Street of Shame, and the Reasons That Kept the Doorway Open

It is late, and cold, and a man is waiting in a street in Yoshiwara with a baby. He has come to walk his wife home from work. When she comes out, the three of them set off together, and there is not much good news to share on the way.

Her name is Hanae, and the house she has come out of is called Dreamland. Her husband is ill and has lost his job. What she earns in that house, selling herself to men who come in off the street, is what the three of them live on. Nobody in this scene is a customer, and yet everybody in it lives on the trade. The film keeps coming back to that.

Street of Shame, Akasen chitai in Japanese, was Kenji Mizoguchi’s last film. It follows the women of that one house through the time when Japan’s parliament was arguing over whether to outlaw prostitution, and the argument comes in over the radio again and again. It has no single heroine. It has five women, each with a reason for being there, and a sixth, the house’s maid, who does not yet work the door.

This essay discusses the whole film, including its last shot.

Almost everyone around these women has a story about them. The man who owns the house says he is doing the work the state neglects. The reformers in the Diet say the law will rescue them. A husband, a son and a father each want a woman out of that life, on his own terms. The film sets every one of those stories aside and gives each woman a reason instead: a husband’s illness, a son, a father’s bail, a dream of an ordinary marriage, a father she refuses to obey. Follow the money and it goes home, to those husbands and sons and fathers. Follow the shame and it comes back, to the women in the doorway.

That is the argument this essay makes. The house lives on the women’s reasons, and so, in their different ways, do the families; and a reason is not a door that a law can close. A law can close a house, cancel a debt, punish a landlord. It cannot buy a husband’s medicine or raise a son. The last shot shows what happens while the reasons are still open: the house’s maid, a girl whose family needs the money, is dressed, made up and put in the doorway.

It is not a film about sin, and it is not a film about rescue. It is a film about who lives on the money, and who is left holding the shame.

The record first. Street of Shame was made at the Daiei studio and opened in Japan on 18 March 1956. It runs eighty-six minutes. The screenplay, by Masashige Narusawa, draws in part on Yoshiko Shibaki’s fiction about Susaki, another of Tokyo’s quarters, and moves the story to Yoshiwara. Kazuo Miyagawa, the cameraman Mizoguchi is said to have trusted most, shot it in black and white. Toshiro Mayuzumi wrote the score, whose strange theme opens the film and comes back when things are about to go wrong; more than one viewer has written that it belongs in a ghost story. Machiko Kyō, Ayako Wakao, Michiyo Kogure, Aiko Mimasu and Hiroko Machida play the five women. It did well at the box office.

Mizoguchi was by then one of the most admired directors in the world, with prizes from Venice in three successive years earlier in the decade. He fell ill while preparing his next film and died on 24 August 1956. Between the film’s opening and his death, on 24 May, the Anti-Prostitution Act was promulgated.

The Japanese title is a term from a map. Akasen means red line. When the Occupation ordered an end to Japan’s licensed prostitution in 1946, the old licensed quarters did not disappear; they changed their signs. The houses took licences as cafés and special eating and drinking establishments. The women became, on paper, waitresses renting rooms in the house, and a customer who went to one of those rooms with a woman became, on paper, a man who had fallen in love and wished to give her a present. The police tolerated the arrangement inside areas they marked on their maps with a red line. Dreamland, in the film, is one of these establishments.

Yoshiwara itself was far older than the map. The shogunate licensed it in 1617, and after the great fire of 1657 it was moved out to the rice fields behind the temple at Asakusa, where it stayed. In the film’s first scene, Mrs Taya, who runs the house with her husband, asks a policeman who has called in whether a trade nobody needed would have lasted three hundred years. It is a good line and a self-serving one, and the film lets it stand. Most of the film’s best lines are like that.

The English title was attached for the film’s first American release, and it put a word into the film that the Japanese title does not contain. Writing in Senses of Cinema in 2004, the critic Dan Harper called the title silly and was sure it was meant to suggest a far more salacious treatment than Mizoguchi intended. It also answers, before the film begins, the question the film spends eighty-six minutes asking: whose shame?

It helps, too, to know what lay outside the red line. Seijun Suzuki’s Gate of Flesh, made in 1964 and set in the ruins just after the war, follows women who worked the streets with no house behind them, made their own law, never for free, and enforced it on each other. Mizoguchi’s women have what those women lacked: a proper roof, a licensed house, a policeman who drops in. They also have what comes with a roof. They have owners, and they owe them money.

