EX-SLAVE GIRL’S ROMANCE.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 January 1922, Page 10

EX-SLAVE GIRL’S ROMANCE.

BETROTHED TO RICH RESCUER. A romance resembling that of Cophetua and the beggar maid comes from Fu-kuoka-ken, a quaint village not far from Tokio, where the betrothal has been announced of Mr. 1. Fuluda, a Japanese j lumber king, with Miss N. Oti, who was until recently a slave girl in China. Mr. Fuluda rescued her at Antung, North Hcian, China, from a band of strolling players to whom she had been sold, after passing from one Chinese i master to another since &he was kidnapped, nearly twenty years ago, on her way to school. The paper Far East, which has given great prominence to the life of Miss Oti, as told by her fiance, says that when on ( business at Antung, the great Chinese I lumber market, where male or female slaves can be bought for as little as 5 I taels (about 12s), Mr. Fuluda was ini vited one evening to see the performI a nee of a company of itinerant Chinese i players. : “We occupied the foremost table,” he says, “just in front of the stage. I ' hurriedly glanced over the programme, lon which a portrait'of an actress, evidently the star of the company, was printed, and it occurred to me that she looked like a Japanese. My suspicions were confirmed by a. slight foreign accent that occasionaly crept into her Chinese song.

“I sought her out next, day, when she told me that she had been kidnapped at Fukuoaka-ken, and for the past twenty years she had been a slave, until her present owner bought her. Every train, she said, running toward Fusau. ' and every ship steaming for Japan, ' tempted her to try to escape, but her servants would never let her out of their sight. “The next day I enlisted the aid of the Japanese Consul, who quickly convinced ner master of the illegality of } the transaction which had driven Mils Oti into