An interesting system of colour-coding came about. Red-coloured akahon appeared in the latter years of the Genroku. Written in cursive script and generously illustrated, these were collections of stories aimed at women and children. They were followed by kurohon, black-covered books containing embroidered accounts of historical tales, heroic deeds and lurid ghost and revenge stories. Aohon were blue books representing scenes from everyday life. Last to appear were the yellow-covered, kibyoshibon books. The authors of these more realistic works, often written in the vernacular and alluding to current gossip and scandals or ostracizing the ideas of Confucian moralists, were more likely to run foul of the censors, though banned books were often simply reissued with new covers bearing different titles.
Real events and scandals, even more provocative than the grimly pornographic works that flourished throughout the Genroku period, appeared in thinly disguised form in plays, stories, ballads, and single-sheet broadsheets similar to the yomiuri. Scandals involving eminent figures, obliquely alluded to but fully understood by the public, appeared in flyers, ballads and the more detailed broadsheets called jitsuroku or “true stories”. Sexual humour inevitably resurfaced in the enormously popular joke books of the age, which invariably featured cuckolded husbands, lustful wives and the habits of lapsed monks and priests. So great was the demand for anecdotes of this kind that even humble street-corner storytellers like the former dyer Shikano Bunzaemon could make a living compiling their accounts in book form or giving narrative recitations at private parties. The writer Kiseki, though happily exploiting the Genroku demi-monde for the contents of his own work, frequently railed against the excessive materialism of the times, the vanity and assertiveness of its women, their immoderate dress and loose morals. Writing in Characters of Worldly Young Women about the showy use of costly cosmetics, he observes, “Now young ladies smear it on down to their navels.”
Graphic Rites of Spring
Makura-e (pillow images) and shunga (spring pictures) provided the erotic images deemed necessary for these books to sell in profitable quantities. Shunga are unapologetically explicit images that celebrate the joy of the sexual act. The largely benign intentions of mainstream images (as opposed to sordid or intentionally depraved shunga) are evident in their alternative name, warai-e (“laughing pictures”). While not all the erotica maintain the same standard of visual integrity, there is a degree of human warmth in the images produced at this time.
According to John Stevens, an authority on this form of art, the darker aspects of erotic illustration - including sadism, a constant in Japanese erotic art - “became more pronounced in Japanese pornography as the twentieth century progressed, reflecting the brutalization of the human spirit that led to the tragedy of World War II.” The fine line between art and pornography is one of those questions that have long vexed the censor. Henry Miller once defined the distinction between the obscene and erotic by saying that you could buy the latter. Shunga were certainly for sale. The fact that their value has risen considerably since they were created, placing them in the category of collectible art, gives pause for thought.
The sense of composition and command of line and form in Edoperiod shunga are immensely superior to the crudity of today’s mass-marketed pornography. Shunga portrayed not only customers and courtesans, newlyweds or young lovers, but also found an erotic range and depth in the study of the sexual relations between affectionate married couples and the wellspring of vitality that could be drawn upon to keep their graphically portrayed coupling fresh and invigorating. In one print, a couple of indefinable age are fixed by the artist in an erotic pose against the backdrop of an apricot tree, the rough bark of its gnarled branches reanimated by virile blooms.
Shunga artists often employed the services of their wives or even daughters in order to achieve greater anatomical accuracy, which is a feature of their work. Great care was taken when representing the details of clothing, often of a sumptuous, multi-layered kind, and the manner in which it was stripped away or left to hang in voluptuous folds. While such images no doubt served simple auto-erotic needs or shared stimulus for couples, they may also have functioned as manuals for the untested or for experienced viewers intent on expanding their repertoire. Not all of the images, however, particularly the more contorted ones, were to be recommended. One senryu provides a caveat:
Emulating the postures
In a shunga book
They sprained all their joints.
The half-consumed pots of tea, sweets and sake that provide delightful human touches contrast with naked limbs and intent expressions. In other prints fans, leaves of erotic poetry or an overturned bath stool add to the mood of abandonment. An interesting fusion of objects and room décor surfaces in some of the later prints, where the familiar postures of the couple blend with lacquered trays and fusuma paper doors, curtains and western clothing.
