Sexuality in Meiji-era Japan is the whole of sexual commerce, sexual expression, marriage institutions, and bodily norms developed in Japan from 1868 to 1912. It denotes the transitional state in which the traditional quarter culture inherited from the Edo period was reorganised through contact with Western modern law, hygiene, Christian ethics, and publishing capitalism. This article centres on the modern building of the licensed prostitution system from the 1872 emancipation edict, the rise of unlicensed-bar and private prostitution, the emergence of the abolition movement, venereal-disease control by modern medicine, the establishment of modern family law, and the popularisation of sexual expression through magazine media.

Overview

Meiji sexuality presents a layered structure in the transition from the early-modern to the modern. The early-modern quarter system was reorganised under a changed legal form as the licensed prostitution system. Outside the designated districts, businesses styled “unlicensed bars” (meishuya) and their attendant women expanded rapidly in the cities. An abolition movement backed by Christian groups and a Supreme Court ruling rose, bringing women’s bodily self-determination into public space. The introduction of German hygiene organised the control of syphilis and gonorrhoea as a state enterprise, with isolation facilities established. The Meiji civil code (effective 1898) established the modern patriarchal “house” family, whose ideology governed sexual norms. And the spread of letterpress printing and the expansion of newspapers and magazines mass-produced sexual representation, from playful early-modern forms to sexual depiction in the modern novel and the popular “soft” magazines.

Historical development

The Maria Luz incident and the emancipation edict (1872)

The starting point was the Maria Luz incident of June 1872. When Japan ruled to free the abused Chinese coolies aboard the Peruvian-registered ship at Yokohama, the Peruvian side retorted that Japan held its courtesans and geisha in the same bodily confinement. Under international criticism, the government issued the emancipation edict (Grand Council Edict No. 295) in October, banning human trafficking and voiding indenture contracts. The Ministry of Justice the next month set rules permitting operators to continue under the guise of “renting rooms,” and prostitutes were redefined as independent operators acting by their own will while remaining under the masters’ control through advance-loan bondage, the origin of the double character of the Meiji licensed system: formal emancipation alongside continued de facto confinement by economic bondage.

Building the room-renting rules (1873-1900)

From 1873 the prefectures individually enacted room-renting and prostitute rules, and the early-modern quarters were largely re-authorised as licensed room-renting districts. Yoshiwara, Shimabara, Shinmachi, Ise-Furuichi, and Nagasaki’s Maruyama are representative. From the 1880s, new districts were authorised in cities, ports, and railway towns; the licensed system was transplanted to the naval ports of Kure, Sasebo, and Maizuru and to the colonies and semi-colonies of Hokkaido, Taiwan (annexed 1895), and the Kwantung Leased Territory (leased 1905).

The control rules (1900)

On 2 October 1900, Home Ministry Ordinance No. 44 issued the Prostitute Control Rules, unifying prostitute management nationwide with registration, an age limit of eighteen, periodic venereal examination, residence within the district, and the institutionalisation of free withdrawal. Details are left to the article on the licensed prostitution system. The same February, the Supreme Court held the advance-loan contracts void as contrary to public order and recognised withdrawal by the woman’s own will, the legal base of the abolition movement.

Derived forms

The unlicensed bar and the rise of private prostitution

In Meiji cities, especially Tokyo’s Asakusa, Tamanoi, Kameido, and Susaki, and Kansai’s Matsushima and Tobita, businesses called “unlicensed bars” (meishuya) spread rapidly: nominally drinking shops with sake casks at the entrance, they kept women upstairs to provide sexual service under the pretext of drinking. Operating outside the designated districts as unauthorised businesses, they could open simply by registering as eating shops, and the police, while policing them, effectively tolerated them for reasons of tax, labour demand, and male in-migration. Beyond the unlicensed bars, varied private-prostitution forms, tea-serving women, archery-stall women, the maids of assignation houses, and geisha (nominally sellers of art but sometimes linked to prostitution), existed at the urban margins, absorbing the demand of men who could not enter the licensed districts.

