• Diary 7/28 Babas of journalists

  • Diary 7/27 The owner of the villa

  • Diary 7/26 When the geishas are them

  • Diary 25/7 A sad city

Some veteran nuns of this congregation created in Madrid in 1856 to rescue women oppressed by prostitution still live in the Casa Alegría de las adoratrices de Kitami, 20 kilometers from Olympic Tokyo.

All the nuns of the Japanese community are older and, although they are already vaccinated, with the more than 3,000 new daily infections in the city by the Delta variant, it is not appropriate to climb the stairs of their residence to visit them in a closed place.

In the three hours that there was of margin between the end of the golf and the beginning of the slalom canoeing, there was time to go for a walk in search of the house of some nuns who became popular in Spain for visiting the brothels and road ditches trying to get out of darkness to trafficked women.

In Japan, that mission was carried out by a woman,

Victoria de la Cruz,

born in Malaga and who died in 2018 shortly after her 110th birthday.

His story, well produced and with good actors, makes for an Oscar movie.

Victoria de la Cruz in her early years as a missionary in Japan.

When she was younger, Victoria would shed the habit with which she landed in Japan before World War II and went to prostitution venues every night to try to convince women that they were not owned by any man.

It offered them a way

out: taking them out of the backyard of traditional Japanese society to relocate them in centers where social educators offered them protection, training and a future for themselves and their children.

Five years ago, we picked up the phone from the Madrid newsroom and found Victoria at the residence of Kitami, one of the seven communities that adorers have in Japan.

He told us that he had been away from his native Malaga for 80 years.

From there he traveled to the Asian country for the first time in 1936

, on a boat trip that lasted two months.

Victoria had been in Tokyo for three years when Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor.

For the next six years she lived as a refugee, together with the sisters of the community, in the mountains of Karuizawa, far from the city.

When World War II ended, his community settled in Yokohama.

The social work of the malagueña and the other worshipers there multiplied to

heal the physical and moral hardships left by the Hiroshima bomb.

Victoria paid special attention to researching how the network for the sale of orphan girls to geisha houses worked, where they were taught Japanese arts of music and dance.

But some were also forced to rent their bodies to the

danna

, wealthy older men, usually married, who paid for the training of these girls in exchange for their sexual favors.

Those were the times of Victoria's night outings, without a habit, camouflaged as a Westerner ready to mingle with the women of the night.

Already in old age, after a marathon as a missionary, Victoria, the second of nine siblings who went to become a teacher before becoming a nun, also won a gold medal like the Olympians.

She was decorated by the Government of Japan for protecting and removing hundreds of women from the streets and brothels.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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