7
The Tokugawa shogunate instituted political, administrative, and social policies to help ensure that they retained power, but the rigidity of the status system they created could not flexibly accommodate ongoing, long-term changes in the economy and society. Urbanization and the growth of the commercial economy worked to redistribute wealth from the samurai to commoners, undermining the system. It also helped fuel the development of lively new forms of culture among urban commoners.
Courtier and samurai elites had long enjoyed elegant amusements such as poetry gatherings, tea ceremonies, and flower-arranging parties. During the Edo period, another name for the era of the Tokugawa shogunate (1600–1868), wealthy commoners increasingly began to enjoy such pursuits. Peace and prosperity enabled the blossoming of a popular culture, affordable by the less privileged, that included books, woodblock prints, the theater, and the “pleasure quarters,” filled with brothels and teahouses. This culture is often associated with the term ukiyo (the floating world). During the medieval era, the term was linked to Buddhist notions of impermanence, part of the suffering of the human condition, but during the Edo period it represented a world of play, characterized by humor, eroticism, and self-indulgence. The spirit of ukiyo culture was titillating, irreverent, and bold, essentially mocking the solemnity of the samurai elite. Artistic, literary, and theatrical facets of ukiyo culture were deeply intertwined with one another because all developed in the same great cities and catered to the same expanding clientele: increasingly wealthy groups of commoners.
The Genroku era (technically 1688–1704, but more generally referring to 1680–1720) represented a high point in urban culture. Early Edo culture was risqué and sexually oriented, but as the era advanced, ukiyo culture gained greater sophistication. While ukiyo art, literature, and drama were focused largely on Kabuki actors and the courtesans of the pleasure quarters, they also began to reflect the triumphs and tragedies of daily life for urban commoners. By the late seventeenth century, licensed quarters for theaters and brothels had matured into highly structured systems, with hierarchies of authority and status, elaborate codes of etiquette, and a rich body of tradition. Actors and prostitutes, as members of the caste of “nonhuman” vagrants, were considered sources of social pollution by the Confucian-oriented bakufu. They were thus restricted to special areas, fenced off from “decent society.” Nonetheless, Kabuki actors and the women of the pleasure quarters were subjects of endless popular fascination and thus remained central subjects for drama, prose, and art in this period.
URBANIZATION
The establishment of the shogun’s capital at Edo, along with the sankin kōtai system that ordered all daimyo and their samurai retainers to reside alternately at Edo and in a single castle town within their domains, initiated an accelerated degree of urbanization throughout Japan, bringing unprecedented levels of commercial growth. Following Ieyasu’s victory at Sekigahara, he ordered all daimyo to contribute materials and manpower to the gargantuan project of constructing a capital city: reclaiming lands from floodplains, building his massive castle (now the Imperial Palace), and engineering a network of waterways and bridges. Remnants of these original efforts can be seen in contemporary Tokyo and provide a sense of the scope of Ieyasu’s project. The inner moat circumscribed central Edo and remains an important avenue of transportation today as the Yamanote train line, a 21.4-mile loop that is Tokyo’s busiest and most important line, linking all major centers in the city. The mansions of the daimyo were all located within the loop, to the north and west, occupying 70 percent of the land, while quarters for the townspeople were crammed in the “low city” (shitamachi), representing 15 percent of the inner loop. Temples and shrines occupied the remaining land. Along the city’s waterways, areas for amusement developed, intended for townspeople but eagerly frequented by many samurai. Evening pleasure boats hosted lively parties for clients they ferried to the theater or pleasure quarters.
Edo did not immediately achieve national dominance as a center of culture. Kyoto and Osaka, sometimes jointly known as Kamigata, remained at the forefront of literature, arts, crafts, religion, and commerce throughout the seventeenth century. The samurai presence in these cities was minor; elite classes of courtiers, merchants, and samurai mingled freely, borrowing from one another in creating new cultural forms and forums. Kyoto painters and artists achieved elegant new heights, as illustrated in the work of the Ogata brothers, Kōrin (1658–1716) and Kenzan (1663–1743), heirs to a luxury textile business. The brothers engaged in all of the fashionable cultural pursuits of their day, such as tea, painting, and calligraphy. With the death of their patroness in the late seventeenth century, their family fortunes declined and later collapsed, forcing the brothers to turn to careers as artists. They brilliantly applied concepts associated with textile design to painting and ceramics. Nevertheless, they too eventually left the declining Kyoto for Edo, seeking wealthy patrons to support their work.
MAP 7. Edo, 1844. Courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin.
Kamigata elites valued elegance. They considered Edo-ites, with their preferences for novelty and boldness over understatement, boorish and rough. This lasting division between eastern and western styles is illustrated in regional preferences for Kabuki drama: the heroes of Edo Kabuki played warriors with exaggerated movements and bluster, a style called aragoto (rough business), while Kamigata Kabuki featured sophisticated, fashionable heroes, often known as great lovers, in wagoto (soft style) roles. From the eighteenth century onward, Edo gained the upper hand as the national center of cultural production. While it was less polished than the older cities, it was more dynamic. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, commoner ukiyo culture originating in Edo spread throughout the other urban centers, while many courtly and samurai arts stagnated.
FIGURE 32. Ogata Kōrin, Red and White Plum Trees, early eighteenth century. MOA Museum of Art, Atami, Japan. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Edo and the domainal castle towns were military cities, constructed for the needs of the samurai class. The population of Edo was thus largely male, not only among the samurai but among the merchant classes, who staffed new establishments in the shogun’s capital with male clerks and apprentices from their home domains, and among male laborers brought by the tens of thousands to work on construction projects. According to a census from the early eighteenth century, the population of Edo was approximately half samurai and half townspeople, with at least twice as many men as women. Such gender proportions account for the rough cultural preferences of early Edo and for the significant roles of prostitution and erotic art and literature in popular culture, as important forms of entertainment for a population of single men.
Concentrated urban populations spurred the growth of consumer culture, because residents were dependent on shops and markets to purchase food, clothing, and other desirables, available for budgets of all levels. The wealthy indulged in finely crafted fashions, ceramics, and lacquerwares; they ate delicacies like crane and carp at elegant restaurants, often near the theater or pleasure quarters, where they paid handsomely for entertainment. Poor laborers, on the other hand, could buy secondhand clothing and goods from street stalls, eat a variety of tasty street foods, drink cheap sake at bars, and entertain themselves at inexpensive storytelling houses or in the galley seats of Kabuki theater. Sushi, soba noodles, and grilled eel—iconic items of Japanese cuisine today—originated as cheap, fast food sold in street stalls to satisfy the appetites of Edo’s labor force. In 1860, over 3,700 shops sold soba, meaning that a noodle shop could be found on every Edo block. Those with more middling incomes might shop at Edo’s large, new dry-goods emporiums, such as Echigoya, opened in 1673. Traditionally, kimono vendors traveled to their customers’ homes, making their wares to order and selling textiles by the bolt. Echigoya adopted a more consumer-friendly approach, opening large stores that sold premade clothing and accessories at fixed prices, eliminating the traditional haggling and making transactions more efficient. Allowing customers to buy cloth in small quantities rather than by the bolt resulted in a huge volume of sales, enabling Echigoya to open stores in other urban centers. Not until Le Bon Marché was opened in Paris in 1852 were such practices enacted in the Western world. Echigoya, eventually renamed Mitsukoshi, was forerunner of Tokyo’s modern department stores.
