Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  For the next two and a half centuries the Japanese were to develop a unique culture and lifestyle, largely free from outside influences. Western explorers were extending the bounds of the world they knew; in 1610 Henry Hudson discovered Hudson Bay, in 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers reached New England and millions of slaves were being shipped from Africa to the Old and the New Worlds. The Dutch were a power all over the globe and had laid claim to an area which they called New Amsterdam, later to be known as New York. But the doors of Japan remained firmly closed.

  To create a well-ordered society in which there would be no room for the slightest possibility of rebellion or upheaval, the shogunate adopted neo-Confucianism, with its rigid codes of behavior and emphasis on hierarchy and respect for authority, as the official basis of government and the underlying ethical code for society. The system remained in force until the end of the Tokugawa period in 1853, after which in theory it began to change. But many of the attitudes and social structures which it engendered remain in place to this day.

  The shoguns divided society into rigid classes, with a different set of laws governing each. Sumptuary laws were issued decreeing what each class could and could not wear, what they should eat, how they should wear their hair, where they could and could not live, whom they could marry, and how they should decorate their houses.

  At the top of the hierarchy were the daimyo, provincial princes who governed their own domains but had to pledge fealty to the shogun. Then came the samurai, the military class who had grown in numbers mightily during the years of warfare and were now the army, police, and administrators of the new system. Below the samurai came the farmers, who ranked high because they were responsible for producing the rice by which everyone lived, though in fact they had miserable lives. They were followed by the artisans, who were also producers; they were craftsmen and builders.

  Right at the bottom came tradesmen and merchants who, so the argument went, produced nothing. They just passed goods around from the producers to everyone else, skimming off a profit along the way, and were thus considered worthless parasites. In reality, of course, they were absolutely essential to the life of the country, ensuring that goods were shuttled from the provinces, where they were produced, to be sold in the cities.

  In practice the main division was between the samurai and the rest, lumped together as “townsmen.” But the trouble with relegating merchants to the very bottom was that the samurai desperately needed and wanted the goods which the merchants sold and quickly spent their miserable stipends on them. Over the centuries their stipends never increased at all; they were rigidly prescribed. So the merchants started lending money, first to the samurai, then the daimyo, and eventually to the shogun himself, and thus became richer and richer.

  There were a couple of classes so low that they did not even feature in the Tokugawa ranking system. One was the hinin (nonhumans), most of whom were beggars or did the work that no one else wanted to do. The other encompassed popular entertainers—everyone from grand courtesans, dancers, tea-serving wenches, saké servers, and itinerant prostitutes to actors, roving minstrels, musicians, jugglers, and jesters. They were all lumped together under the term kawaramono—riverbed folk—and (unless, like the courtesans, they were lucky enough to have a patron) they lived in ghettos in the dry riverbeds and along the river banks, frontier areas of the city which were outside government control, considered unsuitable for permanent habitation because of flooding. This was the class from which the geisha were to emerge.

  Like everything else in the highly regulated Confucian society of seventeenth-century Japan, prostitution needed to be organized. The best way to manage it was to control it, to herd as many prostitutes as possible into one place and to make prostitution legal there but illegal anywhere else. Along with the kabuki theater, the pleasure quarters were classified as the “bad places” where the lower orders, and anyone else who wanted to, could go to let off steam and exercise their baser instincts. But, “bad” though they were, they fulfilled a recognized need. Ironically the geisha and the whole culture of eroticism arose directly out of the rigid strictures of Confucianism; the walled cities of pleasure which were to become the heart of the counterculture in Japan were created with whole-hearted government approval.

  Confucianism required unquestioning obedience to authority. Within the state, this was the shogun, acting in the name of the emperor. Within the household, it was the father, who was to be accorded as much loyalty and respect as one would give the ruler of the country. The basic unit of society was not the individual but the family, which had to be preserved and protected at all costs. A woman had to obey her father, then, after she was married, her husband, and finally, if her husband predeceased her, her son.

