Slavery in Japan
Slavery in Japan is a history that stretches from a single recorded export in a 3rd-century Chinese chronicle all the way to courtroom battles in Seoul in 2018. What that Chinese text called seikō, meaning "living mouth," was the first glimpse of a practice that would take many legal and illegal forms across more than a thousand years. How did an island nation come to export its own people to Europe? Why did a ruler who banned the foreign slave trade simultaneously encourage the enslavement of Korean prisoners? And what became of the hundreds of thousands of laborers conscripted during the Pacific War, some of whom never made it home? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.
The Wajinden, a 3rd-century Chinese historical record, notes the export of at least one enslaved person from Japan, though the surrounding system remains unclear. It is the earliest written evidence of unfree labor in the archipelago.
By the 8th century, a formal legal category existed. Under the Nara and Heian-period legal system known as Ritsuryōsei, enslaved people were designated nuhi and were put to work farming land and maintaining households. Estimates of their share of the population, though uncertain, hover around 5%. The proportion is difficult to pin down because the records are fragmentary and contested.
Slavery persisted into the Sengoku period (1467-1615), even as elite opinion seems to have shifted toward viewing it as outdated. The custom of geninka, sometimes rendered as genin status, covered a broad range of dependency: children sold by their parents, people who sold themselves, debtors bound to labor, and individuals given genin status as punishment for crimes. That punishment could extend to a criminal's wife and children. Women who fled abusive households and sought refuge with a lord could find themselves reclassified as genin by that same lord. During famines, people offered themselves voluntarily in exchange for food and shelter. The genin condition could also be hereditary, passing bondage to the next generation.
After Portuguese traders first made contact with Japan in 1543, a substantial commerce in Japanese people developed. Portuguese merchants purchased Japanese captives inside Japan and moved them to Goa, Brazil, Portugal, and other corners of the Portuguese colonial world. The trade continued until it was formally outlawed in 1595, though enforcement remained weak throughout.
At least several hundred Japanese people were sold through this network. Some were prisoners of war handed over by rival clans. Others were sold by their feudal lords, and still others by their own families to escape poverty. The Church noted in 1555 that Portuguese buyers were specifically acquiring Japanese slave women to bring to Portugal for sexual purposes. King Sebastian I of Portugal, worried that the trade was undermining Catholic missionary work in Japan, ordered it banned in 1571. Portuguese merchants largely ignored the order.
Jesuit priest Luis de Almeida documented a group of Chinese female slaves at Tomari Port in Kawanabe District, Satsuma Province in 1562. These women had been captured by Japanese forces during fighting in China and then purchased by the Portuguese. Almeida lacked the authority to stop the transaction; all he could do was ask that the women be kept safe during the voyage.
Japanese slaves were also brought to Macau, where some ended up owned not only by Portuguese traders but by the enslaved Malay and African people those traders already owned. A 1598 document by Jesuit Luis de Cerqueira records that Japanese slave women were sold as concubines to Asian lascars serving on Portuguese ships.
When the Imjin War erupted between Japan and Korea between 1592 and 1598, Korean captives joined the trade. Italian merchant Francesco Carletti visited Japan during that period and recorded purchasing five Korean slaves for roughly 12 scudi. After baptizing them, he transported them to Goa, where he freed four. A Japanese researcher, Watanabe Daimon, suggested Carletti may have released four of them because their resale value was too low to justify the cost of feeding them on the journey.
The Jesuits in Japan occupied a strange position: morally opposed to the slave trade, institutionally dependent on the goodwill of the merchants who ran it, and legally unable to stop either side.
Jesuit-backed organizations, including confraternities and the Nagasaki Misericórdia almshouse, worked to rescue Japanese slave women from ships and brothels. Afonso de Lucena pressed the ailing Ōmura Sumitada after Christmas 1586 to free captives he held unjustly, using the threat of withholding confession as leverage. Bishops and their delegates condemned brothels as, in their words, "workshops of the devil." The fourth article of the Constitutions of Goa, dated 1568, prohibited brothel ownership, imposed fines and public shaming on violators, and required the liberation of any slave coerced into prostitution.
Alessandro Valignano's approach was one of strategic accommodation. He allowed missionaries to sign short-term servitude certificates, schedulae, to prevent the greater harm of lifelong enslavement. This practice was recognized as early as 1568 with Melchior Carneiro's arrival in Macao. By 1598, however, the practice was banned following criticism from figures such as Mateus de Couros.