Townsmen native to Edo, called Edokko, took pride in their identity, distinct from the parsimonious, moralizing samurai class and from rural yokels. By the middle of the Edo period, savvy Edokko were said to embody stylish chic (iki) and strength of character (hari). The spirit of iki was characterized by generosity with one’s money; modesty and unostentatious behavior; and knowledgeability about art, fashion, and the rules and etiquettes of the pleasure quarters and theater. The most sophisticated townsmen, known as tsū (stylish connoisseurs), became role models for other men with cultural aspirations. Men who aspired to tsū status but made crude mistakes, such as wearing expensive but out-of-fashion clothing or behaving flamboyantly or arrogantly, were condemned as superficial phonies (hankatsū) or yokels (yabo). The quality of hari, in turn, was characterized by a straightforward nature, a spirit of resistance, and a refusal to pander. The sense of resistance grew from the dislike of oppressive samurai rule and its class-based restrictions. The courtesans and geisha of the pleasure quarters were also sometimes said to embody iki and hari, but the more prevalent ideal for women was coquetry (bitai), a charming and flirtatious allure that was erotic but never vulgar.
PRINT CULTURE
Qualities like iki, hari, and bitai were disseminated and popularized through the print industry, which experienced immense growth during the Edo period. They were illustrated in woodblock prints and explained via illustrated prose literature (kana zōshi), written in vernacular language using kana characters so that large audiences with rudimentary literacy could enjoy them. As the publishing industry developed during the seventeenth century, printing techniques changed. Movable type—introduced by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century—gave way to the older form of woodblock printing, because type didn’t allow for artistic integration of text and picture and discouraged calligraphic creativity. Block printing’s capacity to combine text and picture enabled printers to reach a readership that ranged from the highly literate to the illiterate—crucial for creating a large consumer base.
In the early seventeenth century, the print industry helped define and legitimate the Tokugawa regime through the prolific production of maps of the nation, including maps of each of the provinces, major cities, the networks of highways, and popular travel routes. This was soon accompanied by an outpouring of commercial printing that included “atlases, encyclopedias, dictionaries, calendars, almanacs, rural gazetteers, urban directories, travel accounts, personnel rosters, biographical compendia, manuals of work, manuals of play, guides to shopping and local products, and school primers.”1 Mary Elizabeth Berry has identified the vast new range of data available to the commoner population as the “library of public information.” Contemporary fiction was a highly popular genre among urban townspeople, who were its primary market. Best-selling novels often sold over ten thousand copies in a few months’ time. Book lenders (kashi honya) enabled commoners who couldn’t afford to purchase books to read widely. The lenders traveled to customers’ homes with a large pile of books on their back or peddled their volumes on the streets, renting books for around one-sixth the price of purchase. There were around 650 such book lenders in Edo in 1808 and a similar number in Osaka. Some traveled to rural villages, thereby disseminating urban culture throughout the country.
During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the publishing world was centered in Kyoto and Osaka. Branches of Kyoto booksellers dominated the Edo market. The most popular and successful authors of the era, satirist Ihara Saikaku (1642–93) and dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725, discussed later in this chapter) resided in Osaka. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, entrepreneurial Edo publishers gained ground, producing new genres such as illustrated storybooks, including popular “pillow books” of erotica; and books of satiric verses and political lampoons, which often landed their authors in jail. Edo publishers produced numerous books on Dutch learning, including Sugita Genpaku’s Kaitai shinsho (New treatise on dissection) and many other translations of Dutch works on medicine, physics, and other sciences. They ignored traditional copyrights, reprinting books popularized by their Kamigata rivals. They were especially successful in their sales of full-color woodblock prints (nishiki-e). Edo bookstore chains such as Suwaraya and Tsutaya, which specialized in different types of texts and prints, eventually drove out their Kyoto-based competitors. In addition to books and artwork, the printing industry also produced the advertisements, handbills, guides, and rankings for the theater and pleasure districts. Librettos and commentaries for popular Kabuki and Bunraku (puppet theater) plays allowed enthusiasts to practice the roles themselves at home or among fan circles. The outpouring of print closely linked the producers of urban culture with its consumers.
Ihara Saikaku was a prolific poet and novelist, credited with popularizing the genre of ukiyo zōshi (tales of the floating world). Scion of a rich merchant family, he was well traveled and deeply engaged with the actors, courtesans, and wealthy connoisseurs at the forefront of his stories. His best-known works are hilarious parodies that explore the life of the townspeople, emphasizing themes like sex, money, and adventures in the pleasure quarters. His first novel, The Life of an Amorous Man (1683), is often viewed as a satire of the classic Tale of Genji. It chronicles the sex life of Yonosuke, an insatiable hedonist, from his first sexual venture at age seven to his departure for paradise, the fabled Island of Women, at age sixty, on a ship stocked with aphrodisiacs and sex toys. Yonosuke seduces both females and males; his diary records that he slept with 3,742 women and 735 boys.2 Unlike the genteel Genji or his Heian courtier colleagues, Yonosuke is unmoved by beauty or the pathos of life; he is motivated only by lust and libido.
In one episode, Yonosuke meets one of the ladies-in-waiting who staff the females-only inner chambers of the shogun’s castle. In popular culture, such ladies were often rumored to be starved for sex, trawling the theater districts on their days off. Yonosuke encounters the lady in question in that district, and she begs him to defend her from a mortal enemy. They retire to a nearby teahouse:
“This will tell you all you need to know,” she said demurely, nestling her face into the collar of her kimono, as she handed him a brocade bag. Yonosuke undid the scarlet thong and peered in—at an eight or nine inch long slender object which looked as if it had been worn down by years of hard use. “What’s this?” he exclaimed, taken aback.
“It’s my mortal enemy. Every time I use this weapon I scream I’m dying! I want revenge on it!” And she threw herself against him.
No sooner had he drawn his own weapon that he pinned her down and grappled fiercely with her, drenching several layers of mats beneath them. But when they rose again to part, she dipped into her purse for a discreetly wrapped gold piece, slipped it into his hand, and said: “Don’t forget, I have another holiday on the sixteenth.”3
The Life of an Amorous Man was a best seller, and Saikaku followed it up with other, similarly themed works, such as The Life of an Amorous Woman (1685), which chronicles the descent of a lusty woman from a top young courtesan down through the seamier ranks of prostitution as she loses her beauty, ending up a common streetwalker. Another work, The Great Mirror of Male Love (1687), describes the homosexual love affairs of samurai, Kabuki actors, and Buddhist priests—a very common phenomenon among these populations, typified among samurai and priests by couplings of senior-ranking males with youthful boys and by prostitution plied by actors. Saikaku discusses the relative merits of loving men rather than women: “A woman can be likened to a plant which, for all its blossoms, has creeping tendrils that twist around you. A youth is aloof, but imbued with an indescribable fragrance, like the first plum blossoms. For this reason, if one discusses their relative merits one must end by discarding women in favor of men.”4
Such works seem tinged with the misogyny of their time. Saikaku’s Five Women Who Loved Love (1685) furthers the sense of gender inequity and sexual double standards for women and men. Its stories are based on actual scandals and, rather than featuring the usual courtesans, center on women of the merchant class, who were generally portrayed in popular culture as stoic and boring, faithful to their husbands, and devoted to the success of the family’s enterprise. In Saikaku’s work, however, they are strong, decisive women who pursue the men they desire but pay a heavy price. Four of the five suffer unhappy fates: executed for adultery or other crimes, driven to becoming nuns, or committing suicide. The following excerpt from one of the tales presents a comic example of a scene still familiar today—young men checking out and judging the appearances of women:
There was in the capital a band of four inseparable young men who were known for their handsome appearance and riotous living. . . .
After the theater one evening they were lounging around a tea shop called Matsuya and one of them remarked, “I have never seen so many good-looking local girls as I did today. Do you suppose we could find others who would seem just as beautiful now?” They thought they might, and decided to watch for pretty girls among the people who had gone to see the wistaria blossoms and were now returning to their homes. After a worldly actor in the group had been chosen as chief judge, a “beauty contest” was conducted until the twilight hours, providing a new source of amusement for the jaded gentlemen.
At first they were disappointed to see some maids riding in a carriage which hid them from sight. Then a group of girls strolled by in a rollicking mood—“not bad, not bad at all”—but none of the girls quite satisfied their exacting standards. Paper and ink had been brought to record the entries, and it was agreed that only the best should be put on their list. . . .