  Marriage was a political matter, nothing to do with love. It was an alliance between families which was arranged by the head of the household with the help of a go-between, far too important a matter to be left to the will of the individuals concerned. Rather than marrying the man, a woman married into the household. She became a yome, which means “daughter-in-law” as well as “bride,” and moved into her husband’s house with her in-laws, where she was more like a glorified domestic servant than our concept of a wife.

  As for conjugal sex, the only function was to produce a male heir who would ensure the continuance of the household and carry out the ritual respects due to the ancestors. Apart from that, sexual gratification was not supposed to take place within marriage. In other words, a husband was not supposed to love his wife, enjoy sex with her, or give her sexual pleasure. That was the theory; though in reality many a Japanese mother provided her daughter with a “pillow book” of sexual techniques to try and lure her husband away from the sirens of the pleasure quarters and the manifold other temptations available to him.

  Just so long as a man did his duty by his wife, supported her financially and produced an heir, he was at liberty to amuse himself in any way he pleased. As François Caron, who was in Japan with the Dutch East India Company in 1639, observed, “One Man hath but one Wife, though as many Concubines as he can keep; and if that Wife do not please him, he may put her away, provided he dismiss her in a civil and honorable way. Any Man may lie with a Whore, or common Woman, although he be married, with impunitie; but the Wife may not so much as speak in private with another Man, without hazarding her life.” 7

  Besides enjoying oneself with the wife and concubines, there was no disgrace in visiting the “bad places.” And the options were not limited to the pleasure quarters or the female sex. In fact, a man who chose to stay home with his wife and children would have seemed a bit of a wet-blanket goody goody, probably tight-fisted, and certainly far from a stylish man about town.

  The Lusty Lady of Izumo

  One of the most urgent tasks for the new shogunate was to clamp down on vice, which had increased enormously over the years of civil war. Kyoto had become a center of prostitution, with women who had lost their menfolk, itinerant nuns, and unemployed shrine maidens wandering the streets. There were also thousands of prostitutes servicing travelers along the rivers and roads, at ports, and in front of shrines and temples where pilgrims gathered. The problem came to a head not long after Ieyasu Tokugawa established peace.

  The cause of all the trouble was a woman named Izumo no Okuni (Okuni of Izumo). Okuni claimed to be a shrine maiden and shamaness from the Grand Shrine at Izumo (from where she took her name) though this may have just been an invention to give her an air of mystery. She was, in any case, a dazzling dancer and by definition a prostitute; in those days, the two were one and the same.

  Around 1603, when peace had barely been established, she set up an open-air stage in the dry riverbed of the Kamo and, with her troupe of wandering female entertainers, began to dance. Those who saw her were electrified. After two centuries of civil war, people were hungry for pleasure, diversion, and beautiful women in silk kimonos. It was from Okuni and her dancing that the geisha, with their irresistible combination of char
m, entertainment, and eroticism, were to develop.

  As word spread, crowds descended on the riverbed to watch Okuni perform. Artists of the time portrayed her dancing wildly, accompanied by singers, a flute-player, and people beating hand drums before an eager audience of top-knotted samurai and robed women and children, sheltered by huge red parasols, with the townsfolk jam-packed in front of the stage.

  Some of her dances were adapted from ancient folk dances. One of these was the Buddhist prayer dance, for which she dressed in priest’s robes, sporting a conical black hat and baggy black trousers and carrying a bell which she struck with a small hammer. Sometimes she dressed as a Shinto priest and at other times she mimicked a Christian one, wearing a large golden rosary.

  But the most thrilling part of her show was when she played a man. Audiences cheered, applauded, and roared with laughter when she sauntered out wearing brocade trousers and an animal skin jacket. With a painted mustache like a dashing young man about town, she would mime chatting up a teahouse woman, wooing a courtesan, or having an assignation in a bathhouse. Okuni’s dancing was not just brilliant but cheerfully erotic. It was so extraordinary that a new word had to be coined: kabuki, from the verb kabuku, meaning “to frolic” or “to be wild and outrageous.” Okuni’s sexy dancing was the seed of the kabuki theater and also of the floating world of the courtesans and geisha.