Suzuki Harunobu was an early master of the suggestive detail. One famous print shows a young man struggling with a woman to retrieve a love letter, their clothes in suggestive disarray. Hanging from a wall behind them, a poem by Chosui reads:
Stretching across scarlet plum blossoms,
Bamboo pipes are green.
Neo-Confucian Doctrines
Moderating the irrepressible liberties of Edo was an especially orthodox brand of neo-Confucianism extolled by the Tokugawa regime. Stemming from the twelfth-century Chinese philosopher Chu Hsi, who stressed absolute submission to authority, the ideology held enormous sway with Japan’s rulers, who eagerly adapted this system of graduated obedience to suit their needs. In the manner of Japan’s other cultural and religious implants, the Analects and other writings of Confucius were subjected to an empirical resorting. Confucian doctrines enlisted to serve the Tokugawa state emphasized feudal values designed to support the authority of rulers over the compliant masses. Metaphysics tended to vanish in this rebranded state theology as neo-Confucianism, as it became known, assumed the form of a doctrinaire political philosophy.
The architect of this template for governance was the classical scholar Hayashi Razan, who supervised the founding of the first Confucian academy in Ueno. The institute moved to Soto Kanda in 1691, continuing its work as a finishing school for the sons of the Tokugawas, the elite feudal nobility and military class. A teacher training college was later set up on the same grounds by the Meiji government, relocating to Hongo where it would become the University of Tokyo. Yushima Seido temple’s identification with learning continues, evident in the number of students who visit the site, especially in the weeks before entrance examinations, to hang votive tablets of Confucius on racks set up along the covered portico that runs along the main courtyard of the shrine. A pistachio tree, grown from a cutting taken from a tree that stood at Confucius’ grave, can be seen at the entrance to the temple grounds. Roosters and “devil dogs” sit on the sweeping tile and copper roofs of the Taisei-den, the Hall of Accomplishment, which enshrines the spirit of Confucius. The temple is situated at the base of a slope that levels out at the banks of the Kanda river. Gazing south from the stone ramparts of Hijiribashi (The Bridge of the Sages), the span that forms an unintentional processional to the temple, the deep green domes of an altogether different deity, the god of the Russian orthodox Nikolai Cathedral, loom over the more occidental domain of Ochanomizu.
Attempts were made to control the freedom of the townspeople through the issuing of countless edicts, regulations and sumptuary laws aimed at reaffirming Hayashi’s Confucian social model. The wealthier merchants, their vain wives and spoilt children quickly found ingenious ways to evade these petty laws. Told not to wear silk, they devised kimonos of rough cloth lined with the finest silk available; forbidden to build houses of over two storeys, they added additional levels to existing interiors. Other means were found to circumvent decrees against decorating their rooms with silver leaf or furnishing them with objects covered in gold lacquer. When a decree to prevent commoners from using kago (palanquins) was issued in
1681, the general public simply ignored it. The very fact that repeated attempts were made to discourage common people from developing extravagant tastes hints at their ineffectiveness. The townspeople had their own behavioural codes, tastes and aesthetics for governing their lives.
Their preferences, expressed not only in the arts but in clothing, lifestyles and manners of speech, were defined by iki (style), tsu (connoisseurship) and asobi (play). Iki, a sense of stylish flair and bravura, the domain of high-ranking courtesans, actors, young blades and the Edo flâneur, has always been difficult to translate because such concepts belong to a sophisticated culture of sensation. Iki was much esteemed for implying sensual promise without revealing too much. The women who worked in the teahouses of Yanagibashi had this special quality, a flair and good taste in dress and comportment that, while flamboyant, eschewed the more florid ostentations of the wealthier Edo townspeople. Only a select number of tsu or dai tsu (grand connoisseurs), however, were conversant with the subtleties and code signals of this increasingly intricate world.
