The Cruelest
Cut
By: Yuki Allyson Honjo
On May 18,
1936, Sada Abe strangled her lover Kichizo Ishida with an obi
cord. She removed his genitals with a knife, daubed in blood “Sada
and Kitchi together” on the sheets, and carved her name on his
arm with a knife. She neatly wrapped Ishida’s genitals in a magazine
cover and washed her hands. Carrying the souvenir of her lover,
Abe stepped out of the inn and into Japan’s collective popular
imagination.
When
her crime was discovered the next day, it was an instant sensation.
With a “sexually and criminally dangerous woman on the loose,” the
nation was gripped with “Abe Sada panic”: newspapers printed extra
editions and a mad rush of curiosity seekers created a large traffic
jam in Ginza. She evaded the police for days and was eventually
caught in an inn in Shinagawa, where she had planned to commit suicide.
In a widely published photo (Click here
for original photo) taken shortly after her arrest, her kimono is
slightly disheveled; she has an odd smile on her face. The policemen
are smiling as well, and all look rather pleased with themselves.
Abe
confessed freely to the crime and was clearly a danger to no one
but herself. They asked her why she killed Ishida. “Because I loved
him,” she answered. Men could legally control women in any number
of ways. Killing him, she said, was the only way she could really
and truly “monopolize” and control her man.
As William Johnston, the author of Geisha, Harlot, Strangler,
Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan points out,
Abe’s story still remains current, almost seventy years after the
event. While similar crimes have been committed, even in the jaded
post Lorena Bobbitt world, Sada Abe remains a well discussed subject
of numerous books, essays and multiple films. For example, Nagisa
Oshima’s film (1976) In the Realm of the Senses was based
on Abe Sada and her relationship with Ishida, as was Noburu Tanaka’s
Abe Sada Story (1975) and Nobuhiro Obayashi’s Sada
(1998). She became an icon, someone to be feared, and an exotic
object of lurid and prurient male fantasy.
This
book focuses on the historical Sada Abe. Johnston uses a wide array
of primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English to create
a multi-dimensional and sympathetic portrait of Sada Abe. In the
back of the book, he includes a translation of the published transcripts
of Sada’s police interrogations. While Abe’s responses are fascinating,
so are the police questions. The police ask, as if this were the
normal course of action, “If you loved Ishida so much, why didn’t
you bring up the idea of a double suicide?” Johnston’s book argues
that while Sada Abe was a unique individual, the difficult circumstances
around her life were generally unremarkable for the day.
The
youngest daughter of a tatatmi mat maker, she came from middle class,
if not affluent, family. Spoiled by her mother, she was allowed
to do largely as she pleased as a child. In her teens, she was a
victim of an acquaintance rape. While her family defended her (contrary
to some of the fictional and semi-fictional accounts of her life)
and tried to mollify her with presents, Abe became a surly and uncontrollable
teenager. With her parent’s money, she was able to fund her aimless
lifestyle. Her father eventually sold her to a geisha house: there
is some debate on whether it was Abe’s wish (geisha were glamorous
stars of the day) or whether it was punishment for Abe’s sexual
promiscuity, which was also not unusual.
Abe
soon found that life as a geisha was not all that she imagined.
True geisha were accomplished women: they trained for years in the
arts, many since they were children. It became evident to Abe that,
with her lack of discipline and training, she was unlikely to become
a star in the geisha world. As a low ranking geisha, her services
were mostly sexual and she spent five years plying her trade. After
a bout of syphilis and thus consequently facing regular examinations,
she chose to become a licensed prostitute.
After
a few years in the trade, she tired of it and its conditions. She
attempted to leave the business. However, because of her contract
which indentured her to over two thousand yen in services (one thousand
yen was sufficient to buy a house at the time), she took an assumed
name to evade her creditors. With no real skills to her name, she
first took a job as a waitress, became a mistress to various men,
then a private prostitute, and then again tried to “go straight”
working as a maid in a restaurant named Yoshidaya. The owner was
Kichizo Ishida, whom she would eventually murder after a passionate
affair.
Johnston’s
analysis is particularly strong in setting the sometimes astonishing
events of Abe’s life in historical context. As a public health expert,
Johnston’s discussion of the sexual mores of the 1930s Japan give
us greater understanding of the period and of Abe herself. In the
1930s, sexual values and the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior
were in a period of flux and differed across class boundaries. On
the one hand, given the importance of family reputation, virginity
was prized among the upper classes to ensure proper succession.
Among commoners, women had far more sexual freedoms and sexual experience
was expected for women and men alike.
“Modernity,”
with import of western Victorian norms, contributed to the “transformation
of Japanese values governing sexuality.” In Sada Abe’s day, these
dual definitions of acceptable behavior were in conflict. For example,
Sada Abe’s sister Teruko had multiple lovers: as punishment, her
father sold her into a brothel. Johnston tells us that this was
not an uncommon course of action. However, her father bought her
back. Teruko later married, and “her sexual history was no obstacle
to marriage for somebody of her natal class.”
One
of the most extraordinary passages of the book concerns Keijiro
Hosoya, the senior judge in the case. He wrote candidly on the case
and admitted to frequenting “cafés” where paid “dates” with
women were arranged. When reviewing the case Hosoya found himself
excited by the candid sexual details.
| Contemporary
sensibilities supported taboos on sexual intercourse during
a woman’s menstrual period; Hosoya did not want the case
to arouse the other judges sexually if they might then discover
that their wives were having their periods, since they would
be without the proper means of relieving their excitement,
Consequently, he determined when their wives were having
their periods by asking them about who had bathed the children
of if their wife had taken a bath, since bathing also was
taboo during a woman’s period. This way he established a
time when all three wives would not be menstruating, and
he set the trial for that time. (Johnston pp. 135-36) |
Hosoya
ran a tight ship: he tolerated no laughter, applause, or any public
display of emotion. Discussion of crime would be a violation of
the 59th article of the Meiji Constitution on public morality. He
required witnesses to say “Ishida’s extremity” to get around this
issue. Clearly navigating this terrain of sexual politics was challenge
for the judge.
One
weakness of the book is that Johnston spends too much time trying
to understand Abe’s motivations and how the circumstances of her
life led to her crime:
| One
particularly revealing thread is her difficulty accepting
social boundaries. She remained forever on the margins of
society. From adolescence, she lived outside the boundaries
of “normal” women, but for her the “abnormal” became the
ordinary. Eventually she lost her bearings so completely
that murder and mutilation, which to her made a kind of
logical sense, became acceptable. (Johnston p. 14) |
At
the end of the day, we will never really know what drove Abe to
strangle her lover and how she justified these actions in her head.
Johnston argues that heightened love and passion led to her moment
of madness. Indeed, this is an interesting assertion, but it does
not lead anywhere. Hundreds of young women had similar stories,
but they did not strangle their lovers. Johnston tries too hard
to make a connection between the circumstances and the crime.
Abe
did not get the death sentence as she desired: instead, she was
sentenced to six years in prison. After serving her time, she tried
to return to a quiet life, but the persistence of her celebrity
drove her out of hiding. Ishida’s penis and testicles were moved
to the Tokyo University Medical School’s pathology museum, but they
disappeared. In the same vein, Abe’s fate remains a mystery. She
too disappeared after 1970, perhaps finally getting the peace and
anonymity she craved. 
"At
the end of the day, we will never really know what drove Abe to
strangle her lover and how she justified these actions in her head.
Johnston argues that heightened love and passion led to her moment
of madness. Indeed, this is an interesting assertion, but it does
not lead anywhere."
-
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