In the letter to his granddaughter, Uesugi addressed the fear of some brides of facing and enduring the emotional strain of moving into a new household. Among these anxieties was the fear of a weakened relationship with her own parents. Uesugi assured his granddaughter that her parents’ happiness was in her hands. “Your father and mother will undoubtedly be happy and content in their hearts if they see upon your marriage into another household that you look after your parents-in-law, affectionately tend to your husband, and prosper with children.”20 In comforting language, he expressed the essentials of fertility as a sexual value: obedience to and identity with one’s husband and his parents and, hopefully, the begetting of children for the continuation of the household. Obedience in marriage was the anchoring link in a chain of acquiescence: obedience to one’s parents, to one’s parents-in-law, to the need of the husband’s household for descendants, and to the reverence of ancestors. A contemporary of Uesugi, Yashiro Hirokata (1758—1841), put the matter of linked obedience succinctly: “When we state the purpose of marriage, it is to consider with great care the ancestors, to do one’s filial duty to parents, and to have descendants for inheritance.”21 While a young man found himself tied to the same expectations as a husband, Tokugawa social structure placed the burden of commitment on the woman and her role as a wife. The virilocal marriage system, which the prose of Yashiro assumes, was culturally normative by the Tokugawa period. A bride’s move, however, was not simply a change of locale, but a change in mind, body, and soul. In mind she would place her loyalties with her husband’s family; in body she would provide children as household heirs; in soul she would join her husband’s ancestors and be worshiped as one of them by the children she brought into the world. The multiple avenues of obedience a bride walked when she entered her husband’s home served to reorient her total being: her identity as a person, the value of her body, and the state of her soul.
Pleasure also envisaged its model woman. In describing the ideal courtesan in his 1682 novel, The Life of an Amorous Man (Koshoku ichidai otoko), Saikaku pens a conversation between the protagonist and friends pertaining to qualities a woman of rank must possess. They agree she must not only be physically attractive, but must also be accomplished in the arts of pleasing men and entrancing them with her talent and charm.
Such talents include holding her liquor well, singing prettily, being accomplished on the koto and samisen, graceful penmanship, accomplished hostess skills, a generous and self-sacrificing nature, and possession of deep compassion and sympathy.22 Pleasure as a sexual value centered around satisfying men with a playful spirit, talent, and a confident, engaging personality. Satisfaction was not limited to sexual gratification, but included exciting all facets of the senses, including emotions and aesthetics.23 In fact, Saikaku’s fictional conversationalists deem accomplishment in sexual acts merely one talent among many for a courtesan. As a value, pleasure conveyed a principle of sensuous play toward men rather than simply advocating sex with men. The 1720 edition of Who’s Who Among Courtesans (Yujo hyobanki), which is a contemporary description of popular prostitutes, expresses well this ideal of sensuous play. It describes one young woman, Otowa, as musically accomplished, able to hold her liquor as well as any man, and an excellent hostess brimming with charm and elegance.24
While obedience to a single male lay at the heart of fertility, pleasure demanded sensuous play with many men, thus requiring a courtesan to keep her feelings in check with regards to any one man. Masuho captured this ludic demand for pleasure when he argued that love, be it ever pure, is not suited to the role of the courtesan and her place in a quarter. The economic logic of prostitution required a woman to avoid offering real love to any one man, instead offering herself in playful love to several men. However, the pleasure value went further, stipulating that each client must remain an exclusive partner (najimi) of the courtesan with whom he had begun a relationship. Within the quarters there was a reverse ethic of obedience and monogamy. Although this reversal was a form of play, play in the quarters was serious business. It was a major economic enterprise and had a profound effect on Japan’s cultural development in literature and art. Moreover, for a woman participating in this play, it was a serious commitment of her total self. Like her wifely counterpart, who had to orient herself to her new household, a woman moving into a quarter was also expected to reorient her mind, body, and soul. In mind she would place her loyalty in securing the prosperity of the house holding her contract; in body she would offer pleasure to numerous men; in soul she would participate in the celebratory ritual events of the quarter that linked her and her occupation to a sacred reality serving the worldly benefits of her walled-off community.
Advocates of fertility and pleasure put forward more than “values to live by.” They promoted values of obedience and play as necessary to secure meaningful positions in the world women joined as either wives or courtesans. People do not simply have values; they act out values every day of their lives in concrete situations. Both fertility and pleasure recognized the importance of performed behaviors as critical in establishing values; each sought to incorporate behavioral patterns for women to use in guiding their actions with other people. Fertility advocated a behavior pattern steeped in modesty, attentiveness, and self-control for a woman who would develop her relationship with one man and his family. Pleasure emphasized an alluring, strong, and sophisticated spirit that would develop a woman’s relationship with as many men as possible.