The Art City
Painters, former habitués of Kyoto, began to set up schools in Edo under the direction of the master Kano Tanyu. Their work was largely patronized by the aristocracy, however, who appreciated the refined Chinese models used by these artists. While prosperous samurai families, aristocrats and wealthy merchants commissioned expansive paintings to decorate their estates, the townspeople were discovering an inexpensive art form of their own: the ukiyo-e print.
Ukiyo-e images of the floating world appeared in prints, screens, paintings and costume design alongside more accessible paintings that made use of diverse formats: banners, theatre boards and signs, scrolls, lanterns and screens. Almost every available surface of the city could be coopted for some kind of illustrative purpose.
In the mid-seventeenth century the ancient art of woodblock prints (hanga) was revived and invigorated. Woodcuts were printed onto handmade mulberry-bark paper. Different pressures applied to burnishing, embossing and the use of metal dust on the print surface created texture, depth and lustre. The process of making a full-colour print required the collaboration of the commissioning publisher, who acted as art director and co-ordinator, the artist himself, the woodblock engraver and finally the printer. As public demand for prints grew, so did technical innovation.
Although it is doubtful that Hishikawa Moronobu single-handedly raised the level of the woodblock print to that of art, as is often claimed, it would be difficult to visualize the Genroku period without Moronobu’s prints or Saikaku’s satirical fiction. Like Saikaku, Moronobu, who probably arrived in Edo after the great fire of 1657, was drawn by the exhilarating complexity and diversity of city life. Grand courtesans and studied images of illustrated albums like Views of the Yoshiwara and Flower Viewing at Ueno were produced alongside picture-guides to Edo, designs for screens and fans, all manner of erotica and the gritty Pictures of Japanese Occupations, a detailed and realistic document, testament to his fascination with the teeming life of the Edo street. Here Moronobu depicts peddlers of bean curd, clam and rice cake, salt-gatherers, washerwomen, fortunetellers, priests, wrestlers, harlots, apothecaries and fishmongers, all with their trademark quirks and mannerisms. A major chronicler of the newly reconstructed city, Moronobu ensured that ukiyo-e remained the dominant art of Edo.
With a common interest in Edo existence, it was inevitable that Saikaku and Moronobu should collaborate, as they did on a number of books, helping at the same time to stimulate the remarkably close relationship between the ukiyo-zoshi and ukiyo-e. The artists of the floating world, though conscious that their images were embellishments of an already embroidered dream state, claimed that their work, in opposition to the classical painters and their Chinese models, was the truer representative standard of Japanese life, calling themselves Yamato Eshi, “real Japanese painters”.
The well-established tradition of fusing literature and calligraphy in scroll paintings, a popular derivative of genre ukiyo-e paintings, was something only the aristocracy or wealthy merchants could afford to support. The woodblock print, inexpensive and portable, with its broad range of subjects, was exceedingly popular. More intimate, it functioned as an early form of mass media, offering up-to-date coverage of the floating world and information about the pleasure districts or Kabuki plays. Those who could not afford the folding albums or picture books made from rice paper stitched into double sheets might buy one of the single-sheet prints that were put out as flyers to advertise famous actors and renowned beauties.
Moronobu’s earliest ukiyo-e works, known as “primitives”, had been monochrome prints. A breakthrough in printing techniques in 1745 allowed initially for two colours (red and green were the usual choices) to be printed directly from woodblocks. Multiple colours and halftones were perfected in the nishiki-e (“brocade picture”) prints that followed.
Edo Theatrics
The most respected and prolific playwright of his day, Chikamatsu Monzaemon lived in Osaka. Much of his work, adapted for use in Kabuki, appeared as dramas for the enormously influential bunraku puppet theatre. There were two bunraku theatres in Edo. A serious theatrical form, puppet dramas enjoyed much respect among adult audiences for their lifelike dramatizations and occasional social and political commentaries. Bunraku and Kabuki competed for popularity in Edo, but after the fire of 1657, which destroyed much of the city, many of the puppet chanters moved back to Osaka and Kyoto. Gradually overshadowing the ballad dramas and hugely expressive puppet theatre, Kabuki was unquestionably the dominant theatrical form of the age.
