The inhabitants of Shimoda reviled Kichi-san when she was alive, shunning her in the street and avoiding the geisha house she ran. But now she has become one of the town's main tourist attractions, with a museum devoted to her and depicted in postcards, coffee mugs and paintings.
Kichi-san was the first concubine of a foreigner in Japan and no ordinary foreigner at that - Townsend Harris, the first consul-general of the United States in Japan, who lived in this pretty seaside town east of Tokyo for nearly two years from September 1856.
She fulfilled her duties diligently, looking after Harris when he was sick, finding for him milk and beef, items Japanese had never consumed, and helping him to appreciate this new and strange country.
For her pains, she was reviled by the people of the town as unclean. She took to drink, changed her name to hide the fact she was Japanese and finally drowned herself at the age of 50. The chief monk of a temple who recovered her body and buried it was forced to resign and work elsewhere.
These dramatic events are remembered in minute detail for visitors to Shimoda, a three-hour train ride from Tokyo, east along the coast and then south almost to the tip of the Izu peninsula. It is a popular resort town of yachts, hot spring baths and sandy beaches.
Harris arrived in Shimoda in September 1856 after the Tokugawa government had been forced to open it and another port to foreign trade. Harris, a 51-year-old bachelor, was given as a home the Kyokusenji temple, a wooden building with a thatched roof, where he lived with a Dutch interpreter and five Chinese cooks and servants from Hong Kong.
Fearful that he would be lonely, the government offered to supply a concubine. Harris saw Kichi-san as she was coming out of a bath-house. She was 16 and working in a geisha house. The government forced her to break her engagement with her fiance and made him leave the town, while she moved in with Harris.