Hiroichiro Maedako, a proletarian writer who came to Chicago in 1907, once wrote in one of his articles the following confession:
“When I was walking on Armour Avenue, a woman called out to me, ‘Hello, honey boy, come on in—you want skebe?’From the beginning of the encounter, I was dumbfounded by this flatly fired off Japanese word: skebe.”1
Then in 1910, while in a carriage returning to his hotel, Kasho Kono passed four or five Japanese women riding in a fine-looking carriage on State Street. Kono asked the driver who they were, and the driver answered tha…