<figure id="attachment_255676" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 3024px;" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-255676"><a href="#" data-ident_hash="1fd4492c"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2022/07/2942087.jpg" alt=""></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-255676" class="wp-caption-text">Mirai looking at the Capitol Building (image provided by the artist)</figcaption></figure>
<p>Teenage girls drifting in the city at night, selling their bodies.</p>
<p>In society, there are a variety of &#8220;places to stay&#8221; provided by public and private organizations. Children&#8217;s homes, homes for self-reliance, and shelters &#8230;&#8230;.</p>
<p>However, these spaces do not provide a safe haven for these girls adrift. Therefore, they continue to live their lives as drifters, gouging their own bodies through prostitution.</p>
<div data-friday-ad-slot="AD_inArticle"></div>
<p>Why is it that the safety net provided by society does not play a role for these women?</p>
<p>In the &#8220;Young Homeless&#8221; series, we have introduced many girls who have been adrift. This time, we would like to look at the reality that social resources do not function as a safety net through the experience and voice of one girl.</p>
<p>Mirai Kisaki, 22, ran away from her parents&#8217; home when she was in the second grade of junior high school.</p>
<p>Her parents&#8217; house was a magnificent house. Both parents worked, but because the family was wealthy, they had more financial resources than they earned.</p>
<h2>Fear of the father overshadows the family</h2>
<p>Miki, the eldest daughter, was allowed to learn piano, rhythmic gymnastics, cram school, Kumon, and other subjects from an early age, and the surrounding households saw them as an affluent and cheerful family.</p>
<p>Despite the surface of the family, there was a dark and gloomy atmosphere in the home. The father was not only a playful man, but was often violent toward his wife and children at home. If he didn&#8217;t like something, even a little, his hands would come out before his mouth.</p>
<div data-friday-ad-slot="AD_inArticle"></div>
<p>Both the mother and Mirai lived in fear of him, as if they were trying to hide their breath. Whenever someone in the family was beaten by his father, they would turn a blind eye because if they stopped it, they would be the one to suffer the repercussions. The family was indifferent to each other.</p>
<p>Miki began cutting her wrist in the sixth grade of elementary school. She was bullied by her classmates at school, and she felt she did not belong at home or at school.</p>
<p>When she picked up the cutter and cut her wrist, red blood flowed. She describes her feelings at the time as follows.</p>
<p><strong> The reason I did the risca was because I wanted to get my father&#8217;s blood out of my body. It was comforting to see the blood, as if my father&#8217;s blood was fading from me. I hated my father so much that I hated him. &#8230;&#8230; So I got into the habit of cutting not only my wrists, but my shoulders, my legs, all over my body with a cutter.&#8221;</strong></p>
<p>Her father&#8217;s abuse was not limited to physical abuse. In the first year of junior high school, he began to sexually abuse her.</p>
<div data-friday-nextpage-lead="Spectacular sexual abuse by father"></div>
<figure id="attachment_255679" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 750px;" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-255679"><a href="#" data-ident_hash="7f08abee"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2022/07/294894290.jpg" alt=""></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-255679" class="wp-caption-text">Interaction with a prostitute (image provided by the victim)</figcaption></figure>
<p>At first, Miki&#8217;s father entered her room when he was drunk. After that, her father, as if he had gotten a taste of it, came to her room frequently and played with her young body.</p>
<p>The sexual abuse by her father was unbearable for her. But her mother was unaware of it and would not have helped her even if she had been told the truth.</p>
<div data-friday-ad-slot="AD_inArticle"></div>
<p>There was nothing she could do. Miki had no choice but to endure the sexual abuse by suppressing her emotions.</p>
<p>It was not long after that that she began to run away from home. The first time she ran away from home was the day her school teacher found her wrist cutting and called her parents. After returning home, her father beat her severely.</p>
<p>Something snapped inside her. It was raining heavily outside, but she jumped off the balcony in her pajamas and wandered around town barefoot. This time she was taken into custody by the police and returned home, only to be violated again.</p>
