Sada Abe

was a Japanese geisha and prostitute who murdered her lover, , via strangulation on May 18, 1936, before cutting off his penis and testicles and carrying them around with her in her kimono. The story became a national sensation in Japan, acquiring mythic overtones; it has also been interpreted by artists, philosophers, novelists and filmmakers. Abe was released after serving five years in prison and went on to write an autobiography.

Family background

Sada Abe was the seventh of eight children of Shigeyoshi and Katsu Abe, an upper middle-class family of tatami mat makers in Tokyo's Kanda neighborhood. Sada's father, originally from Chiba Prefecture, some acquaintances reported him to be somewhat self-centered, with a taste for extravagance. Likewise, Sada's mother had no known legal or moral blemishes on her record.

Sada's brother Shintarō was known as a womanizer, and, after his marriage, ran away with his parents' money. Her sister Teruko was also known to have had several lovers. Sada's father sent Teruko to work in a brothel, then not an uncommon way to punish female sexual promiscuity in Japan, although he soon bought her back. Teruko's past was not considered a hindrance to marriage for those of the Abes' class at the time, and she soon married.

Early life

Abe was born in 1905. Abe's parents initially appeared to support her, but soon changed their response, and, claiming that Abe had become irresponsible and uncontrollable, they sold her to a geisha house in Yokohama in 1922. Abe's oldest sister, Toku, testified that she wished to become a geisha. Abe herself, however, claimed that her father made her a geisha as punishment for her promiscuity.

Abe's encounter with the geisha world proved to be a frustrating and disappointing one. To become a true star among geisha required apprenticeship from childhood, with years spent training and studying arts and music. Abe never progressed beyond a low rank, and one of her main duties was to provide sex for clients. She worked for five years in this capacity and eventually contracted syphilis. When Abe suggested that Kasahara leave his wife to marry her, he refused. She then asked Kasahara to allow her to take another lover, which he also refused to do. Afterwards, their relationship ended, and, to escape him, Abe left for Nagoya. Kasahara ended his testimony with an angry remark about Abe: "She is a slut and a whore. And as what she has done makes clear, she is a woman whom men should fear." Likewise, Abe remembered Kasahara in less than flattering terms, saying, "He didn't love me and treated me like an animal. He was the kind of scum who would then plead with me when I said that we should break up."

In Nagoya, in 1935, again intending to leave the sex industry, Abe began working as a maid at a restaurant. She soon became romantically involved with a customer at the restaurant, Gorō Ōmiya, a professor and banker who aspired to become a member of the Diet of Japan. Knowing that the restaurant would not tolerate a maid having sexual relations with clients, and having become bored with Nagoya, she returned to Tokyo in June. Ōmiya met Abe in Tokyo and, finding that she had previously contracted syphilis, paid for her stay at a hot springs resort in Kusatsu from November until January 1936. In January, Ōmiya suggested that Abe could become financially independent by opening a small restaurant and recommended that she should start working as an apprentice in the restaurant business.

Acquaintance with Kichizō Ishida

Back in Tokyo, Abe began work as an apprentice at the Yoshidaya restaurant on February 1, 1936. The owner of this establishment, 42-year-old Kichizō Ishida, had worked his way up in the business, starting as an apprentice at a restaurant specializing in eel dishes. He had opened Yoshidaya in Tokyo's Nakano neighborhood in 1920. When Abe joined his restaurant, Ishida had become known as a womanizer who, by that time, did little in the way of actually running the restaurant, which had become, in fact, managed primarily by his wife.