The breakthrough came with Pedro Martins' consecration as bishop in 1592 and his arrival in Nagasaki in 1596. As the first senior cleric in Japan since Francisco Xavier, Martins gained the authority to excommunicate Portuguese merchants involved in trading Japanese and Korean slaves. But even this weapon was blunted: the Jesuits depended financially on the Captain-major, who as the supreme representative of Portuguese royal authority in Japan held considerable power of his own. After Martins' death, Bishop Cerqueira continued pushing on the Portuguese crown. Despite the 1595 ban on selling and buying Chinese and Japanese slaves, King Philip III's 1605 decree, and Cerqueira's sustained lobbying, the trade persisted. Profitability and weak enforcement made the bans largely symbolic.
On the 19th of June 1587, Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued the Bateren Edict, ordering the expulsion of Christian missionaries from Japan. A memorandum drafted before the final edict accused the missionaries of trafficking Japanese people to China, Korea, and various European territories. Conspicuously, those accusations disappeared from the edict itself.
The edict's actual text drew a sharp line between religion and commerce, stating that the purpose of the Black Ships was trade and that trade could continue freely. Portuguese merchants, who historians identify as the principal actors in the slave trade, were explicitly exempted from punishment. The missionaries were expelled; the merchants were not.
On the 24th of July 1587, Hideyoshi wrote to Jesuit Vice-Provincial Gaspar Coelho demanding that the Portuguese, Siamese, and Cambodians stop buying Japanese people and return those who had been sold as far away as India. The Jesuits replied, reasonably, that regulating the slave trade was the responsibility of the Japanese government itself.
Historian Rômulo da Silva Ehalt argues that Hideyoshi's real concerns were economic. He feared the Portuguese slave trade was depleting Kyushu's labor force, and he also expressed worry about meat consumption reducing livestock needed for agriculture and warfare. He ordered displaced people, including those trafficked or kidnapped, returned to their home territories to stabilize agricultural production. That policy applied nationally, not just in Kyushu.
Two years after the edict, in 1589, Hideyoshi ordered the establishment of the Yanagihara pleasure quarter in Kyoto, regarded as Japan's first licensed pleasure district. This formalized the yūkaku system but also created a setting where human trafficking flourished under official sanction. Then, when Japan invaded Korea in 1592, Hideyoshi's forces abducted large numbers of Koreans and sold them into slavery. His 1597 second invasion actively encouraged the trade, which historians Maki Hidemasa and Romulo Ehalt describe as transforming enslavement into a major industry. Contemporary sources describe Japanese forces bringing crowds of Korean prisoners to islands specifically to sell them to Portuguese merchants, who conducted the transactions offshore to avoid the bishop's excommunication order.
After the 1614 expulsion of the Jesuits from Japan, Dutch and English buyers reportedly joined the trade in human beings. Many were sold in Nagasaki and Hirado by Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Spanish traders. The Edo period (1603-1868) did not end coerced labor; it reorganized it.
Widespread famine and rural poverty in the early Edo period drove human trafficking to the point that the Tokugawa shogunate capped servitude terms at 10 years in 1625. The cap was lifted in 1698, permitting extended-term and hereditary servitude again. The system that filled this space was called nenki bōkō, a form of indentured service that historian Kiyoshi Shimozue describes as reframing "body selling" as "entering service."
Data from Nishi-jō village in Mino Province between 1773 and 1825 shows that 50.3% of boys and 62% of girls aged 11 or older were in some form of servitude. The contracts transferred to employers certain patriarchal rights over the worker, including the right to resell them, arrange their marriages, or manage their affairs after death. Legal scholar Kaoru Nakada called these "body-selling indenture contracts."
The Gotōke reijō, the Tokugawa House Laws compiled in 1711 from more than 600 statutes issued between 1597 and 1696, prescribed non-free labor for the immediate families of executed criminals under Article 17. In practice, this provision never became widespread, but it illustrated how coercion remained legally embedded in the Edo system even as the vocabulary shifted away from slavery.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, Japan's military mobilized labor on a scale that dwarfed earlier periods. A joint study by historians including Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo, and Mark Peattie found that more than 10 million Chinese civilians were mobilized by the Kōa-in, the East Asia Development Board, for forced labor.