<p>&#8211;She began to think that if she was going to run away from home, she had to make sure she wouldn&#8217;t be caught and taken back home.</p>
<p>Miki began to think this way and decided to run away from home again.</p>
<h2>How to Run Away from My Father&#8230;&#8230;&#8221;</h2>
<p>But it is difficult for a junior high school girl to survive on her own. At first she spent her nights on park benches or on the emergency stairs of buildings, but there was no way she could sleep, and food was hard to come by. So she moved to the entertainment district of Shinjuku and began to work as a prostitute.</p>
<div data-friday-ad-slot="AD_inArticle"></div>
<p>Runaway girls engage in prostitution partly because they have limited means of earning an income, but there are other psychological reasons as well. In particular, girls who have experienced sexual abuse or sex crimes believe that their bodies have been damaged as a result. They may become desperate and try to hurt themselves even more, or they may try to convince themselves that their past experiences were no big deal by repeating similar hurtful experiences.</p>
<p>Says Miki.</p>
<p><strong> When I first ran away from home, I hardly knew about institutions. The only way to escape my father was to run away from home. If the police caught me, they would take me back home, so I thought I had no choice but to run away.</strong></p>
<p><strong> Sometimes adults would ask me, &#8216;What do you want to do?&#8217; Sometimes adults would ask me, &#8220;What do you want to do? If you want me to help you, I will help you. But at that time, I didn&#8217;t know what I wanted to do. I couldn&#8217;t think about the future. I just wanted to live in the moment, keep running away from home, and sell my body to save my life.</strong></p>
<p>At the time, she was like a little rabbit that was almost killed by its parents in the nest and ran away to the savanna out of desperation. In the savanna, where the law of the jungle is fierce and the law of the jungle is weak, she was just trying to survive for the day and could not imagine what would happen next.</p>
<p>As she ran away from home for longer periods of time, she learned the ropes of the prostitution trade: dozens of calls from strangers on social networking sites using certain cloak-and-dagger phrases, and hundreds of messages on matching apps used by prostitutes. I received hundreds of messages. As I got used to it, I learned the streets where men approached me, and the going rate for one prostitution session was 20,000 yen (currently 10,000 yen).</p>
<p>Miki was caught by the police on a day when she was 15 years old, and the child guidance center decided that she should go to the police station. The child guidance center decided to send her to a children&#8217;s self-support facility instead of to her parents&#8217; home.</p>
<div class="expapp-yahoo-paragraph-break"></div>
<div data-friday-nextpage-lead="Why do you feel safe in the entertainment district?"></div>
<figure id="attachment_255680" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 1024px;" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-255680"><a href="#" data-ident_hash="63fbf386"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2022/07/294740138.jpg" alt=""></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-255680" class="wp-caption-text">Miki finds temporary peace at a children&#8217;s self-support facility (image courtesy of Miki).</figcaption></figure>
<p>Children&#8217;s self-support facilities are what used to be called &#8220;reformatories&#8221; or &#8220;educational institutions. They are facilities where men and women with family or behavioral problems are gathered and live together in a group.</p>
<p>The facility is surrounded by greenery and has a school, dormitory, swimming pool, playground, fields, and other facilities. The children are not locked up in a locked facility like in juvenile training schools, but are allowed to live relatively freely. In the dormitory, the head of the dormitory and his wife live with the children and act as their parents. In other words, the children are &#8220;reared&#8221; by the head and his wife in a secluded place.</p>
<div data-friday-ad-slot="AD_inArticle"></div>
<p>Miki says, &#8220;The children are allowed to live together with their parents.</p>
<p><strong> I was surprised to learn that such a happy place existed. I was surprised that such a happy place existed. I had a lot of experiences that affirmed me, which was a big thing.</strong></p>
<p><strong> For example, because I had a scar from my cut, I had been avoiding exercise. But there are so many kids with scars at KOJIMA, so I didn&#8217;t mind. So I joined the swim team because I could eat out on the day of competitions.</strong></p>
