"Yokohama Mary" - Oldest Prostitute in Kanto

[Mulboyne]

[floatl][/floatl]Yokohama Mary was part of the landscape of Isezakicho and Kannai in Naka-ku. Born in 1921, she worked as a prostitute and hooked up with an American GI lover in Tokyo after the war. When he left for home, Mary moved to be near the Yokosuka naval base around 1961 where she continued frequenting the bars which served US forces in the area. She went back to her old line of work and continued for the next 35 years, unimpaired by age or 22 arrests. Mary had no home, however, and took to sleeping on benches or corridors of buildings in the area. Local residents [floatr][/floatr]got used to the sight of this tiny woman with her thick white make up and white evening dress, hanging around on street corners and they dubbed her Yokohama Mary. She kept all her possessions in two large bags which she would carry around constantly. It is said that she refused the regular offers of charity which came her way over the years but she made friends with the local shopkeepers and, later, more bohemian types who sought her out to see if they could get her to tell her stories. In particular, she struck a chord with the popular chanson singers of the time. As the bubble came and went, Mary was still wandering the streets and although the landlords changed, she still used the local buildings to sleep at night. She suddenly left Yokohama in 1995 and it was learned that she had moved to her hometown in Chugoku prefecture. When the local papers reported her death by heart attack last year, she had made such an impression that editorials wrote of the passing of an era in Yokohama even though she had been absent for years. Director Takayuki Nakamura has now produced a documentary on Mary which is due for release next month. A site here (Japanese only) also retells some of the conflicting stories of her life.

[Mulboyne]

The flier for the new film and a couple of other images of Mary.

[Greji]

She dumped me for Taro!

[Tsuru]

Damn.... You don't make shit like this up!

[GuyJean]

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

[Greji]

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'll never tell. I'm still mad cause she left me for Taro's big money.
Here she is on the night we became engaged!

[Taro Toporific]

[Mulboyne]

Well, if I'd done an elementary search, I would have seen that old thread and saved Taro the trouble of reposting his earlier comments. That's one of the hazards of posting in the early hours after a glass or two too many.

Coincidentally, or probably not so since the new film's PR team is out in force, there is a piece on Mary in today's Japan Times which is based on a feature in the Asahi Geino. The JT archives are registration only so here's the whole piece:

The colorful, ultimately tragic tale, of a famous Yokohama prostitute

"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."

[Blah Pete]

I saw this movie yesterday at a theater in Yokohamas Isezaki-Cho. More like a TV documentary than a movie. The film consists mainly of interviews of the residents and shop keepers of Isezaki-Cho and a Chanson singer who seemed to be the closest contact she had.
Her early past still remains a mystery as most of the people interviewed met her after she arrived in Yokohama.
The last scene shows her in a senior citizens home where she went by her real name and gave up the white makeup and dresses.
I likes this film because the pace was slower than you something comparable on TV and the fact that it took place on the streets right outside the theater. This film was not only interesting because of the mystery of Mary but because it was a glimpse of everyday life from 20-40 years ago.
Something to do over Golden Week if you are not fighting the crowds to get to the inaka. It is also playing in a theater in Shinjuku.

[Taro Toporific]

An interesting portrait ...

'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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