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senzenwomenI’m putting these two O-Kiku together because they were both karayuki-san (Japanese women forced into sex work abroad) who made a name for themselves, as well as being close in age (but they are definitely two different people).
Degami Kiku was born in 1877 in Yamaguchi, in a shipbuilding village with frequent interactions with Korea and the continent beyond. Orphaned by seventeen, she went to Korea to work in a bar in Incheon, where a sailor who liked her helped smuggle her into Vladivostok. There she went to work in a Japanese-owned brothel, serving Russian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese customers. She followed the Siberian Railway construction to Chita and then Chichihar, saving up to twenty thousand yen (an absurdly huge sum in those days) from the gold dust her miner customers paid her with. Avoiding a Russian-Chinese clash (possibly the alleged Blagoveshchensk massacre of 1900?) she returned to Vladivostok with her earnings and opened a brothel under her own name. She shortly became known as the local Big Sister or Amazon.
After a brief return to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War, she came back to Russia and settled in the gold-mining area of Zeya with a suitcase stuffed with Japanese remedies, which sold immediately; once she had cash in hand, she set up an even larger brothel, with twenty women and ten chefs.
Kiku earned military medals along with the nickname of Siberia O-Kiku for her collaboration with the Japanese Army upon their Siberian invasion in 1918, trading on her Korean and Chinese connections to work as a successful spy in conditions of great danger. She became partly paralyzed afterward, settling in Harbin with her friend O-Tsuma to sell Russian sweets and live quietly. She died in 1924 at the age of forty-seven.
Yamamoto Kikuko was born in 1884 in Kumamoto; her poverty-stricken family sold her to a restaurant/brothel in Seoul when she was seven. By 1916, having wandered through Korea, China, and Siberia, she too had ended up in Blagoveshchensk, where she ran a bar called the Aurora Palace. There (at least according to one account, which seems a little too dramatic to be true, but who knows) she fell in love with Sun Huating, a sworn brother of Zhang Zuolin. Hearing that he was about to be executed by the Kantogun, she summoned his underlings and rushed the place of execution along with them on horseback, brandishing a dagger. This dramatic rescue saw her established as a bandit chief in her own right (Sun Huating felt she was better suited to leadership than he was), known as Manchuria O-Kiku, with a hundred underlings; the safe-conduct passes she issued for her territory were considered the gold standard. She died in 1923 at the age of thirty-nine.
Sources
https://comic.k-manga.jp/title/2069/pv (Japanese) Manga about Manchuria O-Kiku (click the orange rectangle to see inside)
Degami Kiku was born in 1877 in Yamaguchi, in a shipbuilding village with frequent interactions with Korea and the continent beyond. Orphaned by seventeen, she went to Korea to work in a bar in Incheon, where a sailor who liked her helped smuggle her into Vladivostok. There she went to work in a Japanese-owned brothel, serving Russian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese customers. She followed the Siberian Railway construction to Chita and then Chichihar, saving up to twenty thousand yen (an absurdly huge sum in those days) from the gold dust her miner customers paid her with. Avoiding a Russian-Chinese clash (possibly the alleged Blagoveshchensk massacre of 1900?) she returned to Vladivostok with her earnings and opened a brothel under her own name. She shortly became known as the local Big Sister or Amazon.
After a brief return to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War, she came back to Russia and settled in the gold-mining area of Zeya with a suitcase stuffed with Japanese remedies, which sold immediately; once she had cash in hand, she set up an even larger brothel, with twenty women and ten chefs.
Kiku earned military medals along with the nickname of Siberia O-Kiku for her collaboration with the Japanese Army upon their Siberian invasion in 1918, trading on her Korean and Chinese connections to work as a successful spy in conditions of great danger. She became partly paralyzed afterward, settling in Harbin with her friend O-Tsuma to sell Russian sweets and live quietly. She died in 1924 at the age of forty-seven.
Yamamoto Kikuko was born in 1884 in Kumamoto; her poverty-stricken family sold her to a restaurant/brothel in Seoul when she was seven. By 1916, having wandered through Korea, China, and Siberia, she too had ended up in Blagoveshchensk, where she ran a bar called the Aurora Palace. There (at least according to one account, which seems a little too dramatic to be true, but who knows) she fell in love with Sun Huating, a sworn brother of Zhang Zuolin. Hearing that he was about to be executed by the Kantogun, she summoned his underlings and rushed the place of execution along with them on horseback, brandishing a dagger. This dramatic rescue saw her established as a bandit chief in her own right (Sun Huating felt she was better suited to leadership than he was), known as Manchuria O-Kiku, with a hundred underlings; the safe-conduct passes she issued for her territory were considered the gold standard. She died in 1923 at the age of thirty-nine.
Sources
https://comic.k-manga.jp/title/2069/pv (Japanese) Manga about Manchuria O-Kiku (click the orange rectangle to see inside)
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Date: 2026-01-24 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-26 02:14 am (UTC)