YPAM

She Swims Away Beyond Reach [Drama Reading]

Bird Park

How far back is enough for us to make it right…?

• Japan
• Theatre

This fictional story is based on research about the karayuki-san—Japanese women who, from the 1870s to the 1930s, were sent abroad, often to Southeast Asia, to work in brothels. Their earnings supported Japan's poor economy, yet while the nation was building its modern identity, these women were used and then discarded. Branded as “disgraced,” they carried the stigma, while those who sustained the system—the men who bought their services and the state that encouraged men to remain overseas, rooting themselves in foreign lands for the sake of territorial expansion—remained invisible. To be invisible may feel like safety: men could consume karayuki-san without consequence, always assured of someone placed beneath them. Yet that illusion of safety only masked another violence—the state's own consumption of men, granting them fleeting privileges while using their lives to serve national ends. Japanese men—the so-called “uncles of Japan”—have appeared invisible from the postwar era to today. What lies within that invisibility? Or is there nothing at all? This work calls into that hollow void.