Before any argument, the reasons, because the film gives them first and gives them as facts rather than excuses.

Hanae comes in to Dreamland from home each day, and what she earns keeps a husband who is ill and out of work, and their baby.

Yumeko is older, a widow. She sends what she earns to her only son, who has grown up in the country with his late father’s family, and she dreams of the day the two of them will live together.

Yasumi is young, and she is the house’s best earner. She came to Dreamland to raise bail for her father, who had been jailed for corruption, and she has stayed to save. She tells each customer what he wants to hear, and she lends money to the other women at interest.

Yorie longs to be an ordinary wife. A man who makes wooden clogs wants to marry her, and she owes the house money.

Mickey arrives early on, a newcomer from Kobe: loud, flashy, outspoken, with American manners and no interest in saving anything. Her reason is the least obvious and the one she guards hardest. It has to do with her father, and it will come out.

And in the background the whole time is the house’s maid, Shizuko, who does its errands and does not yet work the door.

The film does not ask us to approve of these reasons, and it does not ask us to pity anyone for having them. It asks us to know them. A reason is not an excuse, and it is not a verdict. It is the fact that has to be dealt with before anything else can be, and every rescue that turns up later in the film fails at exactly that point.

Nor are the women only rivals. They quarrel, over money and over a regular customer, and they also throw a farewell party for one of their own when she leaves to be married, and give her presents, and she is moved to tears. The film is as interested in what they are to each other as in what they are to the men.

In its first minutes the film follows money around the house. The man who rents Dreamland its bedding delivers a load of futons and slips money to Yasumi; a moment later Yumeko is borrowing from her. Nobody remarks on it. In Dreamland money passes from hand to hand all day, and the film watches it the way other films watch a glance.

The women owe the house. It advances them money against what they will earn, and the debts keep them where they are; Yasumi, who has learned from the house, lends to the others on the same terms. When Hanae comes in looking worn out, Mrs Taya tells her not to. She is, after all, for sale.

Mr Taya goes to hear the debate in the Diet and comes back furious. He gathers the women and tells them what the bill means for them: if it passes, they will be locked up for taking customers, and then how will they live? The people who really look after them, he says, are the owners. The house makes up for what politics fails to provide. It is doing social work.

It is the most self-serving speech in the film, and the film does not make it stupid. Two things in it are true. The first is the threat. The bill that women members of the Diet had brought in 1955, and which was voted down that July, would have punished the woman who sold as well as the man who paid; Taya is not inventing the prison, only using it. The second is the complaint. Nobody else in the film is offering these women a living, and he knows it.

The Diet had heard the same argument from the other side. When that bill was voted down, one of the members who supported it, the Socialist Shizue Yamaguchi, told the chamber that the reason given for rejecting it was that it could not pass before there was a social security system to support the women it would affect. She called the reason a pretext. Both sides, in other words, were talking about these women’s living. Neither was providing it.

And the film shows what Taya’s social work costs. Interest. Advances that hold a woman in place. A madam who looks at a tired woman and sees stock losing its value. And, at the end, the maid. This is the part of the film that earns anger, and the anger should go to the right place. Not at Taya as a monster; he is a small businessman with a grievance and an account book. At an arrangement in which an account book could call itself welfare, because nobody else had come to do the work.

Yorie is the one who is offered a way out, and the film offers her two, one after the other.

The first comes from a court. In October 1955, five months before the film opened, Japan’s Supreme Court held that a contract binding a woman to this kind of work was void, and that money advanced under it could not be claimed back. The news reaches Dreamland: leave, and the debt stays behind. Yorie leaves. The women give her a party and presents, and Hanae’s husband, whose household is kept by what his wife earns in that same house, tells the bride never to go back to that life.

The second way out is the marriage, and it does not last. Yorie comes back. Her husband, it turns out, wanted a pair of hands: a woman to work for nothing in his shop and his house. In Dreamland, she tells the others, at least what she earns is hers.

It would be easy to read this as a sad joke on a foolish woman, and it would be wrong. Yorie made a comparison, and she made it accurately. On one side, paid work, in a house where she had friends. On the other, unpaid work, in a house where she had a husband. She chose the pay. The film does not tell us she was right and does not tell us she was wrong. It records that the respectable way out turned out to be work as well, with the wages taken away.

Sixty-eight years later, Sean Baker’s Anora sent a woman from the trade into a wedding and let the groom’s family undo it. Mizoguchi is colder. Nobody undoes Yorie’s marriage. It holds, and it is a job.

