The history of sex workers in Japan traces the social position, institutional management, and changing circumstances of women who made sexual service their trade. From the ancient ritual of sex and fertility, through the early-modern pleasure-quarter system, the modern licensed system, the postwar Anti-Prostitution Law, and today’s sex industry, the form has changed greatly with the times.

Ancient and medieval: the sacred and the secular

In ancient Japan, women who mediated sex were sometimes tied to religious and magical contexts; some readings find an element of sexual service among women serving in kagura and shrine rites, taken as a prototype of the later yujo. In the Heian period, women called asobime, who offered arts and sexual entertainment, travelled the waterways of the Yodo and other rivers and served aristocrats and warriors. In the medieval period, women who combined performance and sexual service, such as the shirabyoshi, gathered around post stations, ports, and religious sites, forming the seed of the “pleasure place.”

Early modern: the licensed-quarter system

The Edo-period pleasure-quarter system institutionalised the sale of sex as “managed prostitution in licensed places.” Yoshiwara, established in Edo in 1617, became the model for later licensed quarters. Quarters were set up in castle and post towns across the country, and an internal system of ranks developed, from the keisei and oiran down through the houses of assignation.

In most cases the women were sold from impoverished rural families under indenture, working under debt bondage in which the purchase price was not repaid until the contract expired. The higher-ranking courtesans developed their own culture, arts, and quarter dialect, becoming a kind of subculture that strongly influenced Edo culture.

Modern: the licensed system and the abolition movement

The Meiji government’s 1872 Emancipation Edict for Performers and Prostitutes professed to forbid the sale of persons, but licensed prostitution continued in substance under the name of “leased rooms.” Registered women were positioned as licensed prostitutes subject to compulsory medical inspection, tying the trade to the management of syphilis and other infections under a form of “hygienically managed sex sale.”

From the late Meiji through the Taisho and early Showa years, an abolition movement developed. Christian organisations and abolition leagues argued that licensed prostitution was state-sanctioned human trafficking, and campaigns to abolish it were waged across the country. Some prefectures achieved abolition in the 1920s and 1930s, but no national abolition was reached before the war.

Postwar: the occupation and the Anti-Prostitution Law

After the Second World War, during the occupation, the Recreation and Amusement Association set up “comfort facilities for occupation troops” under the lead of the Japanese government. GHQ intervention then set abolition of licensed prostitution as policy, but prostitution in the “red-line” districts continued under effective toleration.

The 1956 Anti-Prostitution Law, fully effective in 1958, abolished the red-line and blue-line districts and made prostitution illegal in law. In practice, various forms of the sex industry, such as soaplands and fashion-health shops, continued and developed by working through the law’s loopholes. Today’s sex industry operates in a form held to fall nominally outside the scope of the Anti-Prostitution Law.

See also

• Yoshiwara
• Sex-industry worker (fuzoku-jo)
• Anti-Prostitution Law
• Soapland