Ojiroku, Obasa: The slave virgins of the Japanese mountain villages

When we think of Japanese virginal girls, we tend to think of cute girls like this.

But there were another kind.

The Ojiroku and Obasa was a rural custom that is said to have continued until the twentieth century.

They weren’t allowed contact with anyone except the oldest son and could not marry, instead being worked by the family like a slave all their lives.

Due to Japan’s mountains, there are many villages separated by peaks and forests, giving rise to unique isolated culture. Take the village of Kamihara in Nagano.

In this village, there was no space for children other than the eldest son, so any other sons were called “Ojiroku” and daughters were “Obasa”, and both were made to work as the slaves of the eldest.

They weren’t allowed to be married or even take part in things like village festivals. In other words, they were condemned to be eternal virgins.

Needless to say the custom, which began in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, does not exist today, though it apparently continued until the 1960’s.

However, it came to notice of a psychiatrist who went to the village in 1964 to study the “robot”-like Ojiroku and Obasa, who had personality deficiencies caused by the limited gene pool in the village and their life as slaves.

Japanese history is full of bizarre and at times incredible tales of sexual practices, from the red light district of Yoshiwara to the rural custom of yobai, where people would crawl around at night from house to house to have sex with (or rape) a neighbor’s daughter. It was tacitly allowed by the parents as a way of arranging a partner, since the father and mother might also wait up until a suitable moment to “interrupt” the couple and then declare them married.