Next they spied a lady of thirty-four or thirty-five with a graceful long neck and intelligent-looking eyes, above which could be seen a natural hairline of rare beauty. . . . Underneath she wore white satin, over that light blue satin, and outside—reddish-yellow satin. . . . Assuredly this was a woman of exquisite taste. . . . Around her head she had draped a veil like that worn by court ladies; she wore stockings of pale silk and sandals with triple braided straps. She walked noiselessly and gracefully, moving her hips with a natural rhythm. “What a prize for some lucky fellow!” a young buck exclaimed. But these words were hardly uttered when the lady, speaking to an attendant, opened her mouth and disclosed that one of her lower teeth was missing, to the complete disillusionment of her admirers.5
Playful comic fiction of the late eighteenth century and beyond is known as gesaku, and it comprises two main types. The first, kibyōshi (yellow cover), are often considered the first comic books for adults. They were typically printed in ten-page volumes; a single story spanned two or three volumes. Authors often drew the illustrations themselves, and blank spaces in the pictures were filled with dialogue, narrative, and labels identifying the characters portrayed. The second type, sharebon (books of wit and fashion), described the manners, language, and clothing styles of the pleasure quarters. Santō Kyōden (1761–1816), the son of an Edo pawnbroker, was a master of both forms. His kibyōshi masterpiece, Edo umare uwaki no kabayaki (Romantic embroilments born in Edo, 1785), is the tale of a very ugly young merchant, Enjirō, who desperately wishes to be seen as a great lover and tsū. He pays women to run after him in the streets of the pleasure quarters; begs his parents to disinherit him, as merchant families were likely to do with playboy sons; and stages a fake love-suicide with a courtesan. Characters include actual Kabuki actors, poets, and courtesans of the day.
In order to avoid violating censorship laws—which prohibited publishing books or prints that depicted current events, unorthodox theories, rumors, scandals, erotica, government officials, or anything directly related to the Tokugawa rulers or the imperial family—Kyōden gave his books superficial historical settings. Nevertheless, his sharp satires of social status and politics gained the attention of censors, and Kyōden was sentenced to fifty days in handcuffs, while his publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō was fined half of his entire net worth.
Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Shank’s mare), written by Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831), was one of the best-selling comic novels of the early nineteenth century. It concerns the misadventures of Yaji and Kita, two buffoons on a pilgrimage to the Ise Grand Shrine, traveling along the Tōkaidō road between Edo and Kyoto, motivated mainly by their interests in eating, drinking, and sex. Since they are from Edo, they view themselves as superior to the provincials they meet, but their foolishness and stupidity are revealed through incidents that occur in the inns along the way. At one, they burn themselves trying to use the bathtub; at another, they question how to eat the hot stones they’ve been served, not realizing that the stones are for cooking and not to be consumed. Yaji and Kita frequently get into trouble trying to sneak into the beds of women travelers. Tōkaidōchū hizakurige served as a kind of guidebook to the fifty-three post stations of the Tōkaidō, supporting the travel and tourism boom of the Edo period.
Poetry
Haiku—brief poems of seventeen syllables in a 5-7-5 pattern that have become Japan’s most characteristic form of poetry—emerged during the Edo period as an unpretentious form of verse that could be enjoyed and composed by commoners. Classical waka poetry had evolved into a stale, rule-bound form, judged mainly by its ability to allude to the famous poems of past imperial anthologies and limited to a handful of themes and images. During the Sengoku period, a poetic practice known as linked verse (renga)—in which groups of poets took turns composing stanzas linked to the preceding verse through wit, wordplay, or metaphor, according to a set of rules—gained popularity. There were two types of renga practiced by separate groups during Sengoku: serious (ushin), composed in the high-minded classical tradition by the learned; and comic (haikai no renga), which involved simple verses, often bawdy or celebrating crude behavior, composed by the commoners as a kind of game, resulting in works that were hundreds and sometimes thousands of lines long. The following example is a famous pair of comic links:
Bitter, bitter it was
And yet somehow funny.
Even when
My father lay dying
I went on farting.6
Here, the first poet expresses a conflicted emotion, which the second illustrates by juxtaposing the sadness and solemnity of loss with the inability to control bodily functions. Scatological jokes were frequently found in Edo commoner verse and fiction alike.
The short opening verse of a comic renga developed into its own complete form, known as senryū if it was comic verse or as haiku if it was more serious. Senryū were frequently cynical or contained black humor, as in these three examples:
‘She may have only one eye
But it’s a pretty one’
Says the go-between.
After he’s scolded
His wife too much,
He cooks the rice.
The laundryman—
By his neighbors’
Grubbiness he lives.7
Unquestionably, the master of the more serious haiku form is Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), who renounced his samurai status to become a master and teacher of linked verse to pupils from all walks of life. Bashō wrote the following haiku, among the most well known in the world:
Ancient pond
A frog jumps in
Sound of water.
Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto.
Bashō dressed and lived like a monk, although he never took formal Buddhist vows. He believed that the true poets of the past rejected worldly ambition and embraced simple poverty, so he himself attempted to live this way, moving from the central Edo district of Ueno to a small cottage in the city’s outskirts. Although he might have preferred a solitary life, like that of the medieval hermit Kamo no Chōmei, he was a master and teacher of linked verse, which required working closely with groups of poets. He adopted the name Bashō, a type of nonfruiting banana tree, after a disciple presented him with one as a gift.
The haiku master began embarking on a series of long journeys in 1684. These were difficult pilgrimages, often over remote roads that held many dangers. Many poets had died conducting such travels over the centuries. Bashō’s masterwork, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, combines verse and travelogue in a record of his 156-day, fifteen-hundred-mile journey into Japan’s northern interior. Most of the trip was completed on foot, but horses and boats were used on occasion. He set off in early 1689 in homage to the late-Heian-era poet-monk Saigyō, to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of his death. Bashō wished to visit all of the places Saigyō noted in his poetry, in order to reinvigorate his own work. Narrow Road opens with the following passage: “The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. From the earliest times there have always been some who perished along the road. Still I have always been drawn by windblown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering.”8
During the journey, Bashō filled his notebooks with observations. It took him several years after returning to Edo to rework these into a slim volume, the masterpiece that emerged as Narrow Road. Each entry consists of lyrical observations about the place visited or events that happened there, followed by a haiku verse related to the emotions or ambience evoked by them. One celebrated section describes Hiraizumi, the home of a powerful branch of the Fujiwara family who, during the late Heian era, built a large capital, with a population of more than a hundred thousand, near the northern barrier of the realm. Hiraizumi (Izumi Castle in the excerpt below) was said to rival Kyoto in its size and splendor; its mountaintop temple complex, Chūsonji, was filled with golden treasure halls and elegant gardens. After the fall of the Fujiwara, the city fell into obscurity and its impressive buildings and sophisticated reputation rapidly decayed. The entry is suffused with a Buddhist sense of impermanence; it juxtaposes the transience of humans, their institutions, and their reputations with the raw, regenerative power of nature:
Here three generations of the Fujiwara clan passed as though in a dream. The great outer gates lay in ruins. Where Hidehira’s manor stood, rice fields grew. Only Mount Kinkei remained. I climbed the hill where Yoshitsune died; I saw the Kitakami, a broad stream flowing down through the Nambu Plain, the Koromo River circling Izumi Castle below the hill before joining the Kitakami. The ancient ruins of Yasuhira—from the end of the Golden Era—lie out beyond the Koromo Barrier, where they stood guard against the Ainu people. The faithful elite remained bound to the castle—for all their valor, reduced to ordinary grass. Tu Fu wrote:
The whole country devastated
only mountains and rivers remain.
In springtime, at the ruined castle,
The grass is always green.
We sat for a while, our hats for a seat, seeing it all through tears.
