Halfway up a hill overlooking the port of Nagasaki, at the top of a stone-paved slope, the place-name “Maruyama-machi” is carved into a townscape of tiled roofs. In the Edo period this quarter flourished alongside Kyoto’s Shimabara and Edo’s Yoshiwara as one of the three great quarters, and it functioned as an international entertainment hub, dispatching courtesans to the Dutch of Dejima, the country’s sole window on overseas trade, and to the Chinese of the Tojin-yashiki residence. No other quarter held both Japanese and foreign clients at once.

The Maruyama pleasure quarter (丸山遊郭) was the shogunate-licensed quarter of Edo-period Nagasaki, in the towns of Maruyama and Yoriai. From its designation in 1642 (Kan’ei 19) until the Meiji reorganisation of the quarters, it carried Nagasaki’s sex trade and entertainment culture for roughly 230 years. This article treats its formation, the dispatch system to Dejima and the Tojin-yashiki, its cultural character, and its rise and decline.

Formation

Nagasaki developed rapidly as a base of the Nanban trade after Portuguese ships began calling in 1571. To gather the courtesan houses scattered through the city into one place, the Nagasaki magistrate Baba Toshishige set up the two towns of Maruyama and Yoriai on a height on the south side of the city as a designated quarter in 1642. This was the quarter’s origin. The motive lay in both moral control of the city and meeting the entertainment demand of incoming visitors, the retainers of western daimyo, trading merchants, and sailors. Nagasaki was a shogunate-direct domain, and placing the quarter under the magistrate’s office was administratively rational. At its height in the Genroku and Kyoho eras (late seventeenth to early eighteenth century), Maruyama and Yoriai together held more than sixty rendezvous and dispatch houses, with a courtesan total said to exceed 1,400.

Dispatch to Dejima and the Tojin-yashiki

Maruyama’s greatest feature was the system of dispatching courtesans to Dejima and the Tojin-yashiki. Under the closed-country regime, Dutch factory staff and Chinese merchants were strictly confined to their compounds. For these long-staying foreigners, the magistrate’s office arranged to dispatch courtesans of the Maruyama quarter.

Courtesans for the Dutch were called Oranda-yuki and those for the Chinese Tojin-yuki; separate lines of courtesans were dispatched and could not serve both. At the gates of Dejima and the Tojin-yashiki, officials checked the courtesan’s identity and belongings before she stayed in the foreign residence for periods of days to months. The fee was paid by the foreign side to the quarter and managed by the magistrate’s office. When a courtesan bore a child by a foreign client, the child was raised as Japanese on the courtesan’s side; mixed-blood children often became interpreters, supplying personnel who supported Nagasaki’s foreign negotiation.

The diaries of Dutch factory chiefs and the records of the Tojin-yashiki preserve many accounts of staff who formed long relationships with Maruyama courtesans. The factory physician Kaempfer (in post 1690-1692), the factory official Titsingh, and Siebold (1823-1829) and his lover “O-Taki” are cases that can be traced in detail through the sources.

Cultural character

Maruyama mixed the Kamigata culture modelled on Kyoto’s Shimabara, the Kanto culture of Edo’s Yoshiwara, and Nagasaki’s own foreign taste into a distinctive milieu. Its arts centred on the Kyoto-style drum, shamisen, and dance, and some courtesans could handle Chinese pronunciation or a smattering of Dutch, abilities specialised for foreign clients. Imported goods filled the dress and furnishings: glass cups, coloured ceramics, silk chintz, and fans bearing Dutch lettering gave the Maruyama rooms an exotic air found in no other quarter. Ihara Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Man (1682) depicts the hero amusing himself at Maruyama and introduces, with curiosity, the topic of “courtesans who keep company with foreigners.”

Rise and decline

In the first half of the nineteenth century, as Qing and Dutch trade volume shrank, Maruyama’s scale gradually declined. After the opening of the country and the opening of Yokohama in 1859, Nagasaki’s relative standing as a trade base fell, and foreign-client demand dispersed to shops near the new foreign settlement. The 1872 emancipation edict nominally freed the courtesans, but Maruyama and Yoriai were reorganised as licensed room-renting districts and continued in business until the 1958 Anti-Prostitution Law ended them. The present towns of Maruyama and Yoriai retain stone-paved lanes and old building remains, which Nagasaki is preserving and developing as quarter heritage. The restaurant Kagetsu (the former Hikitaya) maintains an eighteenth-century building and continues in business as a working restaurant.

See also

• Yoshiwara
• Okabasho
• Kuruwa (pleasure quarter)
• Licensed prostitution system
• Edo-period sexual culture