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Authors: Lesley Downer
Tags: Fiction
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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
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
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