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams9
Bashō never wrote a theory of poetry, although many of his pupils later recollected his teachings in their own writings. He taught that the poetic spirit of good haiku must embody both change and permanence. It should transcend time and space in maintaining the artistic aims of the best poets of the past, but must always strive for freshness and novelty to prevent the ossification seen in classical waka verse. Along Bashō’s immortalized route today, large stone monuments mark the sites of his observations, each inscribed with the poem he composed about that place.
Woodblock Prints
Pictures of the floating world, or ukiyo-e, were another important and popular aspect of Edo’s print culture. Rather than religious art or the classical-style painting of the Kano and Tosa schools, which focused on birds and flowers, ukiyo-e focused on new subjects such as scenes from daily life and leisure, especially the courtesans of the pleasure quarters and popular Kabuki actors. With these prints, human figures became central, not incidental, to the picture.
In some ways, these prints were like the Internet of the Edo period, a new technology that provided ordinary people with a source of the latest news and gossip on popular culture—who was hot and who was not. Another similarity between ukiyo-e and the Internet is that both served as a primary mechanism for distributing pornography. Graphic depictions of sexual acts, known as shunga (spring pictures), were collected in “pillow books.” Even the most renowned artists produced these popular erotic prints. Woodblock prints could be made cheaply, quickly, and in large production runs and thus were able to respond rapidly to emerging fashions. The large print runs made them affordable for many, unlike unique works of art. They were sold in publishers’ shops and by street peddlers. Consumers used them for interior décor or collected them in albums or boxes.
Paintings that captured the interests of urban commoners were available in Kyoto in the late sixteenth century, followed by woodblock prints of these subjects. Early Genroku works were printed in black and white, then colored by hand. In the 1730s, print makers began using two colors, generally rose and green. Edo printmakers gained their own recognizable identity in this medium in the 1760s when they mastered the techniques for full-color prints and began achieving predominance over Kyoto competitors. Edo prints depicted local tastes: Kabuki actors were depicted in the masculine aragoto roles favored by theatergoers, and the works contained more humor and satire than the softer products of Kyoto artists.
FIGURE 33. Hishikawa Moronobu, Street Scene in Yoshiwara, seventeenth century. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
To make full-color prints, the engraver carved a block of wood for each color, sometimes using both sides to save on production costs. There were two crucial tasks: to carve the color blocks in exactly the correct place and to align each color block with the basic black-and-white print so that it received the added color precisely where intended. The printmaking process was a collaborative enterprise. Unlike our conception of a single artist-creator, a publisher initiated the design idea for a print and commissioned an artist to produce a rendition of the final work. Copyists, wood-carvers, and printers were then needed to reproduce that rendition in large runs, usually of two hundred in the eighteenth century, and of a thousand or more during the nineteenth. Prints came in two standard sizes, around fifteen by ten inches (ōban) or ten-and-a-half by eight inches (chūban). Over time, however, prints appeared in diverse sizes and shape for different functions such as fans, scrolls, triptychs, calendars, and New Year’s cards.
Hishikawa Moronobu (1618–94), the son of an embroiderer, studied art in both the Kano and Tosa schools of painting. Considered the “father” of ukiyo-e, he was among the first to make prints outside of book illustrations and to sign his work. Moronobu’s work ranged from complex compositions painted on byōbu screens—illustrating, for example, the workings of the Kabuki theater—to series of risqué black-and-white line drawings showing lovers in progressive states of undress. It was rare to see lovers completely naked in shunga, echoing the classical Heian notion that the unclothed human body was “without charm.”
From early in the history of ukiyo-e, artists depicted Kabuki actors, in response to consumer interest. Actor prints were initially colored in orange and employed techniques called “gourd legs” and “earthworm lines” that allowed artists to exaggerate the muscles of the actors’ legs in order to suggest strength. Torii Kiyonobu (1664–1729), one of Moronobu’s students, developed a reputation for prints that were focused on a single famous actor in a masculine aragoto role. He also produced billboards and flyers for the Kabuki theater, and the school he founded continues to play this important promotional role.
The popularization of nishiki-e, or “brocade pictures”—prints using ten or more colors—is often associated with the artist Suzuki Harunobu (1725–70). Harunobu was the first to consistently use more than three colors in each print. He also used a thicker, more opaque application of paint and experimented with better woods for the woodblocks, using cherry instead of catalpa. Little is known of his life, but during its last five years he produced at least a thousand different works. His style and techniques were widely imitated by others after his death. Harunobu’s prints were lyrical and romantic, with men and women both depicted androgynously as slender, fragile figures whose expressions suggested a kind of innocent elegance. His favorite subjects were not professional courtesans but other local beauties, who worked in teahouses or shops, often engaging in everyday activities. Like many of his contemporaries, Harunobu sometimes drew upon themes in classical art but changed the setting to contemporary Edo. For example, in a series of prints based on works by famous Heian poets, one print inscribes a well-known poem in the upper portion:
Gazing over the capital
Green willow threads entwine
Soft red cherry blossoms
As if the Heian capital
Had spread a spring brocade.
FIGURE 34. Suzuki Harunobu, Night Rain at the Double-Shelf Stand, 1766, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
In Harunobu’s illustration, two fashionably dressed young women reenact the poem in Edo, suggesting that this new world of urban culture had superseded the ancient capital as the center of style.
In the 1780s, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) became known for his daring new portraits of beautiful women. Kabuki actor prints frequently focused on just the head and upper half of their subject; Utamaro applied this style to women, enabling him to capture differences in the characters and temperaments of women of different social backgrounds and to lavish attention on their elaborate hairstyles and ornaments. Rather than using generic facial expressions, his individualized subjects could convey their emotional states, from passion to exhaustion. Utamaro included clever devices to allow glimpses of the faces of women, through transparent fabrics or, more famously, by using mirrors to reflect the expression of women with their backs turned to the viewer.
One of his contemporaries, Tōshūsai Sharaku (a pseudonym), was probably the source of Utamaro’s inspiration for close-up portraits of women. Sharaku rose meteorically from obscurity in 1794 and abruptly disappeared ten months later. We know neither his true name nor the dates of his birth and death. In the short period he was active, he produced around 140 prints and became known for producing “big head” prints that captured an actor’s facial expression during a climactic Kabuki scene. Rather than idealizing Kabuki performers, Sharaku depicted them truthfully, with their unflattering features, such as large noses or wrinkles, intact. Actors playing female roles (onnagata) were clearly revealed as men through their masculine features. The Edo public disliked Sharaku’s realism, which may account for his sudden disappearance, but later audiences appreciated the dynamism and energy in his work.
Later ukiyo-e reflects the social currents of the closing years of the shogun’s rule. Many artists began to incorporate European pictorial techniques and perspectives explained and depicted in Dutch texts. From around the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was an expansion of the audience for prints and a rapid increase in both the number of prints created and the quantity of copies printed. New genres, depicting landscapes and famous landmarks in Edo and beyond, accompanied the national passion for pilgrimage and tourism. Visitors to the capital eagerly purchased such prints as souvenirs. Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), known best for his landscapes, enjoyed a career that spanned more than seventy years and numerous styles. He painted actors and graceful women, famous historical scenes, and traditional birds and flowers. In 1812, he produced a sketchbook intended to teach students simple drawing techniques through whimsical drawings of scenes from everyday life. It became a best seller, and Hokusai produced fourteen additional volumes, known as Hokusai manga, on themes such as ghosts, animals, and Mount Fuji. His subsequent ukiyo-e series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, brought him even greater renown. The first and most famous print of the series is The Great Wave off Kanagawa, with foamy ocean waves framing a snow-capped Mount Fuji in the background. The series featured dramatic views of the mountain alone, in different conditions of light and weather, along with distant views of the peak foregrounded by other famous sites or by individuals engaging in a variety of activities.
FIGURE 35. Kitagawa Utamaro, Naniwa Okita Admiring Herself in a Mirror, 1790s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
FIGURE 36. Tōshūsai Sharaku, print of actor Osagawa Tsuneyo, 1794. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum.
