Sada Abe - Early Life

Early Life

Sada Abe was born in 1905. Her mother doted on Sada, who was her youngest surviving child, and allowed her do as she wished. She encouraged Abe to take lessons in singing and in playing the shamisen, both activities which, at the time, were more closely associated with geisha and prostitutes than with classical artistic endeavor. Geishas were considered glamorous celebrities at the time, and Abe herself pursued this image by skipping school for her musical lessons, and wearing stylish make-up. As family problems over her siblings, sister Teruko and brother Shintaro, became more pressing, Abe was often sent out of the house alone. She soon fell in with a group of similarly independent teenagers. At the age of 15, during one of her outings with this group, she was raped by one of her acquaintances, and even though her parents defended and supported her, she became a difficult teenager. As she became more irresponsible and uncontrollable, her parents sold her to a geisha house in Yokohama in 1922, hoping to find her a place in society with some direction. Toku Abe, Sada's oldest sister, testified that Sada wished to become a geisha. Sada 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 wound up with a low-rank, in which among her main duties was to provide sex for clients. She worked for five years in this capacity, and eventually contracted syphilis. Since this meant she would be required to undergo regular physical examinations, as would a legally licensed prostitute, Abe decided to enter that better-paying profession.