  Okuni’s fame spread all over the country. In 1607 she and her all-women troupe went on tour to Edo and gave a public performance at the shogun’s castle there. Soon there were imitators—troupes of prostitutes and courtesans performing erotic dances and bedroom farces throughout the great cities. It was showbiz; the actresses were stars. But, while the court ladies and townswomen imitated their stylish ways, men were more interested in their bodies. A contemporary wrote, “Men threw away their wealth, some forgot their fathers and mothers, others did not care if the mothers of their children were jealous . . .”

  There was nothing wrong with eroticism. But the shogunate could not risk anything that threatened public order. When men started fighting over the actresses, it was time to put a stop to it. In 1628, after a major brawl, the authorities banned women from performing in public. It was a law that was extremely difficult to enforce. It had to be passed again in 1629, 1630, 1640, 1645, 1646, and 1647. Finally the manager of the last offending theater was thrown into prison and women disappeared from the public stage, not to reappear for another 250 years.

  Banned from public performance, some of the women dancers took up work as prostitutes, licensed or unlicensed. Others found positions in samurai households where they gave private performances or set themselves up as teachers of music and dance. These were the sort of women who a century later were to become known as geisha. 8

  The authorities had banned women’s kabuki. But they had said nothing about kabuki performed by young men, which now became hugely popular. The young men incorporated acrobatics and juggling into their kabuki and the most beautiful took on female roles.

  Alas for the efforts of the authorities, these beautiful young men too were prostitutes. Those who played women dressed the part off stage as well as on. They lived in little shacks near the riverbanks, notably in the area of Kyoto called Miyagawa-cho, now one of the geisha districts, and used their performances to attract customers. Most of them were under fifteen, the age of adulthood, which probably made them all the more attractive.

  For Buddhist priests who had abjured the company of women it was perfectly acceptable thus to work off their frustrations with a clean conscience. The youths also appealed to samurai, among whom homosexuality was considered the purest form of love. In any case, in this society—free of Christianity’s guilt-inducing notions of sin—love was simply love. Homosexual and heterosexual love were seen as different sides of the same coin. Both, as far as the authorities were concerned, were equally liable to lead to public disorder. Eventually in 1652, after the death of a shogun who had himself been partial to young men, this variety of kabuki was also banned and replaced by kabuki played by adult males, as it is today. Thereafter kabuki and the women’s world of courtesans and geisha together made up the heart of the demimonde.

  Pleasure for Sale:

  The Shimabara Licensed Quarter

  Japan’s first pleasure quarter opened in Kyoto even before Ieyasu Tokugawa’s great victory of 1600. In 1589, when Tokugawa’s predecessor, the enlightened warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi, was governing the country from his castle in Osaka, one of his favorites, a stable hand called Saburoemon Hara, asked permission to open a brothel. Hideyoshi granted him a license, and he built a small walled-in quarter with a single gate, not far on foot, horseback, or by palanquin from the emperor’s palace. He called it Yanagimachi (Willow Town). There he set up brothels and teahouses and installed some high-class, educated courtesans to lure the sophisticated gentlemen of Kyoto.

  It was an immediate success. Hideyoshi himself used to sneak in, in disguise, with his retainers. It was, however, altogether too close to the imperial palace for propriety and in 1602 was moved to a site further south. In 1641 the quarter was finally established a decent distance from the center of the city where it would not corrupt upstanding citizens. Thereafter business continued until it burned down in 1854. But it reached the apogee of its prosperity and fame in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when, in the West, Louis XIV, the Sun King, was establishing his glittering court at Versailles and in Britain the pretty orange-seller, Nell Gwynn, was bewitching the Stuart king, Charles II, with her charms.

