Dusk in Fukagawa: cross the Eitai Bridge and a pleasure district opens where Tatsumi geisha pass with shamisen under their arms. There is no great gate or wall as at Yoshiwara, only small houses dressed as eating-teahouses lining the back lanes of the townhouse blocks. The customers are mostly artisans and middling merchants, and the rates are less than a tenth of Yoshiwara’s. The chic, plain-spoken air of the rooms, where one drinks beside geisha in mannish haori coats, held a charm of a different kind from Yoshiwara’s formality. The okabasho was the place where ordinary Edo townsfolk touched sex and pleasure as an extension of daily life.

Okabasho (岡場所) is the general term for the unauthorised prostitution districts that operated in Edo outside the shogunate-licensed Yoshiwara. The oka means “to the side” or “outside,” denoting “a place outside the authorised quarter.” Many okabasho formed at the city’s edges, in Fukagawa, Nezu, Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Itabashi, and Senju, and carried the popular sex trade for the townsman class.

Formation

The okabasho arose between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After the great fire of 1657, Yoshiwara moved to Asakusa Nihon-zutsumi and became New Yoshiwara, but its scale was insufficient for Edo’s growing population. To absorb the demand of townsmen and artisans who could not afford the expensive, formal Yoshiwara, small private-prostitution districts arose spontaneously around the city’s entertainment areas. The shogunate nominally maintained a licensed monopoly with “Yoshiwara as Edo’s only quarter,” but in practice it could not fully police the okabasho spreading through the city. From Yoshimune’s Kyoho reforms (from 1716) to Ieyoshi’s Tenpo reforms (1841), repeated raids and reductions were attempted, but demand and supply revived each time, and the okabasho persisted throughout the Edo period.

Principal okabasho

Fukagawa was the representative okabasho, developing around the gate towns of the Tomioka Hachiman shrine and Eitai temple. Operating in the guise of “teahouses” and “eating-teahouses,” it was the stage of the Tatsumi geisha (named for Fukagawa lying to the southeast, tatsumi, of Edo Castle), who combined the roles of geisha and prostitute. Known for a chic look of bare feet and a haori thrown over the shoulders, they embodied an aesthetic of iki in contrast to the splendour of the Yoshiwara courtesan. Kuki Shuzo’s The Structure of Iki (1930) placed the bearing of these Fukagawa geisha as one type of modern Japanese aesthetic sensibility.

Nezu spread at the gate of the Nezu shrine on the northern foot of the Hongo plateau, with samurai, scholars, and students as its core clientele owing to the nearby Shoheizaka academy. It continued as a quarter into the Meiji period before being ordered to move to Susaki (the later Susaki quarter) in 1888 as a supplement to New Yoshiwara.

The four Edo post stations of Shinagawa, Naito-Shinjuku, Itabashi, and Senju, as stages on the highways, held “meshimori-onna” (meal-serving women), nominally inn maids who in practice engaged in prostitution. Shinagawa, as the starting point of the Tokaido, boasted the largest scale, said at its peak to hold over a thousand meshimori-onna, forming a singular space where the formality of the official inns coexisted with okabasho-style pleasure spots.

Clientele and rates

The okabasho clientele centred on artisans, middling merchants, and samurai retainers who could not reach the formality and prices of Yoshiwara. Where a high-ranking Yoshiwara courtesan required around one ryo of gold for a night, the okabasho charged a few monme of silver (roughly several thousand to ten thousand yen in present terms). Varied forms of use were offered according to the customer’s purse, from the short-time chon-no-ma to banquets with geisha and long-standing relationships with regulars. The everyday quality of an artisan stopping after work to drink and talk with a woman was the true appeal of the okabasho.

Policing and raids

The shogunate raided the okabasho intermittently. In the Tenpo reforms of 1842, the senior councillor Mizuno Tadakuni led a large-scale raid that temporarily devastated the Fukagawa okabasho; the raided prostitutes were forcibly transferred to Yoshiwara and the operators punished. Yet demand did not vanish, and with the collapse of the reforms in 1843 the okabasho revived, functioning again as Edo entertainment districts for the twenty-odd years to the Restoration.

After the Meiji Restoration

After the 1872 emancipation edict, many okabasho were either reorganised as authorised room-renting districts or driven out of business. Fukagawa shrank again in the Taisho period after the post-earthquake reconstruction and was destroyed in the war. Nezu was absorbed into Susaki, and Shinagawa survived as a red-line area into the postwar period before the 1958 Anti-Prostitution Law ended it. The okabasho was a popular erotic space born of Edo’s urban culture, and as the “back” culture paired with the authorised Yoshiwara, it carried one half of Edo manners.

See also

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