What the court gave her was real. A debt that nobody can collect is a door. But a cancelled debt is not an income, and the film is exact about the difference: Yorie was freed from what she owed and not from what she needed. She came back to the work that paid.

Hanae is the most practical of the women and the most tired. On cold nights her husband comes to fetch her with the baby, and on the way home there is little to say. Then, in despair about the future, he tries to take his own life.

What matters in the scene is her answer. Hanae does not comfort him. She is angry. They have not stolen anything, she tells him; they have done nothing wrong; they could not have lived at all unless she sold herself, and he still has not understood what that has cost her. Then she goes back to work.

Set that beside what he said at Yorie’s farewell party, urging the bride never to go back to that life, and the shape of the thing is plain. His household is kept by the house. His opinion of the house is the respectable one. He is not a villain. He is ill and frightened, and he depends on her completely. But the money goes one way and the judgement the other, and Hanae stands where they cross.

The essay “Out, the Night Shift, and What It Costs to Be the Household’s Shock Absorber” gave this position a name. A shock absorber, it said, is the part of a structure built to take each impact so that the rest stays whole, and it is worn down by exactly the thing it is for. Natsuo Kirino’s women took their households’ shocks on a night shift in a lunch-box factory. Hanae takes hers in Dreamland. Illness, lost work, a baby, the rent: every shock her household meets is turned into another night of her work.

At the end the landlord turns the family out. When the radio reports that the bill has failed, Hanae is still at Dreamland, because there is nowhere else to go. The film does not ask us to feel sorry for her, and she would not thank us if we did. It asks us to see what she is carrying, and for whom.

Yumeko’s reason has a face, and it is her son’s. One night he comes to Dreamland looking for her. She is too ashamed to see him, and from where he stands he watches his mother calling in customers.

She goes out to the country to find him and learns that he has gone to Tokyo to work in a factory. She is glad. He is standing on his own. When at last he agrees to meet her, she tells the others he is sure to ask her to live with him. Instead he tells her that her work is filthy and that she is never to contact him again.

Back at the house she falls silent. The film shows what happens to her next without giving it a name: something in her gives way, she can no longer be reached, and she is taken away to hospital. This essay will not name it either. It is what the film shows it to be, a woman whose one reason was taken from her in a single conversation.

Aiko Mimasu, who plays her, had spent the post-war years starring in a long run of mother films, melodramas of a mother’s sacrifice, and was known for them. Casting her as an ageing woman of the house was talked about when the film opened. Mizoguchi gives her the sacrifice and nothing in return.

Here the English title comes due. The shame in this film is real, but look at who is made to hold it. The son was raised on the money. The shame went back to his mother. It is the plainest case in the film of what this essay is about: the money travels home, and the shame travels back to the doorway.

It would be easy to hate him, and the film makes that harder than it looks. He is young, and the people he grew up among know how his mother earns her money. His shame did not begin with him. That is not an excuse. It is a reason, and the film knows the difference.

Mickey is the film’s noise: loud, funny, extravagant, the only one of the women who seems to enjoy an audience. She spends as fast as she earns. It would be easy to take her as the film’s picture of a modern girl gone wrong, and the film sets that picture up in order to knock it down.

Her father comes up from Kobe. Her mother has died, he tells her, and Mickey weeps. Then he tells her why he has come. The family has a name to think of, her younger sister has a marriage in prospect, and she should give up this work and come home.

Mickey turns on him. While her mother was alive, she says, he made her cry with his women; now he wants to talk about appearances. She throws him out.

Her reason for being in Dreamland turns out to be a refusal. She will not be brought home to repair a respectability her father spent years damaging. The film neither rewards her for it nor punishes her. When the bill fails she is still at Dreamland, loud and unrepentant, and the film leaves her there as a person who has made a choice, which is exactly what the respectable world in the film will not let her be.

And then there is Yasumi, who does the arithmetic.

She is the house’s best earner because she has understood the district’s paper fiction better than the people who wrote it. On paper, a customer of a red-line café falls in love with a waitress and gives her presents. Yasumi lets each man believe he is in love and that she might marry him, and she takes the presents. One regular, Aoki, a married businessman, embezzles from his firm to pay her debts, believing she will be his wife. The man who rents out bedding pours money into her until he has to flee his creditors.

When Aoki finds out, he attacks her and nearly kills her. She recovers. After the bill fails she does what no one else in the film can do: she buys the bedding business the vanished customer left behind and becomes its proprietor. The shop rents out bedding, and Dreamland is one of its customers. The film opened with that man’s money passing into her hands. By the end, his shop is in them.