Vocabulary from the period reflects these different patterns of behavior. The exemplar of jokun, The Greater Learning for Women (Onna dai-gaku), represents well the liberal use of specific vocabulary to describe ideal female actions most fitting to the household.25 Conspicuous examples appearing throughout this study are tsutsushimi and tashinami. These terms incorporate notions of modesty, humility, self-control, prudence, and social refinement. The Greater Learning for Women makes clear the affinity between these qualities and obedience to one’s husband.
A wife must think of her husband as her lord and look up to him with humility (tsutsushite). She must not make light of him. As a rule, the way of a woman is to follow people. In contrast to the husband, she should be docile in her facial expression, use of words, and in being politely humble; she should not falter in her endurance or be fickle in spirit. There must be no extravagance and unceremonious behavior. These things are the primary responsibilities of a woman. When a husband has something to teach his wife, she must not go against his teachings. When there is doubt in her mind concerning a matter, she should ask her husband and follow the advice he hands down. If he has something to ask his wife, she should answer clearly and correctly. To neglect answering is unceremonious. At times when he is angry, a wife must control herself and follow him. In a quarrel a wife must not go against her husband’s will. A woman regards her husband as heaven. So as not to invite the punishment of heaven a wife must be careful not to disobey her husband.26
Authors of jokun tied obedience to modesty, self-control, and a sense of feminine refinement. They also linked these behavioral qualities to a solid sense of ceremony. I have translated as “unceremonious” the Japanese term burei. Although customarily rendered as “discourteous” or “rude,” “unceremonious” captures the significance that fertility moralists placed on actions of modesty, discretion, and self-control. Opposite forms of conduct were not seen as unfortunate moments of rudeness, but as points of disjuncture between the individual and reality. It was not a break with reality in terms of simple existence, but rather with social reality as brought into existence through ceremonies. Traditionally in Japan there are three ceremonial occasions that most affect individual lives: recognition of adulthood, marriage, and the funeral. Collectively known as kankonsdsai (ceremonies of capping, marriage, and funeral), the term also implies any ceremony directed toward an individual rather than a collective body. Many of these ceremonies are meant to secure a space for the individual in an ordered community at a specific time in her life. That space holds meaning because it holds status, identity, and defined expectations of behavior. The writer of The Greater Learning for Women sought to diffuse ceremony from the exceptional moments into everyday behavior. He did this by defining obedience itself as ceremony and giving it the same function as ceremony: to create a space of social meaningfulness in a value-based community. Almost two centuries after The Greater Learning for Women, authors still expressed the idea of obedience as a form of ceremony. Egawa Tanan (1801—1855) wrote that the “way of respectful obedience is a woman’s most valuable ceremony (tai-rei).”27 Tairei (lit. “great ceremony”), which I render as “most valuable ceremony,” refers both to an emperor’s enthronement rites and to any ceremony, such as those among the kankonsdsai celebrations, that an individual deems as most important in her life. Burei in the fertility model implied immodest, self-centered behavior that broke the ceremony of obedience and risked displacing a woman from the meaningful space of social reality in her husband’s household that she had created through her marriage rites and modest behavior.
Divorce was the most obvious form of displacement from the meaningful space of marriage and the community of the virilocal household. In their idealization of marriage, fertility moralists adapted from China the list of seven conditions a husband could invoke to divorce his wife: being unfilial toward his parents, not bearing a child, lewd behavior, jealousy, major illness, talking too much or talking immodestly, and stealing.28 With the exception of illness and not bearing an heir, the conditions were tied to behavior that flagrantly challenged the ideals of modesty, self-control, and prudence. Childbirth was not unrelated to the question of obedience, either. With regards to the lack of an heir, The Greater Learning for Women includes a clause stating that if a wife’s heart is in the right place, if her behavior is good, and if she has no jealousy, then she should not be subject to divorce. Instead, the household should adopt an heir or take in a concubine rather than humiliate such a morally grounded woman with a divorce.29 Thus even in the idealization of fertility, certain realities of household life—primarily that childbirth was more anticipation than requirement and that a woman was judged less by commitment to motherhood than by commitment to a man and his household—come to light. The practice of obedient behavior and loyalty superseded all other concerns. Such behavior could even diminish the threat of losing one’s place in the household in the face of failure to give birth to an heir. Exercising obedience, then, acted as ceremony. In other words, it allowed a woman to practice a set of behavioral expectations to create a meaningful space of identity and status that could secure and protect her position even amidst circumstances beyond her control that could bring about her displacement.
