On the night of August 28, 1858, the Russian frigate "Askold" sank near the Japanese port of Nagasaki. Almost 600 Russian sailors had to disembark. The ship's repairs took nearly a year, and when it was ready to set sail, it turned out that not all the sailors had returned on board. Many of them had acquired wives, referred to as musume, which translates to girl.

Over time, the term musume came to denote the temporary wives of Russian sailors. Before the 1904-1905 war, our sailors often stopped in Japan, sometimes for an entire year. During this time, some of them found temporary "brides." These relationships were voluntary and regulated by a legal contract. Musume received $15 a month for cohabitation, while sailors were obliged to clothe, support, and feed them. However, Japanese women refused to cook, so sailors had to either bring food from the ship or take musume to restaurants.

Musume cared for their Russian "husbands," were loyal to them, and tried to support them. However, such relationships lasted only until the end of the contract. Japanese women were very jealous and even slight flirting with another woman was perceived as infidelity. Sometimes musume became official wives, and children were born from these unions.

For example, Dmitri Mendeleev's eldest son, Vladimir, according to his sister Olga's recollections, while serving as a midshipman on the frigate "Memory of Azov," during a stop in Nagasaki, took a "temporary wife" named Taki Hideshima, who bore him a daughter. However, after the ship departed, Mendeleev never returned. The warm relationships between Russian sailors and musume continued until 1904, when the Russo-Japanese War began. But that is a completely different story.