"You have seen the Yoshiwara, where girls are sold to men. That is our business. Do you understand now?"
"No."
"Then I will tell you the whole story of the Fujinami. About one hundred and twenty years ago our great-great-grandfather came to Yedo, as Tokyo was then called. He was a poor boy from the country. He had no friends. He became clerk in a dry goods store. One day a woman, rather old, asked him: 'How much pay you get?' He said, 'No pay, only food and clothes.' The woman said, 'Come with me; I will give you food and clothes and pay also,' He went with her to the Yoshiwara where she had a small house with five or six girls. Every night he must stand in front of the house, calling. Then the drunken workmen, and the gamblers, and the bad samurai would come and pay their money. And they pay their money to him, our great-great-grandfather. When the girls were sick, or would not receive guests, he would beat them, and starve them, and burn o kyu (a medical plant called moxa, used for cauterization) on their backs. One day he said to the woman who was mistress of the house, 'Your girls are too old. The rich friends do not come any more. Let us sell these girls. I will go into the country and get new girls, and then you will marry me and make me your partner.' The woman said, 'If we have good luck with the girls and make money, then I marry you.' So our great-great-grandfather went back to his own country, to Akabo; and his old friends in the country were astonished, seeing how much money he had to spend. He said 'Yes. I have many rich friends in Yedo. They want pretty country girls to be their wives. See, I pay you in advance five pieces of gold. After the marriage more money will be given. Let me take your prettiest girls to Yedo with me. And they will all get rich husbands.' They were simple country people, and they believed him because he was a man of their village, of Akabo. He went back to Yedo with about twenty girls, fifteen or sixteen years old. He and the other clerks of the Yoshiwara first made them jor[=o]. From those twenty girls he made very much money. So he married the woman who kept the house. Then he hired a big house called Tomonji. He furnished it very richly; and he would only receive guests of the high-class people. Five of his girls became very famous oiran. Even their pictures, drawn by Utamaro, are worth now hundreds of yen. When our great-great-grandfather died he was a very rich man. His son was the second Fujinami. He bought more houses in the Yoshiwara and more girls. He was our great-grandfather. He had two sons. One was your father's father, who bought this land and first built a house here. The other was my grandfather, Fujinami Gennosuké, who still lives in the inkyo. They have all made much money from girls; but the curse was hurting them all, especially their wives and daughters."
"And my father?" asked Asako.
"Your father wrote a book to say how bad a thing it is that money is made from men's lust and the pain of Women. He told in the book how girls are tricked to come to Tokyo, how their parents sell them because they are poor or because there is famine, how the girls are brought to Tokyo ten and twenty at a time, and are put to auction sale in the Yoshiwara, how they are shut up like prisoner, how very rough men are sent to them to break their spirit and to compel them to be jor[=o]. There is a trial to see how strong they are. Then, when the spirit is broken, they are shown in the window as 'new girls' with beautiful kimono and with wreath of flowers on their head. If they are lucky they escape disease for a few years, but it comes soon or late—rinbyo, baidoku and raibyo. They are sent to the hospital for treatment; or else they are told to hide the disease and to get more men. So the men take the disease and bring it to their wives and children, who have done no wrong. But the girls of the Yoshiwara have to work all the time, when they are only half cured. So they become old and ugly and rotten very quickly. Then, if they take consumption or some such thing, they die and the master says, 'It is well. She was already too old. She was wasting our money.' And they are buried quickly in the burial place of the jor[=o] outside the city boundary, the burial place of the dead who are forgotten. Or some, who are very strong, live until their contract is finished. Then they go back to the country, and marry there and spread disease. But they all die cursing the Fujinami, who have made money out of their sorrow and pain. I think this garden is full of their ghosts, and their curses beat upon the house, like the wind when it makes the shutters rattle!"
"How do you know all these terrible things?" asked Asako.
"It is written in your father's book. I will read it to you. If you do not believe, ask Ito San. He will tell you it is true."
So for several evenings Sadako read to this stranger Fujinami her own father's words, the words of a forerunner.
Japan is still a savage country, wrote Fujinami Katsundo, the Japanese are still barbarians. To compare the conventional codes, which they have mistaken for civilization, with the depth and the height of Occidental idealism, as Christ perceived it and Dante and St. Francis of Assisi and Tolstoy, is "to compare the tortoise with the moon." Japan is imitating from the West its worst propensities—hard materialism, vulgarity and money-worship. The Japanese must be humble, and must admit that the most difficult part of their lesson has yet to be learned. Cut and dried systems are useless. Prussian constitution, technical education, military efficiency and bravado—such things are not progress. Japan must denounce the slavery of ancestor-worship, and escape from the rule of the dead. She must chase away the bogeys of superstition, and enjoy life as a lovely thing, and love as the vision of a life still more beautiful. She must cleanse her land of all its filth, and make it what it still might be—the Country of the Rising Sun.
Such was the message of Asako's father in his book, The Real Shinto.