Like fertility, pleasure had its own defining vocabulary. Spirit, allure, and urbanity best typified a courtesan’s comportment. These qualities are captured in the behavioral ideal called iki. Many scholars of Tokugawa urban culture, following Kuki Shuzo’s (1888—1941) influential study of the aesthetics of iki, have commented on this behavior pattern and its relation to the world of play.30 Seeing it, like Kuki, as a type of embodied aesthetic, these commentators have tended to examine iki as a cultural phenomenon originating in bustling cities among courtesans, dandies, artists, and entertainers—those most familiar with the quarters where iki was most intensively put on display. These commentators see iki as a property of historical culture and as possessing an objective quality open to structural examination, which has led to analyses that break it down into the smaller components of attitude and emotion, each with an equally independent and objective existence.31 Such focus, however, ignores iki as a socially constructed behavior pattern. As much as it may have developed as a product of the culture of the urban floating world, it was also something that bordello owners, courtesans, and their managers actively honed and marketed for the business of play. In this market iki was invaluable in establishing a woman as a successful courtesan both in relation to her clients and as a way to secure her own rank and profitability in the quarters.
Tokugawa literature, especially those examples topically related to the quarters, is replete with descriptions of courtesans and their comportment of style and sophistication suggestive of iki. A passage in Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Man (discussed earlier), is an excellent example. In the same scene mentioned above concerning a group of revelers discussing the traits of the ideal courtesan, the novel’s main character, Yonosuke, asks his merry band who, among the courtesans they have known and heard about, might fit such a description. They answer in a single voice: Yugiri. They continue,
To a customer intent on throwing away his life and reputation because of love for her, she explains to him the ethical duties of society and home that are his life outside the quarters. When a client is caught in scandal, she always thinks of something to erase it. To one lost in love for her, she persuades him to cut his ties to her. Without diffidence she states her opinions to men of rank. She makes a married client come to an understanding for the reason behind his wife’s jealousy of his dalliance. She even allows the fishmonger, Chobei, to take her hand into his, and she always speaks pleasantly to the green grocer, Gorohachi, which brings him so much happiness. Yugiri tosses no one aside.32
Yugiri (1654—1678) was a courtesan of Osaka’s Shinmachi. Although she died before the age of twenty-five, she had gained so much fame during her short life that later puppet plays (joruri) and the kabuki stage produced testimonies of her person and qualities.33 She was so important to her bordello owner, Ogiya Shirobei, that when he elected to move his establishment from the Shimabara to Osaka in 1672 he made sure to bring along Yugiri and her promising reputation of iki.34 As Saikaku’s band of bawdy brothers suggests, iki was a type of female idealization developed from and for the man’s perspective.35 And yet it was more than that. Ideal behavior is an act of modeling. When a courtesan molded her conduct to fit, as best she could, a model of communal excellence based on iki, she did far more than please men. She performed ceremony to create for herself meaningful space in the hierarchical social structure of the quarter. As obedience was construed as a “great ceremony,” which allowed a woman to make meaningful space in the household through displays of modesty and obedience, a comparable process was available to a woman in the floating world. By skillfully employing iki in her associations with men, she too participated in ceremony—the ceremony of play. In his classic study of play, Johan Huizinga stresses that play is voluntary and free. Once play becomes bound by obligations and duties, it becomes a “cultural function”—in other words, a rite, a ceremony.36 As play, a courtesan’s relations with men necessarily demanded behavior that was neither voluntary nor free. The idealization of iki stemming from male bias was really just one side of the dual nature of play practiced in the pleasure quarters. For men, enjoying a courtesan’s performance of iki was true play. They chose to play the game of sexual dalliance. For a courtesan, however, her performance of play was a duty. Her role required her to achieve an effective display of sophistication, compassion, and spirited discourse that men found alluring. The accomplishment of iki as the obligatory side of play made it a form of ceremony. As ceremony iki affected a woman’s standing in her bordello and among her clients and colleagues, which also had a direct effect on her livelihood. Skillful performance of the ceremony of play could secure a woman the meaningful space of status, identity, and success that the quarters made available.
World History