FIGURE 37. Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, 1830s. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Utagawa Hiroshige, also known as Andō Hiroshige (1797–1858), rivals Hokusai as one of the greatest masters of ukiyo-e. Hiroshige came from a low-ranking samurai family that served in the Edo fire brigade. He studied painting with the Kano school and created many bird and flower prints. But like Hokusai, he is best known for his landscape prints. In 1832, Hiroshige participated in a daimyo’s sankin kōtai procession from Edo to Kyoto. The journey served as inspiration for his most famous work, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, issued the following year, with one illustration for each post station town. The serene, rural landscapes he depicted were highly popular; they became the best-selling ukiyo-e prints in history. Hiroshige followed up with The Sixty-Nine Stages of the Kisokaidō, depicting the stops on the more mountainous inland highway between the two capitals. Between 1856 and 1859, he issued the remarkable One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, depicting famous shrines, temples, gardens, and shops.
Ukiyo-e prints and other aspects of Japanese art and design began to influence European and American artists when Japan opened to trade with other nations in the 1850s (see chapter 8). Japanese textiles, ceramics, cloisonné enamels, and bronzes were immediately popular with collectors abroad. Ukiyo-e, considered a cheap, lowly art of commoners, was not initially exported, but was “discovered” when a French artist found that his shipment of Japanese porcelain was wrapped in a copy of Hokusai manga. Parisian shops that sold Japanese goods began carrying ukiyo-e prints, and renowned artists were among their most avid fans and collectors. Ukiyo-e’s strong colors and compositional freedom inspired Impressionist masters such as Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas. Vincent Van Gogh owned a large collection of prints and imitated their vibrant tones, unusual perspectives, and motifs. His painting Japonaiserie: Flowering Plum Tree is a copy of Hiroshige’s Plum Park in Kameido; his Le Père Tanguy depicts the proprietor of an art supply shop against a background of six ukiyo-e prints. American painter James McNeill Whistler also collected ukiyo-e and frequently incorporated kimonos, folding screens, fans, and other Japanese items into his works. Beyond painting, famous architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, examined prints for the structures depicted and emulated their restrained use of natural materials, texture, and light and shadow, and their avoidance of excessive ornamentation.
THEATER CULTURE
A second major arena of urban culture, supported and promoted by the development of print, is the theater. There are three extant forms of traditional Japanese drama: Nō (see chapter 4), Kabuki, and Bunraku. Nō became popular among medieval warrior and courtier elites and continued to be appreciated by refined clientele during the Edo period. Bunraku and Kabuki, however, held the most appeal for urban townsfolk. The theatrical district and the pleasure quarters were the two areas designated by the bakufu for the amusement of lowly commoners, but over time they came to represent the quintessence of Japanese traditional culture.
Bunraku
The earliest references to puppetry in Japan date from the eleventh century, discussing itinerant bands of entertainers who performed plays with small hand puppets and engaged in prostitution. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, chanted narratives from The Tale of the Heike, performed by blind bards who accompanied themselves on the lute, became popular. A new style of chanting emerged with the importation of the shamisen, a three-stringed, banjo-like instrument, from Okinawa. The arts of puppetry and stylized chanting (jōruri) to shamisen accompaniment were merged in Bunraku. The puppet theater reached its heyday in the late seventeenth century in Kyoto and Osaka, under the auspices of great chanters such as Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1714), who founded his own theater in Osaka, and the most talented dramatist of his day, Chikamatsu Monzaemon.
Bunraku performance is a composite of three elements. First are the puppets and their operators. Puppets acquired new technical features beginning in 1727, such as prehensile hands and movable eyelids and mouths. They later developed movable eyeballs and eyebrows, allowing a much wider range of expression. The two-thirds life-size puppets operated by three men were introduced in 1734. The puppets are not manipulated with strings; the main operator (omozukai) works the facial features and the right arm while two assistants manipulate the left arm and the legs, respectively. Female puppets have no legs because a kimono conceals the lower body; movement is simulated by manipulating the costume. Assistant puppeteers usually wear a hooded black uniform to become “invisible” to the audience, but the omozukai wears ceremonial dress and remains unmasked, because he is the master practitioner. The second element of Bunraku is the chanter. A single chanter speaks for all the puppet characters on the stage—men, women, and children—so his voice must cover a broad range, from a high falsetto to a gruff bass. Finally, there is the musical accompaniment provided by the shamisen player, who dictates the pace of the narrative; both the chanter and puppet operators must synchronize with his rhythms.
Bunraku transformed into truly artistic theater when its plays acquired dramatic sophistication. Chikamatsu, who came from a family of rōnin and turned to writing drama because he had few financial prospects, lifted Bunraku to new heights. He drew upon classical tales, poetry, and story lines from Nō drama, using their imagery and literary techniques to write plays about both historical subjects (jidaimono) and contemporary society (sewamono). His best-known historical play, The Battles of Coxinga, staged in 1715, is based loosely on the life of a young pirate with a Chinese father and Japanese mother who battles to help the Ming dynasty repel Manchurian invaders. It was so popular that it ran for seventeen months, rather than the usual month. Contemporary domestic dramas tended to emphasize the struggle between townspeoples’ duties and obligations (giri) and their human emotions and passions (ninjō). Two of Chikamatsu’s most popular plays, described below, deal with “love suicides” (shinjū) in which a pair of lovers, unable to resolve the conflict between their social duties and their romantic attachment to one another, agree to end their lives together. Such double suicides were a new phenomenon that acquired social notoriety in the late seventeenth century. Although the bakufu outlawed this behavior and prohibited its discussion in books and plays, townspeople clamored for the stories. Chikamatsu took advantage of this interest, staging fictionalized accounts of incidents just months after their occurrence. His two sewamono masterpieces, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703) and The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721), both involve relationships between merchants and women of the pleasure quarters.
FIGURE 38. Bunraku performance. Courtesy of JNTO.
In the first of these plays, Ohatsu, a courtesan from Osaka, has fallen in love with Tokubei, a soy sauce salesman who had earlier agreed to marry the daughter of his employer and accepted an advance from the cash dowry. Tokubei, a kind but rather foolish character, loaned the money to his villanous friend Kuheiji, a rival for the courtesan’s affections. Because of his romance with Ohatsu, Tokubei is no longer willing to wed his betrothed and asks Kuheiji to repay the sum so that he can return it to his boss, but the villain denies receiving any money and further accuses Tokubei of forging his seal on the debt document. Ohatsu fears that Kuheiji will use the loan to buy out her contract and claim her. Neither of the lovers can face the future—Ohatsu despondent over a future with Kuheiji, and Tokubei unable to live up to his obligations to his employer. In a famous scene at the teahouse where Ohatsu works, Tokubei hides from Kuheiji under her kimono robes. He signals his willingness to die together by secretly taking Ohatsu’s foot and drawing it across his neck. The lovers decide to end their lives that evening, in the woods near Sonezaki Shrine, where a pine tree and palm tree grow from a single trunk. Gazing at the heavens, they vow to be husband and wife for eternity before Tokubei cuts their throats with a razor.
The plot of The Love Suicides at Amijima is somewhat more complex. Jihei, a paper merchant, is in love with the courtesan Koharu, but he cannot afford to buy her release from a brothel. To resolve their dilemma, the lovers vow to die together before a wealthy, obnoxious merchant named Tahei can claim her. One night Koharu reveals her pact with Jihei to a samurai customer and begs him to redeem her before the fated suicide. Jihei, eavesdropping outside, becomes furious that she plans to betray him and plunges a dagger through the paper door, trying to kill his lover, but he is seized by the samurai, who then reveals himself to be Jihei’s brother Magoemon in disguise. Magoemon has staged this charade to prove Koharu’s fickleness and bring Jihei to his senses, urging him to attend to his family and business.
