All aboard the Suffering Sappho!

“Yes,” said Esmerelda Hong, captain of the Suffering Sappho, toughest independent cargo hauler ever to ply the waters of the Pacific. Her loyal crew, lesbians to a man, rough and tough and strong and sweaty but still of course extremely physically attractive, and with notable dominant tendencies, as barmaids and dancing girls in every port from Manila to Acapulco had discovered to their cost, cheered and leered down at Master Hojo and his cargo from the high decks of the steamship. “Those will do nicely.”

“No we won’t! We’ll fight back!”

“Oh, no, don’t do that,” said Esmerelda, rolling her eyes. “You’ll probably win, and then where will we be? I’m sure two fancy English ladies will be more than a match for thirty or forty lusty sailor girls, who have nothing to do all day long but pull ropes and haul cargo and wrestle and dance the hornpipe.”

“Excuse me,” said Lady Evelyn, waspishly, “but I’ll have you know that only I am a fancy English lady. Miss Fiona here has no pretension to noble title at all.”

The two naked, furious women, skin dimpled with rope harnesses, arms pinned behind their backs, ankles bound together, had been suspended in the nude outside Hojo’s shop for several long hours, above a bilingual sign in English and Japanese that said “Master Hojo: What Beauty Deserves.” They had attracted endless ribald laughter, a photographer from the Asahi Shimbun and a lot of curious Japanese girls who wanted to know what Western women’s breasts felt like, and thought this was the perfect opportunity to find out.

It was indeed the case, Hojo had informed them, that Japanese men found the naked embarrassment of women to be highly aesthetically pleasing. As a master of one of the most refined and subtle of Japanese arts, it was necessarily his duty to cultivate the naked embarrassment of the English girls as he would a bonsai tree or a perfect cup of tea. He was a master of shame, heir to a thousand years of tradition, full of devious tricks and jutsus for turning up the heat on stammering bare-bottomed ladies and inflicting the most exquisitely scandalous social disgrace.

Sadly, he had no time to show them the full extent of his powers, so he had to settle for leaving them tied up nude in public for everyone to laugh at. And then, once he’d judged the psychological moment was perfect, he’d retied the struggling young ladies for mobility and marched them down to the docks, making sure to take the scenic route so that even more people would see the shamefaced pair paraded naked through the busy Yokohama streets.

Ankles bound, wrists crossed behind their backs, Fiona and Evelyn were obliged to move in a slow, awkward and very revealing sort of hop-and-shuffle, plump Occidental breasts bouncing in a way that drew hundreds of astonished Japanese eyes, while they shouted English curses at their uncomprehending but intensely amused audience. Plenty of Westerners were on hand as well to giggle and throw mud at the girls as they jiggled down the road - naked, defeated, ashamed and made a laughing-stock in front of all of Yokohama.

“I suppose we’ll take them,” said Esmerelda, handing over a sack full of jingling coins and barking orders in pidgin to her crew. “All aboard, girls.”

“Wait! Where are we going?”

“Across the Pacific, of course. It’s a long, slow voyage, and the lasses need something to keep them entertained on those warm equatorial nights. But we’ll most likely let you go when we reach the other side.”