostitutes. Prostitution at the turn of 20th-century Singapore, as with most other things, was the result of supply rising to meet demand.
Most of the prostitutes came from patriarchal societies like China and Japan. There, sexual licence and the purchase of women was a male prerogative. Abject poverty in some regions in turn pushed these women out to find work in places like Southeast Asia. In , the Nanyang Siang Pau described how one hapless victim was misled:. She agreed and left Singapore without telling her mother. She only wished to save up enough money, look for her mother and return to China with her. During a more explicit period of training, the teenager would receive detailed instructions in the arts of lovemaking and massage.
She would also learn how to use aphrodisiacs and other sexual devices, and how to entertain and pleasure men from sex manuals, erotic paintings and pamphlets. Once the girl, usually between the ages of 13 and 15, completed her apprenticeship, her virginity would be sold to the highest bidder: men would pay several hundred dollars to more than a thousand dollars for the experience of deflowering her.
Foreign tourists, soldiers, and, especially Japanese sailors also sought their sexual favours by visiting the unregistered haunts of Malay and Eurasian women scattered in the side lanes and alleys of the city. Japanese prostitutes, known as karayuki-san , operated within the Japanese enclave along Hylam, Malabar, Malay and Bugis streets where Japanese merchants, shopkeepers, doctors and bankers had set up shop.
