A Few Posts on Yokohama – #3 The Bad Foreigners of Yokohama

(carrying on from yesterday’s post on the Nectarine brothel…)

In 1900 the American Consul General Edward C. Bellows wrote to the State Department to inform them of the death of James Curtis, an American citizen. Boston-born, 40-year-old Curtis, who had no known relatives, had died of alcoholism in Yokohama’s General Hospital on a charity ward. Bellows clearly knew Curtis, recording on his Report of the Death of an American Citizen form sent to Washington that he had, ‘…come to Japan in 1887, since which date he has led the dissolute life of a crimp.’

 

In 1905 Bellows’ successor as American Consul General in Yokohama, Henry B. Miller (pictured below) didn’t mince his words when asked by the State Department for a report on the presence or otherwise of American prostitutes in the port. Miller was a tough and plain spoken businessman who had started out in the Oregon lumber business, got himself elected a member of the Oregon legislature and then an appointment as U.S. Consul General to Chungking at the head of the Yangtze before moving to Newchwang, a small treaty port in north east China (where the Great Wall meets the sea) and finally Yokohama. In a fairly lengthy, but highly revealing, report on the local prostitution scene (at a time when Gracie may still have been there shortly before moving to Shanghai) Miller wrote:

 

‘The police report to me that there are now in this city several houses under suspicion of harboring American prostitutes, one contains four women known to be Americans…Besides these there is another house containing one French woman and another with a Chinese woman under suspicion as prostitutes. These women are generally well known upon the streets and advertise by letters to the various hotel guests. In addition to these permanent places there are numbers of women belonging to this class travelling in Japan, and almost every steamer coming from San Francisco brings one or more prostitutes to the Orient and it is reported that proprietresses often pay their passage over. Many of these women are Americans, while numbers of them claim American citizenship, but are of other nationalities. I think it is perhaps true that the great per cent of foreign prostitutes coming here claim American citizenship.’