The military and sexual custom

The Meiji government built a modern army through conscription and the imperial constitution. The military treated venereal-disease control of its troops as a key task and set “military-designated” room-renting districts near garrisons. Through the Sino-Japanese, Russo-Japanese, and First World wars, the institutional bond between army and sexual custom deepened, the prehistory of the later “comfort station” system. Venereal examination and treatment by military physicians were organised after the German army’s hygiene system, with isolation wards set up across the country.

Cultural references

The introduction of hygiene and venereal-disease control

The Meiji government introduced German hygiene through the Home Ministry’s sanitary bureau (founded 1875), inviting Erwin von Baelz to the Tokyo medical school and laying the basis of modern medicine and hygiene. Control of venereal disease (the “flower-and-willow disease”) was a core public-health task, with examination and isolation facilities attached to the designated districts. Weekly or twice-weekly examination of public prostitutes was compulsory under the control rules, and positive cases were forcibly confined; the examination targeted only the prostitutes, not the clients. Feminist criticism problematised this asymmetric structure that made only the female body an object of control as a “double standard.”

Modern family law and sexual norms

The Meiji civil code, effective in 1898, legally established the modern patriarchal “house” family. Household-head authority, succession, the right to consent to marriage, and the husband’s guardianship over the wife were set down, and women’s legal status was made subordinate to husband and household head. In sexual norms, the offence of adultery (criminal code article 183, 1907) punished only the wife’s infidelity and ignored the husband’s, legislating a double standard; the article was abolished in 1947. While the modern ideal of “good wife, wise mother” spread through women’s magazines and ethics textbooks, men’s visits to the quarters were tolerated as a sign of “capability.” Sexual custom functioned not as the opposite of the modern family but as its complement.

The abolition movement and Christianity

From the 1880s, an abolition movement centred on Christian groups emerged, with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (founded 1886), the Salvation Army (arrived 1895), and the abolition league (founded 1893) as representative bodies. Through their journals they criticised the human-rights violations of the licensed system and supported free withdrawal. Local assemblies passed abolition resolutions, but the Home Ministry maintained the system as policy, and national abolition awaited the 1946 GHQ memorandum.

Magazine media and sexual expression

The Meiji period saw the rapid expansion of letterpress printing, newspapers, and magazines, greatly changing the circulation of sexual expression. Edo-period shunga was driven from public distribution by the publication, newspaper, and obscenity laws and went underground. In its place came the popular “soft” magazines; the literary magazines mass-produced sexual expression through flower-and-willow and popular fiction, and by the late Meiji period general magazines debated the quarters and abolition, bringing sexual custom into the discourse of the intellectual class. In literary history, Higuchi Ichiyo’s Takekurabe (1895-96) depicted a girl near Yoshiwara, Nagai Kafu’s early work took the unlicensed bar and prostitute as subjects, and Mori Ogai’s Vita Sexualis (1909) was a landmark in describing sexual development from a medical viewpoint.

The influx of Western gender views

The Meiji period saw the parallel influx of varied Western gender and sexual values: Victorian British sexual abstinence, German hygienic body management, French love fiction, and American Christian temperance and abolition. Mutually contradictory, they served as plural reference systems composing modern Japanese discourse on sex. The translation-word ren’ai (romantic love) took hold in the 1880s, and through works such as Kitamura Tokoku’s essay on the pessimist poet and women (1892) a modern conception of love distinct from the early-modern “passion” was established, functioning as the ideal of intellectual men at a distance from the mainstream of sexual custom and preparing the lineage of later pure-literature naturalism.

Historiographical points

Recent scholarship raises several points. On the continuity and rupture of early-modern and modern, Fujime Yuki and Amy Stanley have shown empirically how the early-modern indenture system connected directly to the modern licensed system. On gender and the state, Fujino Yutaka calls the organisation of sexual commerce as a state apparatus the “state management of sex,” a central point in the formation of the modern nation-state. On the triangle of colony, army, and sexual custom, comfort-women research argues that the licensed system built in the Meiji period forms the prehistory of the later wartime system. And on the relation of media and capitalism to sexual representation, the Meiji mass production of sexual representation in magazines, newspapers, and novels is being re-examined as the origin of present-day sexual-expression media.

See also

• Licensed prostitution system
• Yoshiwara
• Kuruwa (pleasure quarter)
• Shunga
• Kasutori magazines
• History of venereal disease