She is the only one of the women who gets out, and the way out on offer was to stop being the one in debt and become the one who lends; to stop being what the house sells and start selling to the house. The film does not punish her for it, and it does not admire her either. It shows that in the economy of Dreamland the only exit ran upstream.

Her reason deserves the same respect as the others’. She came to Dreamland because her father’s bail fell to her, and it cost her the life she might have had. It would be comfortable to call her the cold one and the others the victims. The film will not allow it. They are all doing the same arithmetic, with different sums.

The radio announces that the bill has failed. The women hear it and go back to work, because there is nowhere else to go. Yumeko has been taken to hospital. Yasumi has gone to her shop. Hanae has lost her home and is still here. Yorie, who left, is back. Mickey never left.

The house has lost its best earner, and it replaces her from inside. Shizuko, the maid, a girl from Kyushu whose family needs the money, is to start that night. She is dressed and made up.

Then she is put in the doorway. Around her the other women are openly pulling at the sleeves of men passing in the street. She stands there, frightened, and hesitantly calls to one of them. That is where the film ends.

The film presents her as young, and writers on the film call her a girl. It does not give her age, and this essay will not guess one. What it shows needs no guessing. The house has put the person with the least power to refuse into its doorway, because her family’s need made her available and nothing stood in the way. That is exploitation, and the film frames it as nothing else. There is nothing in the shot to enjoy, and it is not made to be enjoyed. It is the last image Mizoguchi left, and it is an accusation.

The trade does not end in this film. It renews itself, from the one thing nobody has touched. A family far away needs money, a house in Tokyo has a vacancy, and the bill has failed. Nothing about the girl in the doorway is new, and that is where the film’s anger lies.

Then history did something the film could not have known. The film ends on a bill that fails, as every earlier bill had failed since the first was brought in the late 1940s. It opened on 18 March 1956. On 2 May the government brought its own bill to the Diet, and on 21 May the Diet passed it. The Anti-Prostitution Act was promulgated three days later.

It is often said that the film helped. It was a hit, and Harper wrote that it is commonly believed to have been instrumental in the law’s passage. Perhaps it was. Nobody has shown it, and it may not be the kind of thing that can be shown; this essay leaves it as a belief.

What the law did is worth stating exactly, because it answers the film in some ways and not in others. It declared that no one may sell sex or buy it, and it attached no penalty to either. It punished what surrounds the act: procuring, advancing money to hold a woman to the work, contracts that bind her to it, providing the premises, running a house, financing one. It made a separate offence of using the influence of family ties to push someone into it. Its penalties took effect on 1 April 1958, and the red-line houses closed that spring.

The essay “The Districts: What Every Country Decided to Do About This” describes what this meant in the long view. In 1956 Japan left the act itself unpunished, for the woman as for the man, forty-three years before Sweden was admired for sparing the seller, and it arrived there through a post-war politics that saw these women as victims of poverty, not through any design. Nothing in that history is exotic. Every country, that essay argues, has had to decide something about this trade. Japan’s decision took ten years of argument and a ruling from its highest court, and it left the women’s reasons where they were. Street of Shame is a record of the poverty the argument was about.

There was one exception, and the film had already shot it. The one offence the law kept for the woman herself was soliciting where the public could see: calling to strangers, stopping them in the street, waiting for them in view. When the penalties came in, the act in Dreamland’s last shot was the one thing in that house for which the woman in the doorway, rather than the house behind her, could be punished.

The law also answered the film’s other question, the one about what would be offered in place of the house. The answer is in its third chapter. Every prefecture had to open a women’s consultation office with a place for temporary shelter, and appoint part-time counsellors to seek out and advise women at risk of the trade. Residential homes were something a prefecture may set up; that is the statute’s word. It was not nothing. It was also not a husband’s medicine, a son’s upbringing or a father’s bail. Whether it reached anyone’s reason is a question for a history of the law. The film shows why the question mattered.

The word itself has faded since. Reviewing the film for Women’s Action Network, a Japanese feminist organisation, Natsuko Nakamura described it as handing a memory on to a society in which fewer and fewer people know what akasen meant. The word has faded. This essay would not claim that the questions have.

There are good reasons to distrust all of this, and they should be put as strongly as they can be.