Not long after Abe began work at Yoshidaya, Ishida began making amorous advances towards her. Ōmiya had never satisfied Abe sexually, and she was responsive to Ishida's approaches. In mid-April, Ishida and Abe initiated their sexual relationship in the restaurant to the accompaniment of a romantic ballad sung by one of the restaurant's geisha. On April 23, Abe and Ishida met for a pre-arranged sexual encounter at a teahouse, or —the contemporary equivalent of a love hotel—in the Shibuya neighborhood. Planning only for a short fling, the couple instead remained in bed for four days. On the night of April 27, they moved to another teahouse in the distant neighborhood of Futako Tamagawa where they continued to drink and have sex, occasionally with the accompaniment of a geisha's singing, and would continue even as maids entered the room to serve sake. They next moved to the Ogu neighborhood. Ishida did not actually return to his restaurant until the morning of May 8, after an absence of about two weeks. Of Ishida, Abe later said, "It is hard to say exactly what was so good about Ishida. But it was impossible to say anything bad about his looks, his attitude, his skill as a lover, the way he expressed his feelings. I had never met such a sexy man."

After their two-week encounter ended, Abe became agitated and began drinking excessively. She said that with Ishida she had come to know true love for the first time in her life, and the thought of Ishida being back with his wife made her intensely jealous. Just over a week before Ishida's eventual death, Abe began to contemplate his murder. On May 9, she attended a play in which a geisha attacked her lover with a large knife, after which she decided to threaten Ishida with a knife at their next meeting. On May 11, Abe pawned some of her clothing and used the money to buy a kitchen knife. She later described meeting Ishida that night: "I pulled the kitchen knife out of my bag and threatened him as had been done in the play I had seen, saying, 'Kichi, you wore that kimono just to please one of your favorite customers. You bastard, I'll kill you for that.' Ishida was startled and drew away a little, but he seemed delighted with it all…"

Murder of Ishida

thumb|Newspaper photo taken shortly after Abe's arrest, at , Tokyo on May 20, 1936

thumb|Site of the "Abe Sada Incident"

Ishida and Abe returned to Ogu, where they remained until his death. During their lovemaking this time, Abe put the knife to the base of Ishida's penis and said she would make sure he would never play around with another woman. Ishida laughed at this. Two nights into this bout of sex, Abe began choking Ishida, and he told her to continue, saying that this increased his pleasure (erotic asphyxiation). She had him do it to her as well.

On the evening of May 16, 1936, Abe used her obi to cut off Ishida's breathing during orgasm, and they both enjoyed it. They repeated this for two more hours. Once Abe stopped the strangulation, Ishida's face became distorted and would not return to its normal appearance. Ishida took thirty tablets of a sedative called Calmotin to try to soothe his pain. According to Abe, as Ishida started to doze, he told her, "You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you… If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it is so painful afterwards." Abe commented that she wondered if he had wanted her to kill him, but on reflection decided he must have been joking.

At about 2 a.m. on May 18, while Ishida was asleep, Abe wrapped her sash twice around his neck and strangled him to death. She later told police, "After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity." After lying with Ishida's body for a few hours, she next severed his penis and testicles with the kitchen knife, wrapped them in a magazine cover and kept them until her arrest three days later. With the blood she wrote on Ishida's left thigh, and on a bed sheet. She then carved ("Sada", the character for her name) into his left arm. After putting on Ishida's underwear, she left the inn at about 8 am, telling the staff not to disturb Ishida.

After leaving the inn, Abe met her former lover Gorō Ōmiya. She repeatedly apologized to him, but Ōmiya, unaware of the murder, assumed that she was apologizing for having taken another lover. In actuality, Abe's apologies were for the damage to his political career that she knew his association with her was bound to cause. After Ishida's body was discovered, a search was launched for Abe, who had gone missing. On May 19, the newspapers picked up the story. Ōmiya's career was ruined, and Abe's life was under intense public scrutiny from that point onwards.

Abe Sada panic

The circumstances of Ishida's death immediately caused a national sensation. The ensuing frenzy over the search for Abe was called "Abe Sada panic". When asked why she had severed Ishida's genitalia, Abe replied, "Because I couldn't take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories." The interrogating officer was struck by Abe's demeanor when asked why she had killed Ishida. "Immediately she became excited and her eyes sparkled in a strange way." In attempting to explain what distinguished Abe's case from over a dozen other similar cases in Japan, William Johnston suggests that it is this answer which captured the imagination of the nation: "She had killed not out of jealousy but out of love." Mark Schreiber notes that the Sada Abe Incident occurred at a time when the Japanese media were preoccupied with extreme political and military troubles, including the February 26 Incident and a looming war in China. He suggests that a sensationalistic sex scandal such as this served as a welcome national release from the disturbing events of the time. After her arrest, Ishida's penis and testicles were moved to Tokyo University Medical School's pathology museum. They were put on public display soon after the end of World War II, but have since disappeared.

