Iro-otoko and iro-onna are Japanese cultural archetypes combining physical beauty with romantic skill. They were institutionalised as role types of the lover in Edo-period puppet theatre and kabuki, matured in tandem with stage conventions such as the nimaime (handsome lead) and the young female-role actor, and were fixed as visual and literary norms through Ihara Saikaku, the domestic plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and the actor prints of the ukiyo-e masters, carrying on into the romantic protagonists of modern popular fiction, film, television, and tabloid press.

Overview

The iro-otoko and iro-onna denote not merely good-looking people but a type understood as the whole of conduct and cultivation: bearing in the scene of love, taste in dress, manner of speech, and the delicacy of reading the other’s feelings. The word iro points at once to the appearance of the loved object and to the sensibility of the one who appreciates it, so the iro-otoko and iro-onna were conceived both as objects seen and as subjects equipped with the eye to see. Scholarship on the pleasure quarters stresses that iro in early-modern Japan worked not as bare sexual appeal but as an aesthetic category crossing performance, literature, and dress.

The concept of iro

Iro anciently denoted appearance, colour, and the feeling between man and woman together; the Manyoshu uses it for both love-feeling and appearance, undifferentiated. In the Heian period the iro-gonomi was not a mere lecher but a person of refined sensibility to the seasons and to things, with Hikaru Genji as the model, combining beauty, cultivation, poetic and musical skill, and feeling for the subtleties of love, the prototype of the later iro-otoko. In the early-modern period, with works such as Fujimoto Kizan’s Shikido Okagami (1678), iro was systematised as a “way” carrying arts, etiquette, and cultivation centred on the quarters, and the iro-otoko and iro-onna were typed across literature, stage, and painting as embodiments of its ideal.

Lover roles in puppet theatre and kabuki

In kabuki role classification, the convention of calling the lead the “first board,” the young handsome lover the nimaime (second board), and the clown the “third board” is said to have formed as a billboard order in the Kamigata theatres of the late early-modern period. The nimaime, also called the gentle man, took the delicate wagoto (soft style) as the base of his movement, against the bold aragoto of the lead. The Kamigata wagoto of the first Sakata Tojuro (1647–1709) became the standard for later nimaime, reproduced through the Edo period as the young master visiting the quarters, the townsman driven to love-suicide, and the actor pledged to a courtesan.

Female roles were taken by the young female-role actor, forming the typical stage image of the iro-onna. The treatise Ayamegusa, transmitted as the dictation of the first Yoshizawa Ayame (1673–1729), taught that the female-role actor should live as a woman even in daily life, showing that embodying the iro-onna was understood as a bodily discipline beyond mere acting.

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) brought the domestic puppet play to its height with the iro-otoko and iro-onna at the centre. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703), The Love Suicides at Amijima (1720), and The Courier for Hell (1711) all show a merchant’s young master and a quarter courtesan driven, between the house system and love, to suicide and ruin. These protagonists were drawn not as mere beauties but as embodiments of iro suffering between duty and feeling, the object of mass identification.

Saikaku’s amorous man and woman

Ihara Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Man (1682) established the iro-otoko in literature. Its hero Yonosuke spends his life from age seven to sixty on love; the figures of women and youths he is said to have known are recorded as exaggerated totals, read not as realism but as the symbolic extreme of the townsman ideal. What made Yonosuke new was the joining of the aristocratic iro-gonomi lineage with townsman economic sense and practical ability. The Life of an Amorous Woman (1686) depicts the splendour and fall of the iro-onna as a one-life chronicle, compressing the range of sexual labour a woman might pass through, drawn not as a mere beauty but as a subject running her own iro as an economic and social resource. In Nanshoku Okagami (1687), Saikaku took both warrior male love and townsman youth-love as material, showing that the range of the iro-otoko was not limited to the heterosexual.

The iro-otoko in ukiyo-e

The actor prints of ukiyo-e spread the stage nimaime to commoners as a visual norm. The Torii-school prints took in the nimaime image, running through Katsukawa Shunsho’s likeness prints to the extreme exaggeration of Toshusai Sharaku, whose 28 large-head actor prints, published by Tsutaya Juzaburo in 1794, are now valued as a summit of the genre. Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865) fixed the late-Edo nimaime image visually across an enormous output, rendering the leading actors of the day down to the loosening of the collar and the angle of the gaze as the conduct of iro. The iro-onna image developed through the beauty prints of Suzuki Harunobu, Torii Kiyonaga, and Kitagawa Utamaro, whose large-head beauties drew the iro-onna as a being with an inner life rather than a mere object of the gaze.

Modern continuation

Meiji and Taisho popular fiction carried on the iro-otoko while joining it to modern ideas of love. Postwar Japanese film and television produced a line of “handsome-lead actors,” holding direct genealogical continuity with the kabuki nimaime while translating the image into modern urban romance. The “trendy dramas” of the late 1980s and 1990s reproduced the type in contemporary manners. Weekly magazines and tabloids are a main present-day engine for reproducing the iro-otoko image, with words such as “ladies’ man” and “playboy” used of celebrities, reproducing the Yonosuke figure in modern manners; such discourse also carries the risk of intruding on private life and causing secondary harm. In girls’ manga, romance games, and bishoujo media, the capturable target characters of otome games can be read as a modern variation on the nimaime and young female-role image, occupying a position functionally corresponding to the actor and beauty prints of the early-modern era.

Significance

The iro-otoko and iro-onna show that early-modern Japanese love and sex were conceived not as bare physiology but as an aesthetic category crossing performance, literature, painting, and dress. That beauty was understood as one with conduct, cultivation, and taste, that the type extended beyond the heterosexual to male love, and that the figures were conceived as subjects as well as objects, all reflect the character of early-modern Japanese sexual culture. The type survived social change by changing medium, forming a long line from the young-master image of kabuki to the protagonist image of modern drama.

See also

• Edo-period sexual culture
• Ukiyo-e
• Shunga
• Bishoujo