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The Making of Modern Japan

Victorian-era Japanese and Japanese classicists, who had thought them rather vulgar. Our museums and contemporary tastes permit careful study of these pictures of Edo types and styles. The best combine magnicent precision of line and elegant decorative design. The ladies they portray are not full faced, something the carver could not provide, but minimalist sketches; they return our stares unblinking and uninvolved. We admire them but do not relate to them, somewhat the way Saikakus readers regarded his characters. We sample, admire, and often relish the beauty and the exquisite virtuosity of those whose talentsartist, carver, and printerbrought them to us. If the merchants danger was to lend money to samurai and daimyo, his sons proclivity was to spend it on the women of the licensed quarter. These quarters exerted an extraordinary inuence on the popular culture of the Edo period. Each of the major metropolises had its own: Kyoto the Shimabara, Osaka its Shinmachi, and Edo its Yoshiwara. In the early years of the period authorities established them under samurai administration, and they were patrolled carefully to keep samurai, who provided the customers, from resorting to violence when in their cups. In Kyoto and Osaka, where samurai were few, order was less of a problem, but in Edo thousands of samurai were away from their families for months at a time, and they made up the majority of men frequenting the area. In Edo the bakufu rst located the quarter near the center of the city, but after the Meireki era re it was moved to the citys outskirts. As the city grew those outskirts were closer by, and the great ji became something of a staging area for revelers Asakusa temple area of Senso bent on an outing of pleasure and dissipation. Houses in the quarter varied immensely in splendor and cost; teahouses, drinking spots, and restaurants were nearby. The women involved also differed sharply in quality, ranging from country girls who were sold into a life of degradation by villagers desperate for survival to magnicently costumed and educated beauties who could be selective with their favors. Japans was a hierarchical society, and there were formal rankings of women in the quarter; four in Kyoto, where they totaled 308, ve in Osaka, where there were 760, and seven in Edo, where the same survey (of about the year 1700) gave the gure of 1,750.23 Even these totals, however, cannot begin to suggest the total numbers involved in the many minor akusho, bad places, to be found in the metropolis. , trained from childhood by her proprietor At the highest rank was the tayu in deportment, dignity, and elegance, and usually accompanied by younger and lower-ranking girls who seemed virtually her retainers. Her favors were reserved for the great and the wealthy, and Saikaku and his followers chronicled disasters of nance as great merchants engaged in rivalries of conspicuous