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Mulboyne wrote:
GuyJean wrote:There was a discussion on her a few years ago..
http://www.fuckedgaijin.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3573
Did anyone ever convince her to tell her stories?..
GJ
"I saw her for the first time when I was in junior high school. She was kind of frightening -- white face makeup, pitch-black eyeshadow. Not an easy woman to approach." Such was film director Takahiro Nakamura's first impression of "White Mary," also known as "Hama Mary," for Yokohama, her adopted home town, is where she was famous -- "part of the landscape," says Nakamura, 30, whose biographical movie "Yokohama Mary" opens next month. "When she vanished suddenly in the winter of 1995, everybody wanted to know what happened to her." White Mary was 84 when she died in January 2005. Summing up her career is easy; her character, less so. She was a prostitute whose first clients were officers of the postwar American Occupation. Her later years were spent in less exclusive circles, but she was still working, Asahi Geino tells us, well into her 70s. She inspired novelists and journalists to write about her, and photographers to take her picture. "Schoolgirls would come up to her and give her flowers," says Yokohama-born photographer Hideo Mori, who published a White Mary photo collection in 1995.
How she came to be called Mary is a mystery. "Nobody knows her real name," claims Nakamura -- somewhat improbably, for Asahi Geino interviewed her younger brother, who must know, though the magazine keeps the secret, if that's what it is. "She came to the store every day," reminisces 80-year-old Kimiko Yamazaki, owner at the time of a Yokohama cleaning business and a friend of Mary's for 20 years. She appears in Nakamura's film. "We had a changing room in the shop. She'd change her clothes there, and then go out on the town. She always paid for her cleaning with crisp new bills. Never seemed to have old ones...The American army officers were quartered in Yokohama," Yamazaki tells the magazine. "Mary-san was a prostitute in their neighborhood. At times she was the 'only-san' of one particular officer. Then the army withdrew, and Mary moved on to Isezaki-cho" -- Yokohama's theater district.
In her heyday she apparently had plenty of money, and indulged without restraint her extravagant taste in clothes -- a taste that never wore off, if the Hideo Mori photograph Asahi Geino features of her in old age is any indication. Her later years, sadly, were hand-to-mouth. Homeless, she slept on a folding cot in the corridor of an office building in downtown Yokohama. "She'd press the elevator buttons, and people would tip her," recalls someone who works in the building. "And she'd say, 'Well, big boy, how about it sometime?' "
"Every year, at New Year's," says Yamazaki, "she'd buy new clothes and presents and announce, 'I'm going home for a few days.' " "Home" was a farming village in western Honshu , where Asahi Geino locates her younger brother, now 82. His sister, he said, left home at 15. She married, divorced, became a drifter -- after which the family effectively lost touch with her. "She was called Mary? Hmm. She never told us. Never spoke to us about her work."
Partly deaf, nearly blind, she returned home for good in 1995. She died in a local senior citizens' home. "Yokohama," says Asahi Geino, "will never be the same."
'Yokohama Mary' Looking back at the life of one of the city's most mysterious figures
japantimes.co.jp | 2017/12/23
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