The second act opens in Jihei’s paper shop, where his wife, Osan, announces that Magoemon and his aunt (who is her mother) are planning to visit, concerned over gossip that a merchant was going to redeem Koharu. Jihei swears a sacred oath that he has forsaken Koharu, and his relatives depart, but Jihei weeps bitterly over the loss of his lover to the loathsome Tahei. Worried that Koharu will now kill herself to avoid an abhorrent fate, Osan pawns her own kimono to raise funds to rescue Koharu, but when this plan is thwarted, Jihei and Koharu escape together, beginning their journey toward death. As the lovers cross the two bridges across the stage, the chorus chants:
Poor creatures, though they would discover today their destiny in the Sutra of Cause and Effect, tomorrow the gossip of the world will scatter like blossoms the scandal of Kamiya Jihei’s love suicide, and carved in cherrywood, his story to the last detail will be printed in illustrated sheets. Jihei, led on by the spirit of death . . . is resigned to this punishment for neglect of his trade. But at times—who could blame him?—his heart is drawn to those he has left behind, and it is hard to keep walking on. Even in the full moon’s light . . . he cannot see his way ahead—a sign perhaps of the darkness in his heart? The frost now falling will melt by dawn, but even more quickly than this symbol of human frailty, the lovers themselves will melt away. . . .10
Finally the lovers stop at a temple in Amijima, where they decide to commit their double suicide. During the final scenes, they each cut off their hair, claiming to become a Buddhist monk and nun who have no remaining obligations to society. Jihei stabs his lover and hangs himself in a nearby tree.
The plays of Chikamatsu represent the zenith of Bunraku; after the mid-eighteenth century, it was gradually overshadowed by Kabuki and went into decline. Today it survives largely through national government support. Few young artists are willing to endure the long apprentice period, which requires ten years of training each on the legs and arms of the puppet before one is allowed to become the main operator.
Kabuki
Kabuki, the theater of human actors rather than puppets, shared much in common with its dramatic predecessors, Nō and Bunraku: all three drew upon classics such as The Tale of Genji and The Tale of the Heike for their plotlines; all involved elaborate costumes; and each was considered a spectacle, more from the realm of fantasy than reality. As in Nō, dance played a central part in most Kabuki plays. It is perhaps closer to Bunraku, however, because both developed within the same urban milieu for the same commoner audiences. Like Bunraku, Kabuki staged both jidaimono and sewamono productions: the former allowed swashbuckling aragoto performances and the latter concerned the contemporary lives of shopkeepers, prostitutes, and other ordinary people, allowing urban audiences to view their own lived experiences on stage. Kabuki contained the same tensions between duty and desire featured in the plays of the puppet theater.
Kabuki was also deeply intertwined with the pleasure quarters. The denizens of both quarters—actors, prostitutes, musicians, and other entertainers—were official outcastes, whom the bakufu believed had to be confined and controlled. Nevertheless, the stars of the two quarters, top Kabuki actors and reigning courtesans, were the toast of urban society, models of fashion and style, and objects of titillating gossip. The intensity of fan culture surrounding both actors and courtesans helps account for Kabuki’s ascendance over Bunraku; few fans could develop erotic or sentimental attachments to the inanimate puppets, who never behaved scandalously off stage. Authorities designated officially licensed areas of major cities to contain these two populations and their fans. In Kyoto, theaters for Kabuki, Bunraku, and storytelling were centered around the Shijō area. Other amusements were clustered nearby, including the same kinds of sideshows and spectacles found at Edo’s Sensōji Temple. In Edo, the first theater was licensed in 1624, but the designated area for theaters was moved to different locations on the periphery of commoners’ quarters.
Kabuki is said to have originated in the early seventeenth century when an itinerant female dancer called Okuni performed burlesque dances and skits at a riverbed in Kyoto. The term is derived from the verb kabuku (to tilt, behave oddly, or dress strangely). Okuni daringly performed dressed as a man and wore foreign styles like brocade trousers, animal-skin jackets, and even a large Christian cross. Other times, she danced in a gorgeous, feminine kimono with a male partner. Her success was imitated by troupes of prostitutes, including many men, and soon Kabuki performances were inseparable from the practice of prostitution. In 1629 the authorities banned women from the stage; they were replaced with attractive young men who played women’s roles (forerunners of the onnagata discussed below) and continued to sideline as prostitutes. To dampen the rise of homosexual prostitution, authorities closed Kabuki theaters in 1652. Facing ruin, theater owners agreed to strict control over the behavior of their actors, whereupon the authorities allowed the theaters to reopen and present yarō (young fellows’) Kabuki. Officials required that the young male actors shave their foreheads in the mature masculine fashion, rather than keeping the long bangs that were considered erotic. The actors responded by covering their bald pates with kerchiefs of dark purple silk to simulate lustrous hair.
By the eighteenth century, the kerchiefs were replaced with elaborate wigs, and those actors specializing in female roles evolved the art of the onnagata, creating a stylized repertoire of gestures and speech believed to represent an idealized femininity. They aimed not for transgender realism but for an exaggerated, fantasy portrayal of feminine grace, beauty, and mannerisms to parallel the exaggerated macho style and bombast of the aragoto roles. Onnagata actors of the time usually led female lives off stage, dressing in fashionable kimonos, coiffing themselves with female hairstyles, and even using the women’s side of public bathhouses. Many Edo-period onnagata continued to have paid sexual relations, with male and female patrons alike. Note, however, that the majority of onnagata actors today do not lead transgender lives and often have heteronormative relationships and families.
The aragoto actors of male roles were generally the biggest stars of Kabuki and developed reputations for their romantic exploits, especially among the courtesans of the pleasure quarters. Their clothing, accessories, mannerisms, and speech were widely copied by their fans. The biggest stars earned fortunes from acting fees and from sales of products they endorsed, such as cosmetics, fans, and textiles. One, Ichikawa Yaozō II, noted for his portrayal of Sukeroku (described below), earned money selling water—in a climactic scene, his character hides in a water barrel to escape. Yaozō’s female fans bought and sometimes consumed the barrel water, bottled after the show. Despite their outcaste status, leading actors and onnagata lived as luxuriously as daimyo, in mansions with legions of attendants. They made extravagant demands, like some top movie stars today who insist that their dressing rooms contain expensive delicacies or designer waters. Actor Sakata Tōjūrō refused to wear clothing once it had been washed and insisted that each grain of rice he ate was individually inspected before cooking, so that there were no small pebbles that could damage his teeth. Fans idolized and indulged their heroes.
Theater architectural features enhanced the sense of intimacy between the actors and their audiences. In its earliest days, the theater was a small, covered stage surrounded by a simple enclosure, which paying customers entered. By the late seventeenth century, the largest Kabuki theaters, like Edo’s Nakamura-za, seated over a thousand, squeezing box seats and galleries into every inch of a relatively small space so that, for many spectators, actors were literally within reach. A stage feature called the hanamichi, a runway extending from the stage to the rear of the audience, allowed featured actors to move through the audience for dramatic entrances and exits. Audiences participated in the performances by shouting appreciation for a skillfully delivered line or pose, or by heckling poor actors as “daikon”—stiff, tasteless radishes. Fan clubs, often formed from members of a given trade, sat together in the theater in identical outfits, cheering on their favorites with clapping routines and songs. These groups often adopted the responsibility for supplying the theater or actors with designated gifts, from stage curtains to key props.
Most fans were familiar with their favorite actors’ stock roles. Leading actors often selected a collection of canonic plays as their standard repertoire. The best known of these collections is Ichikawa Danjūrō VII’s (1791–1859), known as the Eighteen Best Kabuki Plays (Jūhachiban). The Ichikawa acting lineage owns the rights to perform these plays to this day. One of these, Kanjinchō, is a masterpiece of the historical genre, based on the Nō play Ataka, about the great warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune’s attempt to escape from his brother Yoritomo, founder of the Kamakura bakufu, who had ordered his death. Kurosawa Akira’s film The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945) is partly based on this Kabuki play.
