The sensuality of traditional Japanese culture culminated in the middle decades of the long Tokugawa Shogunate, (1603–1868) which is also known as the Edo period, after the great Edo Castle where the shogun lived and held court.
The more affluent men of this period had access to a variety and volume of sexual activity that has probably never been surpassed on a nationwide basis in any other country, before or since. (The shoguns themselves had huge harems.)
The Edo period also saw the rise of the geisha, the heyday of sanctioned red-light districts (the “floating worlds” of Japanese literature), hot baths featuring the sensual services of young women, and a vast national network of inns that also functioned as houses of assignation.
Perhaps the best-known of the institutionalized purveyors of sensual pleasure were the geisha, who began as part entertainers, part prostitutes, and never escaped the reputation, whether deserved or not.
Within several decades after their first appearance and recognition as a specific class of entertainers, the geisha were organized. Girls recruited into the ranks, sometimes as young as nine or ten, were put through years of rigorous schooling in the art of entertaining men, including on-the-job training as dancers, singers, and players of the shamisen.
All geisha were sexually available to patrons in one way or another, but generally speaking, the higher class geisha did not work on a nightly or regular basis as prostitutes. They were expected to develop intimate relationships with favored patrons, however, and might have several in serial fashion. Less attractive geisha were often forced into semi-prostitution by their masters.
By the time Japan’s last great shogunate was beginning to break up in the mid–1800s, the more beautiful and successful geisha were held in high esteem and were often taken as wives by successful men. Virtually all leading statesmen, politicians, and businessmen of this period had geisha mistresses, and this practice continued until World War II.
But it was the great red-light districts of the Edo period that set the tone for much of urban life in Japan from the late 1600s until the 1950s. Every town and city had one or more pleasure quarters. The most famous of all was Tokyo’s Yoshiwara, which was known as the “Nightless City,” and was the impetus and center for much of the cultural activity that flourished during this period.
This huge district, with its high walls, formidable gates, and lantern-festooned streets, attracted sword-carrying samurai, merchants, priests in disguise, artists, writers, gamblers, sumo wrestlers, and others.
The Yoshiwara and the hundreds of other larger red-light districts had their own protocol and laws that were strictly enforced. A special language made up of a unique vocabulary and mode of expression developed within this “floating world.”
There was a popular saying in Japan during this period that there could be no better fortune than to be a man and live in Edo.
Just as important and perhaps even more conspicuous in Japan’s dedication to sexual release during the long, mostly peaceful Tokugawa Shogunate was the great chain of inns linking the country—inns that came about because of one of the most extraordinary political phenomena in the history of any nation.
When Iemitsu Tokugawa, grandson of Ieyasu Tokugawa, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, became shogun in the 1630s he established a political control system known as Sankin Kotai (Sahn-keen Koh-tie), under which some 250 of the nation’s 270 fief lords, known as daimyo (die-m’yoh) or “Great Names,” were required to build mansions in Edo, keep their families there at all times, and themselves spend every other year in the capital in attendance at the shogun’s court.
This meant that every other year, each clan lord, along with a specifically prescribed retinue of samurai warriors, retainers, servants, and so forth, had to travel by foot from his domain to Edo, stopping each night along the way, and then return along the same route one year later. Those lords whose fiefs were in western Honshu and far-off Kyushu were therefore on the road for several weeks on each trip.
When the lord of the Maeda clan, the largest and richest of the fiefdoms, traveled to Edo his procession numbered approximately 10,000. One can imagine the sight and impact of this huge column of distinctly uniformed warriors and retainers as it passed through villages and towns along the way, stopping each night at a cluster of inns. (The Maeda lord maintained four mansions in Edo during the nearly 250 years this system remained in effect.)
As a result of this strictly enforced shogunate edict, the greatest network of traveler accommodations the world had ever seen sprang up almost overnight along the great walking roads that led to Edo from all over the country.
As the years of the Edo period rolled by, these huge “Processions of the Lords” were joined on Japan’s roads by an increasing number of private and official travelers— messengers going to and from the shogun’s castle and the Imperial Court in Kyoto as well as to the 270 clan headquarters, peddlers selling wares, merchants on business trips, gamblers, entertainers, ordinary people on religious pilgrimages, masterless samurai, and itinerant priests.
The larger of these roadside inns provided all the services male travelers normally expected—hot baths, food, bed, and female partners—there being no social or political sanctions against commercial sex. In fact, during this amazing period it was officially accepted as a matter of course that men away from home should not be deprived of regular sexual release.
Thus it came about that Japan, with its geisha, red-light districts, and extraordinary system of travelers’ inns, came closer perhaps than any other country to providing sanctioned, institutionalized sexual outlets for a big percentage of its male population.
Of course, this was a system based absolutely on the chauvinistic attitude that men have sexual needs and women do not—or at least that the needs of women are not important enough to be given serious consideration.
Japanese men neatly sidestepped any moral dilemma by clearly distinguishing between ordinary women who did not engage in premarital or extramarital sex and those who did. Those who did were known as “public women.”
This term generally applied to any woman who worked outside of her home, but particularly to those who worked in the entertainment, food, beverage, and accommodation industries, which eventually came to be known as the mizu shobai (mee-zoo show-bye) or the “water business.”
About the only consolation Japanese women as a group might have had over the long centuries of their history is that some of them worked outside of their homes and were therefore eligible to exercise their sexuality—albeit not always when they wanted to or how they wanted to.
But the women of Japan were to have their day!