Friday, April 11, 2014

David Mitchell

David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, has quickly catapulted into my top five favorite authors, of any genre.  He rocks.  Anyway, in one of his novels, Number9Dream, one of Mitchell's characters writes a poignant history of her enslavement that I want to share with you.  The novel is set in Japan, but it might as well be set in any so-called civilized country.  I'm going to italicize the part that I think is most important, because I have to remind people of the phenomenon of blissful, hopeful ignorance all the time.  Because we think we have made the world such a better place than fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago, we ignore the realities that our own attitudes and ignorance create, and so we then vehemently reject the truth that there are 27 million slaves in the world today.  I hear so many voices ringing in my head arguing with me, "There can't possibly be that many!  I would know about it.  And in the United States?  No.  At least, no more than a few thousand."  What?  Are you serious?  That's more than ignorance; that's a harmful arrogance.

Without further ado, I will quote Kazue Yamaya's account with no further commentary.

"The doorbell rang.  I answered it, and three men barged in the door and snapped the chain my husband had trained me to use.  They demanded to know where my husband was hiding.  I demanded to know who they were.  One slapped me hard enough to dislodge a tooth.  "Your husband's case officers," he snarled, "and we [not my italics] ask the questions."  He and another searched the house while the third watched me to try to reassure my screaming son.  He threatened to maim my son if I didn't tell him where my husband was.  I called my husband at work and discovered he had phoned in sick that morning.  I called my husband's cell phone and discovered the number had been disconnected.  I called his pager--dead... My son watched with big scared eyes.  The two other thugs returned with a box of my husband's personal effects and all of my jewelry.  Then the bad news really began.  I learned that my husband had run up debts of over fifty million yen with a yakuza-backed credit organization.  Our life insurance policy had been doctored to name this organization as sole beneficiary in the event of his suicide.  The house and contents were their property if my husband defaulted on repayments.  "And that," said the most violent of the three, "includes you."  My son was taken into the next room.  I was told I was now responsible for my husband's debts.  I was then beaten and raped.  Photographs were taken "to guarantee my obedience."  I had to endure this torment in silence, for the sake of my son.  If I failed to obey their orders, the photographs would be sent to every name in my address book.

A month later I was living in a single windowless room in a buraku [not my italics] area of Osaka.  I was indentured to a brothel, and I was not allowed to leave the building or have any contact with the outside world, beyond sex with my customers.  You may doubt that sexual enslavement is practiced in twenty-first-century Japan.  Your ignorance is enviable, but your disbelief is precisely why such enslavement can prosper unchecked.  It happens; it happened to me.  I myself would have doubted "respectable" women could be forced into the sex industry, but the owners are masters of control.  I was dispossessed of every item from my old life that could have reminded me of who I was--except my son.  I was allowed to keep my son--this prevented me from escaping by suicide.  My customers not only knew about my imprisonment, they derived pleasure from it, and would have been implicated in the crime had it become public.  The final wall between me and the real world was perhaps the strongest: a phenomenon psychologists label "hostage syndrome"--the conviction that my fate was deserved and that no "crime" was being perpetrated.  After all, I was a prostitute.  What right did I have to bring shame to my old friends or even to my mother by appealing for help?  Better that they carry on believing I had disappeared overseas with my bankrupt husband.  Six other women, three with babies younger than my son, shared my floor.  The man who raped me was our pimp--it was him we had to beg for food, medicine, even diapers for our children.  He also supplied narcotics, in careful quantities.  He administered them personally to ensure we couldn't overdose... In time our old lives became detached from what we had become."

The account continues, but this is enough to capture, despite its being fiction, the reality of the cruelty that sex slavery is.  And, of course, this story could have easily been about some other form of slavery.  It's all equally unexpected and horrible.

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