“Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura's fine documentaries” Joan Mellen.
Between the making of The Profound Desire of the Gods and Vengeance is Mine, Imamura was engaged in a series of documentaries tracing the fates of Japanese who were sent to Southeast Asia during the War years and, for various reasons, never returned. Karayuki-san are women who were kidnapped or sacrificed by impoverished families to become prostitutes for the Japanese military in Southeast Asia. Imamura interviews one such woman, now a balding, toothless 73-year-old. She takes him to the Singapore slum where she had been brought as the prisoner of a slave trader some fifty years earlier, and relates with surprising insight the horrendous tale that is her life. Imamura locates her story in the context of Japan's historical role in Southeast Asia, concluding that she is among the individuals sacrificed to the Japanese State: used, and then abandoned. For if a karayuki-san were to attempt re-patriation, it would only be to be treated as outcasts in Japanese society, especially by those very family members whose livelihood at one time depended on her sale. Therefore, though they still live in poverty, many karayuki-san prefer the poverty of exile to the shame of re-patriation.