The Japanese military's own records show that nearly 25% of the approximately 140,000 Allied prisoners of war held in Japanese camps died there. American POWs died at a rate of 27%. More than 100,000 civilians and POWs died during the construction of the Burma Railway alone. In Java, the U.S. Library of Congress estimates that between 4 million and 10 million romusha, a term meaning manual laborer, were forced to work by the Japanese military. Of the approximately 270,000 Javanese laborers sent to other territories in Southeast Asia, only 52,000 were repatriated.
Approximately 670,000 Koreans were conscripted under Japan's National Mobilization Law between 1944 and 1945. About 60,000 of those taken to Japan died between 1939 and 1945, mostly from exhaustion or poor working conditions. Many Koreans sent to Karafuto Prefecture, modern-day Sakhalin, were stranded there at the war's end, stripped of their Japanese nationality and denied repatriation. They became known as the Sakhalin Koreans. Total deaths among Korean forced laborers across Korea and Manchuria during those years are estimated at between 270,000 and 810,000.
United States House Resolution 121 estimates that as many as 200,000 comfort women, drawn mostly from Korea and China but also from the Philippines, Taiwan, French Indochina, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands, and Australia, were forced into sexual slavery to serve the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. Dutch and Australian women were additionally compelled to perform hard physical labor, including digging graves and building roads, on starvation rations.
In 2018, South Korea's Supreme Court ruled that Japanese companies including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries owed compensation to Korean workers for forced labor during the colonial period. A subsequent ruling by the Seoul Central District Court complicated that picture by dismissing a separate case against Japanese firms, citing the 1965 Agreement on the Settlement of Problems concerning Property and Claims. Japan contends that agreement resolved all compensation questions. The competing rulings have strained trade and security relations between the two countries.
In 2021, UNESCO reprimanded Japan for providing insufficient information about forced labor at its industrial heritage sites. The critique focused on Hashima Island, also known as Battleship Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and part of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution. UNESCO found that Japan had not adequately acknowledged the use of Korean forced labor there during World War II. Hashima Island and the Miike coal mine share a history that includes not only wartime Korean labor but, before that, convict labor as well.
Common questions
What were the earliest forms of slavery in Japan?
The earliest recorded export of an enslaved person from Japan appears in the 3rd-century Chinese text Wajinden, which refers to slaves as seikō, meaning "living mouth." By the 8th century, formal laws under the Ritsuryōsei legal codes governed a class of enslaved people called nuhi, estimated to have made up around 5% of the population.
When did the Portuguese slave trade in Japan begin and end?
The Portuguese slave trade in Japan began after Portuguese traders first made contact with Japan in 1543 and was formally banned in 1595. King Sebastian I ordered a ban in 1571, but merchants largely ignored it and the trade continued into the late 16th century despite repeated prohibitions.
Why did Toyotomi Hideyoshi issue the Bateren Edict in 1587?
Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued the Bateren Edict on the 19th of June 1587, ordering the expulsion of Christian missionaries from Japan. Historian Rômulo da Silva Ehalt argues that Hideyoshi's primary concerns were economic, including fears of labor depletion in Kyushu, rather than moral opposition to slavery. Notably, Portuguese merchants who actually conducted the slave trade were explicitly exempted from the edict's sanctions.
How many Korean forced laborers died under Japanese conscription during World War II?
Approximately 670,000 Koreans were conscripted under Japan's National Mobilization Law between 1944 and 1945. About 60,000 of those taken to Japan died between 1939 and 1945, mostly from exhaustion or poor working conditions. Total deaths among Korean forced laborers across Korea and Manchuria are estimated at between 270,000 and 810,000.
What was the comfort women system and how many women were affected?
The comfort women system was a network of military brothels operated by the Imperial Japanese military during World War II, widely described as involving sexual slavery. United States House Resolution 121 estimates that as many as 200,000 women, mostly from Korea and China but also from the Philippines, Taiwan, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands, and Australia, were forced into the system.
What legal consequences has Japan faced for wartime forced labor?
In 2018, South Korea's Supreme Court ruled that Japanese companies including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries owed compensation to Korean workers for forced labor during the colonial period. In 2021, UNESCO reprimanded Japan for failing to adequately acknowledge the use of Korean forced labor at heritage sites including Hashima Island, part of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution.
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