This article examines how tropes of silence and seclusion were utilized both at the dawn of the Japanese imperial house and in its current iteration. Attempts to subjugate women and to subvert subjugation by women exist in the origin myths of Japan, and are repeated in the Heisei era.

The Deck-Hand's Story

Itagaki Kōzō was an orphan of empire. At the end of the Asia-Pacific War, then aged fifteen, he was stranded in the former Japanese colony of Karafuto (Sakhalin). His father, a coal miner, had died in a mining accident when Itagaki was a child, and his mother had been killed in the brief but fierce fighting that erupted as Soviet forces swept into the southern half of Sakhalin following the USSR's declaration of war on Japan on 8 August 1945. Just as many young men in Japan sought survival after the surrender by taking jobs with the occupying American forces, Itagaki survived by becoming a “houseboy” to a Soviet officer, and his employer, Maxim Tarkin, appears to have been connected to the GPU (the forerunner of the KGB). In 1949, Tarkin left for Moscow via China, and allowed Itagaki to accompany him from Sakhalin as far as Shenyang in northern China, from where Itagaki hoped to be able to find a way to the Japanese homeland he had never seen.