“Crazy Love” born in Japan: The finger cut promise

Thursday 11/04/2024 | 20:24 PM

When children make a promise among themselves, they intertwine their pinkies with each other and sing:

“Yubikiri genman, uso tsuitara hari senbon nomasu! Yubi kitta!”

(Literal translation: “Slice a finger, ten thousand punches. If you tell a lie, you’ll have to swallow a thousand needles. Our fingers are cut.”)

The lyrics alone are quite scary, but the history is even scarier. It is based on “crazy love” that originated in Japan.

What is the finger cut?
As the name implies, it means to cut off a finger. The protagonist of the story is a woman who works in a brothel (yukaku), a sex establishment of the time.

Women who worked in brothels were called “yujo”. Many of them came from poor families in rural areas and it is said that a large number of them were sold in exchange for money from homes that could not pay their debts. Therefore, a significant number of these women could not leave the brothel until they had paid back their debts, and many of those died of venereal diseases at a young age. There were women who spent the rest of their lives there.

The men they met were all patrons of the brothel and it is said that many of the women fell in love with them. Finger cutting originated as a wish, or perhaps as a curse for these women.

At first, it was popular to send a lock of hair to the man you love. Then, the love became more intense, and some women sent their fingernails. Not cut nails, but peeled nails. It’s already starting to sound like a horror movie, isn’t it?

And then, quite literally, finger cutting. Finger cutting began when a woman cut off her little finger and sent it to her partner as a gift. The person who received it must have been horrified by the love that was too intense for him.

The meaning of the song

“yubikiri genman uso tsuitara hari senbon nomasu”

I’ll explain the meaning one part at a time.

“Yubikiri” literally means to cut off the finger. In other words, it means a promise.

“Genman” means 10,000 fists, or 10,000 punches.

“Uso tsuitara harisenbon nomasu”: If you lie, they will make you swallow a thousand needles.

The fact that children are using this song without knowing what it means is even more frightening. Adults, shouldn’t we stop this children’s custom?

More grotesque incidents
Some prostitutes sent other people’s fingers because it would be painful if they cut their own fingers and because they could not distribute them to so many customers. It seems those fingers were sometimes bought from the dead, or from someone with whom there was trouble among prostitutes, etc….

You can see that it is a pretty crazy world.

Why did it go that far?
The women were not free until their debts were paid. Many of them died early of venereal and mental illnesses, and it is said that the average life expectancy was 22 years. There was only one way for these women to get out of this situation: To have a rich patron buy their identities.

If the patron paid for the amount of debt she had remaining and the amount of money that she would still earn hereon, the woman could get out of this hell. That is why they were desperately trying to hold on to the patrons’ hearts and minds.

This song is too strong a curse for a children’s song. Don’t make promises with people so easily, everyone because you’ll have to swallow a thousand needles, won’t you?

ABE KENGO