In Kanjinchō, Yoshitsune, his follower Benkei, and a small party have donned the distinctive costume of mountain ascetics associated with esoteric Buddhism (yamabushi) and pretend to be traveling in order to raise funds for repairs to Tōdaiji Temple in Nara. Warned to watch for Yoshitsune in disguise, the warrior Togashi Saemon stops the party at a barrier gate. Benkei instructs his master to pretend to be a porter while he takes charge of the interaction. The suspicious Togashi tests Benkei to see if he is a genuine priest, asking him to explain Buddhist scriptures and questioning him about symbolic aspects of his yamabushi costume. A former yamabushi himself, Benkei answers with ease, but when Togashi demands that he produce a kanjinchō, a subscription scroll listing the names of donors to the Tōdaiji campaign, he must improvise. In a famous moment in Kabuki, Benkei pulls out a blank scroll and begins reading from it as if it were a real list. Togashi catches a glimpse of the blank paper but is impressed by Benkei’s courage and decides to let the party pass. Yoshitsune is on the verge of escape, but one of Togashi’s guards spies him and calls out. To deflect suspicion, Benkei begins beating and berating the disguised Yoshitsune for bringing their party such troubles; he tells Togashi that he will kill the porter on the spot. Such behavior by a retainer toward his master is unimaginable, but Togashi sees through the ruse. He decides to allow them to pass, moved by Benkei’s unthinkable actions out of devotion to Yoshitsune. Once past the barrier, Benkei breaks into tears, apologizing to Yoshitsune for his behavior. In the final scene, Benkei exits, performing a famous dance along the hanamichi.
FIGURE 39. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Ichikawa Danjūrō IX as Masashibō Benkei in Kanjinchō, nineteenth century, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
FIGURE 40. Toyohara Kunichika, Nakamura Shikan as Hige no Ikyu, Ichikawa Danjuro IX as Hanakawado Sukeroku and Nakamura Fukusuke as Miuraya no Agemaki in the play Edo zakura, nineteenth century. Courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design.
A second masterpiece from the classic repertoire is Sukeroku, a story that takes place in Edo’s Yoshiwara pleasure quarters and illustrates the latter’s rich culture of courtesans and the male connoisseurs known as tsū. Sukeroku is a gallant but street-tough samurai, the preferred companion of the stunning Agemaki, top courtesan of the Miura-ya teahouse, whose elaborate wig and hair ornaments are unparalleled. He is a charming and fashionable rake, known for his expensive purple headband and for picking fights with others. In truth, Sukeroku is the samurai Soga no Gorō, who seeks to avenge the death of his father. By provoking others into drawing their weapons, he will be able to identify the villain, who has stolen his family’s heirloom sword. Another samurai, Ikyū, a wealthy but nasty elderly man with a long white beard, worships Agemaki and is one of her best clients. During one of their visits, he condemns Sukeroku as a thief, and Agemaki responds by refusing to see him again.
When Sukeroku enters the quarter, jauntily twirling his trademark bullseye-patterned parasol, he is surrounded by women who admire him and offer him gifts. He makes a famous speech about being the best fighter and lover alive. When Ikyū’s retainers attack Sukeroku, he easily bests them, then challenges Ikyū to draw his own sword, but the old man refuses, saying it is too precious to be spoiled by the blood of a thief. He actually knows Sukeroku’s true identity and later calls him out, condemning him for playing the man-about-town when his duty was to avenge his father. During this speech, Ikyū draws his sword to make a point but soon realizes his mistake. The sword identifies him as the murderer and he quickly departs. The play ends with Sukeroku’s resolve to attack Ikyū and retrieve the sword.
THE PLEASURE QUARTERS
As we’ve seen, the pleasure quarters were in many ways the heart of ukiyo culture and the main subject of its novels, plays, and woodblock prints. The shogunate, always trying to restrain wasteful recreational excess, enacted measures to control the businesses of commercial sex and erotica. Brothel activity was confined to licensed quarters, surrounded by walls, with a single gateway to control passage. The quarters also contained teahouses and parlors for drinking and dining, where musicians, dancers, and jesters could be summoned for entertainment and where assignations between courtesans and their clients occurred. Courtesans and prostitutes were indentured to houses, where they lived, and were forbidden to exit the gates of the quarter unless redeemed by a wealthy patron. In Edo the pleasure quarters were established in 1617 and known as Yoshiwara, home to as many as six thousand female sex workers. In Osaka the pleasure quarters were called Shinmachi (founded in 1624), and in Kyoto they were known as Shimabara (founded in 1640). In these areas, wealthy spendthrifts held lavish parties day and night in the company of elaborately adorned courtesans and troupes of entertainers and attendants. Prostitution was never fully contained within the licensed quarters; large numbers of male and female sex workers plied their trade wherever possible—in bathhouses, on the streets, and in unregulated areas.
The pleasure quarters were not bound by the same class conventions and restrictions as normal Edo society. Samurai had to surrender their swords on entering the quarter. Here, money was the great equalizer and the sole criterion for receiving favored treatment. Merchants could dare to compete with daimyo for the favors of the highest-ranking courtesans. Indeed, wealthy merchants were usually more popular, because of their lavish spending in comparison to upper-class samurai who were constrained by the Confucian ethic of frugality and moderation. Samurai were discouraged, and daimyo officially barred, from visiting the quarter, but many could not resist. They disguised themselves, hiding under wide-brimmed hats that concealed their faces.
In addition to their renowned beauty, the upper ranks of courtesans usually possessed a high level of cultivation, needed to attract and retain the interest of the wealthy sophisticates who were their customers. They were adept at poetry, painting, and a host of other genteel arts. Like their Kabuki-actor counterparts, these women were trendsetters, their styles of clothing and accessories dictating new fashions and cultural trends. The highest courtesan rank was tayū. An association of the quarter’s experienced residents, teahouse and brothel proprietors, and official supervisors determined who was promoted to this rank. Beauty, intelligence, cultural refinement, deportment, and earning power were the main criteria for tayū status. According to one document, the criteria for tayū rank were as follows: “Her eyes should be a little large, with dominant black pupils. Eyebrows should be close together, on the smoky side. The face should have the shape of a melon seed. . . . Fingers and toes should have delicate nails, fingers tapered and supple and double jointed hands are good. . . . The top of the head should be flat and not pointed.”11 Unacceptable features included a low bottom, droopy eyes, buckteeth, kinky hair, and bowed legs.
The most important possessions of the tayū and other courtesans were their ornate kimonos, made of fine silks embroidered with intricate patterns, brilliant brocades, and textured satins, and their elaborate hair ornaments. Tayū advertised themselves via processions, elaborate parades to the teahouse where they would rendezvous with their clients. In these processions, courtesans wore their finest apparel, usually of original design, and walked very slowly, accompanied by girl attendants in matching dress. A top-ranking courtesan stepped in a distinctive figure-eight pattern, arranging her clothing so that her red undergarment would flip open to reveal a flash of white ankle or calf. It was rumored that when men witnessed this sight, they went insane and spent all their money in attempts to meet with her. Over time, the processions became more ostentatious, with increasingly ornate headwear, higher footwear, and a larger number of attendants who carried long-handled parasols, lanterns, and the tayū’s smoking set.
Tayū had stringent standards of behavior, including not touching money, not eating in front of clients, and never speaking vulgarly. In turn, they were protected by an elaborate protocol that did not permit a client to achieve his desire until his third appointment. Unlike common prostitutes, tayū had the power to reject new or unattractive clients. If a regular client two-timed her with another courtesan, he could be captured and punished, commonly by cutting off his topknot, a shameful condition that required a visit to a toupee specialist before appearing in public.
The cost of a tayū for one visit was around $600 by today’s standards, but clients were also expected to pay for entertainers, food, and drink and to tip lavishly, so that the overall cost ran to several thousand dollars. Well-mannered Edokko who tipped nine times the cost of the visit knew to place the tip in an inconspicuous place, rather than drawing attention to their own generosity. Only the wealthiest merchants and samurai could afford such extravagance. Many men were ruined through debt incurred to finance such visits. Tayū were sometimes called “castle topplers” (keisei) for their ability to impoverish their daimyo admirers. On the other hand, courtesans faced heavy financial pressures to maintain their glamour and their entourage and were always hopelessly in debt to their houses. Each had a daily quota to meet, which she would have to pay herself if she missed a day’s work for any reason, even illness or a death in the family.