First, the film can be read in two opposite directions, and critics have read it both ways. For some it is a case against the ban: close the house and you take away the only living these women have, with nothing in its place. For others it is an indictment of the trade: interest, debt, a madam pricing a tired woman, a girl in a doorway. Harper thought it presented both sides of a bitterly contested argument scathingly and still left no doubt whose side Mizoguchi was on, which was the women’s. This essay has chosen a third reading, about reasons, and a third reading can be a way of not choosing. A reader who takes the film as a plain indictment of the trade, or as a defence of the women’s livelihood against the moralists, has the film’s support.

Second, eighty-six minutes is not long for five lives. Each woman gets a handful of scenes, and a group portrait drawn that quickly leans toward types: the mother, the schemer, the rebel, the would-be wife, the breadwinner. This essay has insisted on their particularity. The film gives that less room than the essay suggests, and at least one viewer has written that spreading the focus across five women kept any one of them from landing.

Third, Mizoguchi’s reputation. He is often called a director of women, and sometimes a feminist one. Donald Richie cautioned against the second label, even for Mizoguchi: finding in women the perfect protagonist for drama, he argued, did not make a director a feminist. A film can be on these women’s side and still use their suffering as its material. So can an essay.

Fourth, the film was a product. A studio made it about a controversy of the day, it filled cinemas, and its English title sold it abroad as something racier than it is. None of that makes it false. It does mean that the film had its own interest in the subject, as does everyone who writes about it.

Last, and aimed at this Library. This house sells private companionship, and a film about a licensed house is not neutral ground for it. There is a flattering story ready to hand: that the old districts were exploitation, that the law of 1956 closed them, and that whatever is sold today stands on the far side of that line, reformed. This essay does not tell that story, and a reader should distrust any house that does. Nothing in Street of Shame is evidence about anything sold now, and nothing sold now is an answer to it. What the essay takes from the film is three questions: who lives on the money, who is handed the shame, and what is offered in place of the doorway. They apply to any arrangement a reader meets, this one included, and no house can answer them about itself.

Not that the trade is shameful, and not that it is work like any other. The film declines both, and so does this essay. What it takes is smaller and harder to put down: a way of looking at any arrangement a woman is in, the respectable ones included.

Ask where the money goes, and ask where the shame goes. In Dreamland they travel in opposite directions, the money home to husbands and sons and fathers and the shame back to the doorway, so that the respectable world is paid for by the place it looks down on. The pattern is not confined to Yoshiwara in 1956. It turns up wherever one person’s work keeps a household going and the household would rather not talk about the work.

And ask what is offered in place of the doorway. Every rescue in this film fails at the same point. The marriage offers Yorie unpaid work. The son offers Yumeko his shame. The father offers Mickey a respectability he spent years damaging. The law, when it came, offered a consultation office and a may. The only exit that works is Yasumi’s, and it runs through the trade itself. A reform that does not deal with a woman’s reason asks her to give up the one living she has, and offers nothing in its place.

So, once, to you. If you have ever been the one whose earnings, or hours, or strength kept other people’s lives running, and been judged for it by the people you were keeping, the judgement was never the measure of what you did. You had a reason. It was not an excuse and it was not a verdict. It was the fact everyone else should have dealt with first, and did not.

It is cultural analysis, not a legal, clinical or historical study. It diagnoses nobody, and nothing in it is a statement about any reader. What happens to Yumeko is described as the film shows it and given no name.

It gives no legal advice. The Anti-Prostitution Act is described as it was passed in 1956, from its original text. It has been amended many times since, and in April 2024 its protective chapter was removed and the consultation offices and homes it had created were carried over under a separate law on support for women facing difficulties. Nothing here describes how any of it works today.

The film was not screened for this essay. It reads the film, not Yoshiko Shibaki’s fiction. Scenes beyond the film’s published record come from critics and detailed viewer accounts, and only what two or more of them agree on is used; lines of dialogue are paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

It does not give Shizuko an age, because the film does not, and it describes nothing of her first night beyond what the last shot shows.

It does not claim that the film changed the law, that the present is simply better or worse than 1956, or that any business operating today is the heir of the licensed quarters. No director, performer, critic, studio or organisation named here has any connection to this house, and none has endorsed it.

Whose living do you carry, and which of them has an opinion about how you carry it?

When someone offered you a way out, what did it ask you to give up, and what did it offer in its place?

Is there a reason in your life that other people keep treating as a verdict? What would change if they had to deal with the reason first?

Who in your family was the one who absorbed every shock, and did anyone ever say so out loud?