Conviction and sentencing

The first day of Abe's trial was November 25, 1936; by 5 a.m., crowds were already gathering to attend. Her sentence was commuted on November 10, 1940, on the occasion of the 2,600th anniversary celebrations of the mythical founding of Japan, when Emperor Jimmu came to the throne. Abe was released exactly five years after the murder, on May 17, 1941.

In 1946, the writer Ango Sakaguchi interviewed Abe, treating her as an authority on both sexuality and freedom. He called Abe a "tender, warm figure of salvation for future generations." In 1947, Ichiro Kimura's The Erotic Confessions of Abe Sada became a national bestseller, with over 100,000 copies sold. More than once, during the 1960s, film-critic Donald Richie visited the Hoshikikusui. In his collection of profiles, Japanese Portraits, he describes Abe making a dramatic entrance into a boisterous group of drinkers. She would slowly descend a long staircase that led into the middle of the crowd, fixing a haughty gaze on individuals in her audience. The men in the pub would respond by putting their hands over their crotches, and shouting out things like, "Hide the knives!" and "I'm afraid to go and pee!" Abe would slap the banister in anger and stare the crowd into an uncomfortable and complete silence, and only then continue her entrance, chatting and pouring drinks from table to table. Richie comments, "…she had actually choked a man to death and then cut off his member. It was a consequent frisson when Sada Abe slapped your back."

In 1969, Abe appeared in the "Sada Abe Incident" section of director Teruo Ishii's dramatized documentary , and the last known photograph of Abe was taken in August of that year.

Abe disappeared from the public eye in 1970.

In addition to the documentary in which Abe herself appeared shortly before she disappeared from the public eye, and the 1976 Japanese-language In the Realm of the Senses, at least three successful films have been made based on the story. The 1983 film, Sexy Doll: Abe Sada Sansei, made use of Abe's name in the title. In 1998, a 438-page biography of Abe was published in Japan,
Japanese Noise musician Merzbow adopted the alias Abe Sada for an early musical project. He released only one record under this name, the 1994 7" Original Body Kingdom/Gala Abe Sada 1936.
In March 2007, a four-bass noise band from Perth, Australia, named Abe Sada won a Contemporary Music Grant from the Australian Department of Culture and the Arts to tour Japan in June and July 2007.

Court documents

Undisclosed court documents were transcribed (or photographed) by someone and leaked to the outside. From his upbringing, he wrote about the situation before and after the crime, and it was published underground as "Glossy Record". It is a first-class document related to the Abe Sada case.

Chimao Nakazawa's book, "Abe Retirement Chronology", contains the contents of the leaked pretrial inquiry record, summarized in a chronological format from the birth of Sada Abe to the incident and her arrest.

Sada Abe in literature

Reprint: .
Satō, Makoto. Abe Sada's Dogs, avant-garde play.
Sekine, Hiroshi (1971). "Abe Sada", poem.
Tōkyō Seishin Bunsekigaku Kenkyōjo (1937). The Psychoanalytic Diagnosis of Sada Abe (Abe Sada no seishin bunseki teki shindan).
. A novel modeled on the Abe incident.

Sada Abe in film

Abe herself appeared in the "Sada Abe Incident" section of Teruo Ishii's 1969 documentary ; actress Yukie Kagawa portrayed Abe.

1976 – Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses which was widely banned following its release, for explicit scenes of sex and nudity.
1998 – Nobuhiko Obayashi's Sada starring Hitomi Kuroki.
1999 – Sachi Hamano's
2011 – Yuma Asami's

Notes

References

(Review of Johnston, William. Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star)