Women of the Pleasure Quarters (6 page)

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 beautiful 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.

For the parents, sending a child off to the pleasure quarters was nothing out of the ordinary; it is still done to this day in Asia. Apart from the much-needed money and the brutal necessity of reducing the number of mouths to be fed, they probably felt they were giving their daughter a chance in life. Going to Kyoto to eat fine food, wear fine clothes, meet fine people, and be educated offered far more hope than staying in the countryside hoeing the soil for the rest of her life. As for the child, according to the Confucian code it was her filial duty to put the well-being of her family ahead of her own. Girls who were sold to the pleasure quarters were considered virtuous and admirable for having sacrificed themselves for their family.

Most were recruited when they were six or seven and had only the haziest memories of life outside the walls of the pleasure quarter. While peasants were lucky if they had millet, the children in Shimabara ate white rice, wore beautiful kimonos, and learned to walk, talk, and comport themselves in the exaggeratedly feminine style of the quarter. Shimabara had its own dialect, as did the other pleasure quarters, with distinctive slang that was charmingly polite yet playfully seductive. Any child who managed to escape could thus be immediately identified by the way she spoke and sent back again. For visitors it made the pleasure quarters feel all the more like a dream world, an exotic foreign land.

The children were the property of the brothel owner. Before they even arrived, they had already incurred an enormous debt: the outlay involved in buying them from their parents. Their food and kimono were provided by the brothel; but every grain of rice and every bolt of silk only served to increase the burden of debt. By the time they were old enough to start working, their debt was so huge that they had no choice but to work day and night in a desperate attempt to repay it.

Initially the children worked as maids. When they were older, if they showed promise they became
kamuro
(child attendants to a courtesan). The courtesan taught them how to behave and ensured that they were trained in accomplishments such as calligraphy, tea ceremony, and music. There were many little secrets to be absorbed: how to lure men, how to wind them around their little fingers with tears or protestations of undying love, how to write love letters, how to hold men off long enough to drive them mad with desire, how to pleasure them in the bedchamber, and how to fake an orgasm while conserving one’s energy for the next customer. The key rule was to play at love but never, never to allow oneself to feel it. That way lay disaster.

At thirteen or fourteen, when the child reached sexual maturity, there was a grand celebration accompanied by a rite of passage which the girl had to accept with gritted teeth—
mizuage,
literally “raising or offering up the waters”—ritual deflowerment, conducted by a patron who had paid mightily for the privilege. If she was uncommonly lovely she might be designated a
koshi,
the second rank of courtesan, though there were many that slipped through the net and ended up as lower-grade prostitutes, sitting patiently behind the latticed windows of the teahouses waiting to be chosen by a customer.

At the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of prostitutes and courtesans were the
tayu,
the aristocrats of the courtesan world. Some were the concubines and courtesans of the imperial princes; unlike the lower ranks of courtesans,
tayu
were permitted inside the palace. And in their leisure time the princes went on horseback or by palanquin to amuse themselves at the famous Shimabara pleasure quarters where the
tayu
lived.

If a man wanted to enjoy the company of a
tayu,
the first step was to go to an
ageya,
a house of assignation (the precursor of the teahouses of the geisha districts) to apply for a meeting. If he was a sophisticate, he would ask for one of the
tayu
by name; some were so popular that it might take months before a day became free in their calendar. The owner of the
ageya
would write a letter to the bordello where the courtesan lived, roll it up, and give it to a messenger. While the customer was waiting, he would enjoy the services of jesters and dancing girls and ply them with food and drink, all of which, of course, would be added to his bill.

Hours later, the
tayu
would sweep in, dressed in layer upon layer of gorgeous kimonos and accompanied by a flotilla of child attendants and dancing girls, having progressed at snail’s pace along the boulevard with her entourage. They would while away the evening playing music, dancing, exchanging poems, and enjoying the tea ceremony and incense ceremony—exactly as if they were ladies and gentlemen of the Heian court. Sex did not automatically follow. After all, it would lower the courtesan’s worth if she were too easily available. A proprietor who owned a beautiful
tayu
would want to increase the value of his or her investment by making her as exclusive as possible.

If the man wanted to spend the night with the courtesan, he would have to engage in a long and very expensive courtship. The earliest that one could hope to experience her luxurious silk bedding was at the third visit. And even then, if the
tayu
was not satisfied with the man’s performance, she could decline to sleep with him. If she did agree to spend the night with him, the cost was 90 silver nuggets
(momme)
which equaled one and a half gold nuggets
(ryo),
in modern currency about $675. It was costly but, for a wealthy man, the only sort of person whom a
tayu
would consider, hardly prohibitive.
⁹

The
koshi,
the second rank courtesans, charged sixty silver nuggets, and the
sancha
(teahouse waitresses-
cum
-courtesans) charged thirty. At the Shimabara even the lowest class of prostitutes, the
hashi,
whom one could buy for just one silver nugget, were said to be elegant.

But no matter how famous the courtesans became, they were still slaves of debt, constrained to work out their ten-year contract. In fact the system ensured that, no matter how hard they worked, their debts only increased. There were always new costs being incurred—the purchasing of the splendid kimonos necessary to carry on their trade, the costs of bedding and of clothing and supporting their retinue of retainers, the tips that had to be paid to the bordello staff. They had just three days off a year. If they missed a day’s work for any reason at all they had to pay the bordello out of their own pocket the sum they would have earned. Most carried on working until they were twenty-seven, the usual retirement age. Those who were successful would have plenty of supplicants begging to marry them after that.