  Thanks to the peace which the shogunate had brought about, the country was quickly becoming prosperous. An end of warfare meant that all hands could be turned to production, developing arts, crafts, and trade. Seeking a share of the growing pool of wealth, people flocked to the rapidly expanding cities.

  This was the height of the Japanese Renaissance, the glittering Genroku period. By then, money lenders and merchants had built up stupendous fortunes. Samurai, trying to subsist on their stipends, were forbidden to get a job; not only was there no upward mobility, there was no downward mobility either. There was nothing they could do but borrow from the money lenders, who got richer and richer. Every now and then edicts were issued forbidding merchants from, for example, wearing silk, living in a three-story house, and decorating their rooms with gold and silver leaf or furnishing them with gold lacquer objects; edicts had to be issued, of course, because that was precisely what they were doing. These supposedly low-class townsmen lavished their money on luxuries, filling their storehouses with fabulously expensive gold screens, ceramics, lacquerware, tea bowls, books, prints, and sumptuous kimono. All this big spending further stimulated the economy by providing a market for the artisans.

  But no matter how rich the merchants became, they were prohibited from using their wealth to improve their status by, for example, marrying into a samurai family or moving into the samurai section of town. And the wealthier they became, the more likely it was that the government would confiscate everything they had. Merchants did not pay taxes, as that would have given them rights; instead, every now and then, the shogunate found a pretext to seize their riches. Therefore it made ample sense to squander as much of one’s fortune as possible, as quickly as possible, on pleasure—and where better to do so than in the newly burgeoning pleasure quarters!

  Something had gone badly wrong in the shoguns’ plans. The idea had been to sweep vice under the carpet, to restrict the perpetrators of vice—the prostitutes and the kabuki actors, their companions in sin—to specific areas of the capital and thus control both them and their vulgar customers, the nouveau-riche merchants. But instead the pleasure quarters rapidly turned into the most glamorous part of town. Everyone from samurai to the imperial princes and even the emperor himself sneaked off for surreptitious visits.

  As well as sex, romance, and sensual pleasure, Shimabara offered all that a sophisticated man about town might demand: elegance, culture, and brilliant conversation with beaut
iful women in an atmosphere of refinement. It was a place where merchants could entertain clients and show off their glamorous connections, basking in the company of these not-quite-reputable stars. As for what happened afterward, that was practically irrelevant. The show was the thing.

  In 1661 a writer called Ryoi Asai coined a word for this new way of living: ukiyo (the floating world) from which came the term ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) for the woodblock prints which depicted the courtesans, prostitutes, and later, geisha who were its denizens. In the past, the word ukiyo had been a Buddhist term, referring to the transience of all things. In Ryoi’s Tales of the Floating World, it took on a new slant. Life was indeed transient; so what better way to spend one’s time than in the pursuit of pleasure, like a gourd bobbing lightly along the stream of life!

  For men it was a topsy-turvy world of pleasure which was the reverse in every way from the world of work and family outside its gates. There, it was said, a man would forget what time of day it was, what period of history, and even his own wife. There the outcast courtesans and prostitutes could play at being queens and the low-grade merchants kings. As for the samurai, who were supposedly at the top of the tree, they were dismissed as bumpkins.

  For the women, however, it was no dream. It was where they lived and worked. Even if they wanted to leave, their wings were clipped. Gorgeous though they were, the inhabitants of the pleasure quarters were caged birds. They had been brought to the quarter as small children and had grown up entirely in this hothouse world of women. They knew nothing else. For all their finery and glamour, they were virtual slaves, indentured to the brothel owners.

  Almost all were from the lower classes, the beautiful children of impoverished rural families or debt-ridden townsfolk. There were professional procurers or pimps, called zegen, who scoured the countryside and poorer sections of the city. When they found a suitable child, they would offer the parents a set sum of money. Buying or selling of persons was illegal so the child would be bound with a contract for a fixed period of time, usually ten years.