<p><strong> I practiced hard and learned to swim and won a prize at a competition. At that time, for the first time in my life, I had the experience of working hard and accomplishing something. I also took the Kanji test, got a part-time job at a restaurant, and spent very fulfilling days.</strong></p>
<p>In the segregated facility, there were many children in similar circumstances, so they did not feel inferior, and the staff was very understanding of the emotional trauma they were going through. It must have been like a sanctuary for the scarred little rabbits.</p>
<h2>After leaving the facility, they headed to &#8230;&#8230;</h2>
<p>However, those happy days came to an end after about a year and a half. Suddenly, she was told that she would have to leave the facility.</p>
<p>Children&#8217;s self-support facilities are mainly for children under junior high school age, and the average length of stay is about a year and a half. The average length of stay at the facility is about a year and a half. This is a limitation of the administrative system.</p>
<div data-friday-ad-slot="AD_inArticle"></div>
<p>After Miki was released from the children&#8217;s self-support facility, she was sent to live in the dormitory of a restaurant where she worked part-time. When she entered the dormitory with her few belongings, she was given a cell phone, which she had been forbidden to use until then.</p>
<p>When she opened her cell phone in the dormitory, she found that the address book contained only the phone numbers of the child guidance center and the children&#8217;s self-support facility. Miki felt so alone that she wanted to vomit. Having been removed from the facility where she felt she belonged for the first time, she felt that she had no connection to anyone.</p>
<p>I want to connect with someone. I want to be with people who understand me. These thoughts swelled up in my mind and I found myself running out of the dormitory. She was headed for the nightlife.</p>
<p>She describes her feelings at the time.</p>
<p><strong> What I was going to meet in the entertainment district were people I used to know &#8211; bar boys, scouts, and hosts. I knew that if I met them, I would be right back into the life of selling my body again.</strong></p>
<p><strong> But I was more afraid of living alone in a restaurant dormitory. I was more anxious about having to hide my entire past and live in detail, with no one understanding me.</strong></p>
<p><strong> So I wanted to connect with people who would accept me, no matter who they were, even if they were bad people. At that time, I couldn&#8217;t think of any other place where I could find such people except in the entertainment district.&#8221;</strong></p>
<p>When she was taken out of the children&#8217;s self-support facility, she must have been confronted with the reality that she was all alone, like Taro Urashima.</p>
<p>A respectable adult would tell her that she should work hard at the restaurant and make proper connections there. However, she was exposed to violence at home, bullied at school, and met only adults who took advantage of her while she ran away from home, so it is inevitable that she lacks the ability to do so. She only knows how to live on the streets at night.</p>
<p>Miki says, &#8220;At that time, the police were like children to me.</p>
<p><strong> At that time, the police, the child welfare ministry, and other public institutions were all &#8216;scary people&#8217; to me. I had the image that there were many very strict elites, and if I uttered a single word, they would verbally scold me. So I couldn&#8217;t think of asking for help there. I felt safer in the entertainment district, where they accepted me without getting angry.</strong></p>
<p>What awaited her when she returned to the nightlife district was an unimaginably harsh reality. I will discuss this in detail in the second part, &#8220;Revenge for the father who raped her,&#8221; which the runaway girl vowed to take.</p>
<div class="expapp-no-provided-scope expapp-no-provided-scope-start"></div>
<p>Part 2: A runaway girl vows to take revenge on <a href="https://friday.kodansha.co.jp/article/255683">her father who raped</a> her.</p>
<div class="expapp-no-provided-scope expapp-no-provided-scope-end"></div>


 Born in Tokyo in 1977. Nonfiction writer. Graduated from Nihon University College of Art. He has reported and written about culture, history, and medicine in Japan and abroad. 

 Kota Ishii

 Courtesy of Mirai Kisaki

 There is a girl who ran away from home after being sexually abused by her father. She sells her body to earn money. She lived peacefully for a while in a children's support facility, but after her release from the facility, she went back to the entertainment district. What was the harsh reality she experienced? This is a shocking confession.

Sexually abused by her father…The “fierce reality” of a runaway girl’s experience of selling her body

Access Ranking