The male counterpart to the tayū in the pleasure quarters was the tsū, discussed earlier—a man-about-town, of elegant sophistication and savoir faire, who embodied the spirits of iki and hari. His ideal characteristics were generosity, courtesy, consideration, intelligence, wit, candor, refinement, and urbanity. He dabbled in painting, poetry, song, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and calligraphy. Negative appraisals of tsū condemned them as dandies and dilettantes, yet all men who frequented the pleasure quarters, samurai and commoner alike, aspired to this status. In the eighteenth century, sharebon books instructing readers on how to become tsū were especially popular. The Kabuki hero Sukeroku’s sophisticated appearance, behavior, and impeccable tastes represent the ideal aesthetic consciousness of Edokko men.
Female geisha, professional entertainers who danced and played the three-stringed shamisen, began to appear in the quarters during the 1770s. Until that time, all musicians in the quarter were male. The female geisha’s hairstyle was less elaborate than that of courtesans; her kimono was less ornate, a plain monochrome with crests and a white collar. Geisha prided themselves on their simple beauty and the artistry of their music and dance, the source of their livelihood. This did not mean that they did not engage in paid sex, which remained a common practice among entertainers of all kinds, but this was not integral to their occupation. Over time, geisha began to eclipse the courtesans themselves.
Reflecting on women’s lives in the quarters, there are generally two different interpretations. Some observers see women who led miserable lives, sold into indentured sex work by their fathers or husbands, heavily guarded and unable to escape. Courtesans and prostitutes suffered frequently from venereal and other diseases, and most died in their twenties. Others, however, celebrate the women of the quarter as among the most free and powerful women in urban society—trendsetters able to earn their own disposable income who evaded the heavy burdens of raising families and managing households. In any case, it is important to realize that the sex trade varied widely by location and changed significantly throughout the course of the Edo period.
THE RURAL PERIPHERY
Rural inhabitants were able to gain glimpses of Edo’s rich urban culture through traveling Kabuki and geisha troupes or through their own pilgrimages to the capital. Nevertheless, the lives of the peasantry remained more insular and static than those of their urban counterparts. The traditional Tokugawa village community was relatively autonomous. As long as taxes were paid and order maintained, the authorities left the elders and village headmen to run things their way. In many ways, rural peasant women were freer than their urban sisters. They were considered important working members of the family, not only contributing labor in the fields alongside male relatives but managing the household. Peasant women also had greater autonomy in their personal relationships: virginity at marriage was not expected, as it was among the samurai class, and they could more easily obtain divorces and return to their natal families than the “borrowed womb” brides of samurai.
Most rural protests were brought on by the authorities’ efforts to squeeze more money from the peasantry through higher taxes on land or local products. Protests might also be sparked by excessive demands for free labor on construction projects or as porters along the major highways. The majority of Tokugawa-era peasant protests were nonviolent and had little “revolutionary” content—that is, they were not designed to secure basic changes in governance or social structure, but instead sought jinsei (benevolence) from samurai rulers, such as reduction of taxes in times of famine or drought. The sacrificial figures who petitioned the authorities were known as gimin (virtuous men), and the tales of their heroism would be celebrated in stories and songs for generations. The quintessential gimin was Sakura Sōgorō (1605–53). As a village headman, he petitioned the daimyo of his domain to reduce the heavy tax load that brought suffering to his neighbors. Unsuccessful in his plea, he went to Edo and presented a direct appeal to the shogun, an action punishable by death. His petition was granted, but he and his family were executed.
In the eighteenth century, however, there was a change in the nature and composition of peasant protest. No longer simple appeals to the authorities by village headmen, they grew larger and more violent, involving thousands of peasants across several domains. Such protests spiked in periods of natural disaster, crop failure, and famine, and huge waves of protests occurred in the 1780s, 1830s, and 1860s. In addition, protests were increasingly aimed not only at government authorities, but at merchants and wealthy members of rural communities for excessive rents, loan-sharking, and other exploitative practices.
In 1867, as opposition to the shogunate swelled, a yearlong wave of carnivalesque riots swept villages over a wide swath of central and western Japan, the densely populated heartland from Hiroshima to Yokohama. They were kicked off by the seemingly miraculous descent of paper talismans (ofudafuri) of shrines and temples from the sky. Food riots, rent riots, and farm uprisings also peaked in 1867, after several years of bad harvests. In the face of this chaos, the people believed that the falling talismans were signals of the start of yonaoshi, a kind of millennial world renewal, and celebrated by dancing and singing in the streets, dressing up in absurd costumes, cross-dressing, or just plain running around naked. Dancers in huge crowds barged into houses and businesses demanding that the occupants join them. They coerced the wealthy in their communities to supply food, drink, and entertainment. Their songs had the refrain ee ja nai ka, or “What the hell! It’s all OK!” In total the phenomenon involved hundreds of thousands of ordinary people over a nine-month period. Movements would emerge in one area, then evaporate several days later, only to emerge in another village. While this may seem an unconventional form of protest, the dancing and singing masses aimed to achieve world renewal, a cleansing away of evil and an ushering-in of utopia—semireligious ideas with political implications. Their activities clogged the main highways, paralyzed commercial neighborhoods and city centers, interrupted farming, and obstructed official business and traffic at a crucial moment in history, contributing to the chaos that surrounded the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate.
In summary, many cultural developments of the Edo period reflected the interests of urban commoners, rather than their samurai or courtier superiors. Townspeople eagerly consumed the affordable products of a rapidly developing print industry, including a wide array of book types, from satirical novels to reference works to travel guides, alongside mass-produced woodblock prints depicting their favorite actors or courtesans or famous landscapes. They attended Kabuki and Bunraku plays that retold beloved tales of the past or reflected their own everyday struggles. Despite the strict class divisions, men of all ranks began to admire male gender ideals depicted in popular culture—including generosity, stylish refinement, and a spirit of resistance that sometimes clashed with official ideology. During the ensuing Meiji period, many class restrictions would be legally abolished, but many gaps in lifestyle and opportunity—between classes, between genders, and especially between urban and rural residents—would persist.
FURTHER READING
Berry, Mary E. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Gundry, David J. Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017.
Guth, Christine. Art of Edo Japan: The Artist and the City, 1615–1868. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
Ikegami, Eiko. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Matsunosuke, Nishiyama. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1997.
Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Screech, Timon. Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan 1700–1820, 2nd ed. London: Reaktion Books, 2009.
Seigle, Cecilia S. Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1993.
Shimazaki, Satoko. Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Stanley, Amy. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Walthall, Anne. Peasant Uprisings in Japan: A Critical Anthology of Peasant Histories. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Yonemoto, Marcia. Mapping Early Modern Japan Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603–1868. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
RECOMMENDED FILMS
An Actor’s Revenge. 1963. Feature film directed by Ichikawa Kon. Tale of an onnagata actor who takes revenge against those responsible for the deaths of his parents.
Double Suicide. 1969. Feature film directed by Masahiro Shinoda. Adaptation of Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Amijima that blends Bunraku theater traditions with live action.
Eijanaika. 1981. Feature film directed by Imamura Shōhei. Fictional story of the turmoil and revelry among urban commoners on the eve of the Meiji Restoration.
Miss Hokusai. 2015. Animated film directed by Hara Keiichi. Fictionalized account of the daughter of Katsushika Hokusai, herself a gifted artist, based on a popular manga series.
The Life of Oharu. 1952. Feature film directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. Adaptation of Saikaku’s novel The Life of an Amorous Woman.
Utamaro and His Five Women. 1946. Feature film directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. Fictionalized account of the life of artist Utamaro by an iconic director.