Fires precipitated a crucial period in the development of Edo. Casting off more traditional influences seen in the culture of the western Kansai region, the rebuilding of theatres saw the emergence of a more unique Edo style and appearance. Kabuki did not always enjoy official approval. The form started as a loose mixture of variety acts performed by troupes of women, who set up their tents and stages on the dry banks of the Kamogawa river in Kyoto. Those involved in these pantomimic performances along the riverbanks were branded kawara kojiki (riverbed beggars) and disdained by the authorities. Because the dances were often salacious in nature, and the performers frequently supplemented their incomes with prostitution, female performers were banned by the authorities in 1629 as injurious to public morality, a restriction that, while no longer enforced by law, has been upheld to this day.
The word Kabuki is a compound of three words: ka (song), bu (dance) and ki (acting). Daylong performances of Kabuki attracted audiences from every walk of life, from surreptitious visits by ladies of the shogun’s court, who watched from behind screened galleries, to shop clerks and messenger boys. This was the age of such theatrical colossi as Ichikawa Danjuro I, the founder of a long line of Edo Kabuki performers and the exponent of a bold and muscular style known as aragoto acting. The coarser, bravura treatment of themes typified by the aragoto style is reflected in its name, which means literally “rough stuff” or “wild thing”. Ichikawa created a sensation, making his debut in the role of the martial hero Kimpira wearing stunning red and black makeup alongside actors decked out in flowing demon wigs and silk robes with long trailing hems. Ichikawa’s acting career ended abruptly and bloodily in 1704 when he was stabbed to death on stage.
Kabuki’s resplendent historical spectacles and real life stories of starcrossed lovers often dramatize the conflict between raw human emotions, sexuality and duty, frequently centring on an ill-starred affair between a young blood of Edo and one of the women of the pleasure quarters. There is a populist, even rebellious side to Kabuki, though, with its brothelkeepers, gravediggers, ferrymen and prostitutes making their own often subversive social commentary. Plays were performed against elaborately constructed backdrops and stage sets. In the late Genroku era, a revolving stage allowed for quick changes of set. Audiences were rarely passive, as the demonstrative Edokko were quick to voice their approval or displeasure with a performance. In this combustible atmosphere theatres were often sh
aken by fiercely partisan shows of enthusiasm or hostility. At least part of the melodrama - the expansive gestures, larger-than-life costumes and the striking make-up - was due to the dim lighting in the theatres. Young acolytes, stooping beneath actors, held candles attached to bamboo poles to illuminate the thespians’ facial expressions.
Lavish costume displays inevitably attracted the attention of the authorities. Though random sumptuary laws were largely ineffective, a Kabuki actor, if he was unlucky enough to be singled out as an example, might have an expensive wardrobe of silks confiscated. The cost of these embroidered costumes, the budget for musicians and scenery and the scandalously high salaries demanded by top actors, meant that theatre owners were often out of pocket.
In an attempt to idolize women and to create the ultimate metaphor for beauty, male actors took on female parts. Wakashu (male youths) took on the first roles. The sight of such cloned beauty inflamed enough of the male audience for the Wakashu Kabuki to quickly become associated with pederasty. The government soon required all actors to be adult males. Today’s onnagata (female impersonators) are often older-generation actors, whose skill at portraying the first flush of youth in their subjects is all the more remarkable.
The purpose of the onnagata was to create rather than disguise femininity through highly stylized but transparent techniques, the sexual ambiguity of the performance highly appreciated by audiences. An early onnagata, Yoshizawa Ayame, went so far as to insist that the mannerisms portrayed on stage should extend into real life. Living as women outside the theatre and maintaining the fiction for an adoring public often required keeping a wife or family out of the picture. All this was part of the illusion created by the finest male-female actors. In a short story called Onnagata, Mishima Yukio, an accomplished Kabuki critic himself, describes the world of the performer: “The make-believe of his daily life supported the make-believe of his stage performances.” This, the main character of the story convinces himself, “marked the true onnagata. An onnagata is the child born of the illicit union between dream and reality.”
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 7