On a winter night in Suzakuno, a quarter strung with lanterns. Attended by a matron and child-servants in matching black crested robes, a woman walked toward the ageya with the crossed steps of the hachimonji; to the people of Kyoto the sight was a greater spectacle than the theatre. Trained in waka, tea, calligraphy and the shamisen, the highest-ranked women, called tayū, tested a guest by his cultivation before they yielded their bodies. A samurai who failed was quietly turned away as an outsider of the quarter. Kyoto’s Shimabara worked for more than three centuries as a place of commercial sex and, at the same time, as a theatre of such manners and learning.

Shimabara (formally Nishi-Shinyashiki) was the shogunate-licensed pleasure quarter relocated in 1641 to Suzakuno in the lower city of Kyoto (present-day Shimabara, Shimogyō ward). Counted with Edo’s Yoshiwara and Osaka’s Shinmachi as one of the “three great quarters”, it had its own hierarchy crowned by the tayū system and a spatial structure of three trades: the ageya (banquet house), the okiya (courtesan house) and the hikite-jaya (introducing teahouse). Business as a quarter ended with the full enforcement of the Anti-Prostitution Law in 1958, but the ageya Sumiya and the okiya Wachigaiya survive, each designated an Important Cultural Property.

Overview

Shimabara was the most prestigious of Kyoto’s quarters and a meeting place for the cultured and the upper warrior class. The highest courtesan, the tayū, was required to master waka, calligraphy, tea, Noh, the shamisen and dance, and was treated not merely as an object of commercial sex but as one bearer of Kyoto culture. Whereas Edo’s Yoshiwara abolished the tayū system in the later eighteenth century and moved to the oiran system, Shimabara kept the tayū name to the end of the war, and the Wachigaiya preserves the tayū tradition today.

The name “Shimabara” is a nickname. The widely circulated account holds that the upheaval of the Kan’ei relocation recalled the confusion just after the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–38); the formal name was “Nishi-Shinyashiki”, the term used in most early-modern official documents.

Prehistory and relocation

Kyoto’s quarter traces back to 1589, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi had a courtesan town opened at Yanagimachi, the first officially licensed courtesan town of his regime and the prototype of the early-modern quarter system. In the Keichō era it was ordered moved to the Rokujō-Sanchō-machi district. There, when women’s kabuki was performed at Shijō-gawara, the title tayū was given to outstanding dancers, which is held to be the origin of the tayū system in the quarter; the lineage of Izumo no Okuni, the founder of kabuki, was deeply tied to the early courtesans.

In 1640, citing morals problems from urban expansion and the proximity of the Higashi-Honganji temple, the Kyoto deputy ordered the Rokujō quarter moved west to Suzakuno; the move was carried out the next year and the new district named Nishi-Shinyashiki. Because the order was sudden, the confusion of the move became the talk of the city, and townsmen likened it to the recent Shimabara Rebellion, giving the district its nickname.

Spatial structure

Shimabara formed a rectangle about 200 metres east-west by 300 metres north-south, ringed by an earthen rampart some three metres high and a moat. The only entrance was the great gate on the east side, which, like Yoshiwara’s, served the double function of preventing the women’s escape and barring intruders. Inside, the quarter was divided into blocks, each holding okiya, ageya and hikite-jaya.

Business rested on the linkage of three trades. The okiya held and trained the courtesans, the tayū, tenjin and kakoi; the Wachigaiya is the sole surviving okiya, and the tayū’s implements are still kept there. The ageya held no courtesans of its own but provided the banquet and the cooking; a guest came up to the ageya, arranged food and sake, and summoned the tayū from the okiya. The Sumiya is the only surviving example of ageya architecture from the Edo period, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1952. The hikite-jaya acted as the introducing trade, mediating between guest and houses; the proper order was for a guest to take the introduction and instruction in etiquette at the teahouse before proceeding to the ageya.

The tayū system

The highest rank of courtesan was the tayū, below which ran the tenjin, kakoi and other ranks. One could not reach tayū on looks and skill alone: command of nearly the whole field of Kyoto’s upper culture was required, waka, linked verse, tea, incense, calligraphy, painting, Noh, the shamisen, dance, shōgi and ceremony. The illiterate could not become tayū, nor could one weak at impromptu waka. The highest tayū was the only courtesan rank permitted to attend at the imperial palace and was granted a court rank equivalent; whereas Yoshiwara’s oiran functioned as the pinnacle of townsman culture, Shimabara’s tayū served as a point of contact with the culture of the court nobility.

The procession of a tayū to the ageya was the tayū dōchū. With a child-servant, an apprentice, an umbrella-bearer and a matron in train, the tayū wore her black hair piled high and robes and a sash of a dozen or more kilograms, walking with the crossed-clog “inner hachimonji” gait, a contrast to the “outer hachimonji” of Yoshiwara’s oiran procession and a gesture held to embody Kyoto grace. To engage a tayū required, beyond the fee, gratuities and the charges of the three trades, a sum equal to a year’s living of an upper townsman; the three stages of first meeting, second meeting and regular custom had to be passed before a relationship was possible. The tayū held the right to choose, and a guest deficient in character, learning or manners could be refused however much he paid.

Decline and survival

From the later eighteenth century the centre of Kyoto’s quarter culture shifted to the Gion and Pontochō districts, which had no tayū system but developed the lighter “teahouse play” centred on geisha and maiko. Shimabara, with its high fees and elaborate etiquette, became a closed space serving only a limited upper clientele, and its custom thinned. By the Bunka era the number of tayū had fallen from a few dozen at the peak to about ten, and to a few by the end of the Edo period.

In the late Edo period Shimabara was used as a gathering place by the Shinsengumi and loyalist samurai; banquets by Shinsengumi leaders at the Sumiya are recorded, and the sword scars in the Sumiya are known through Shinsengumi tradition. After the Meiji Restoration, the 1872 emancipation edict and the later regulation of 1900 reorganised Shimabara as a designated district under the modern licensed-prostitution system. The tayū system survived in form, but from the late Meiji the Wachigaiya was almost the only okiya keeping tayū. The full enforcement of the Anti-Prostitution Law in 1958 legally ended business as a quarter.

Cultural influence

Through the Edo period Shimabara was a chief subject of the Kyoto-school ukiyo-e and shunga. Kyoto painters such as Suzuki Harunobu, Maruyama Ōkyo and Yosa Buson depicted the tayū of Shimabara; the works are fewer than those on Yoshiwara but were prized in the Kamigata painting world as subjects linked to Kyoto refinement. In literature, Ihara Saikaku’s Kōshoku ichidai otoko (1682) has its hero visit Shimabara and form a tie with the tayū Yoshino, and the quarter appears as the ideal one in early-modern fiction; Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet plays also set works there.

Continuation today

The two surviving early-modern quarter buildings are the Sumiya and the Wachigaiya. The Sumiya is now open as the Sumiya Hospitality Culture Art Museum, showing ageya architecture, furnishings and related art; the Wachigaiya remains a working building and the sole place continuing the succession of the tayū. Today’s tayū, cut off from the sale of sex, are kept as an intangible cultural presence: a few are active around the Wachigaiya, performing the procession, dance and shamisen at cultural sites. This is not the early-modern system itself but a tradition reconstructed after the war, and it is valued in both tourism and cultural protection as an embodiment of Kyoto’s cultural history. The east great gate survives as an early-modern relic and a designated historic site of Kyoto City; where Yoshiwara’s gate is gone, Shimabara’s remains in place.

Cultural-historical significance

Among the quarters of early-modern Japan, Shimabara had the highest degree of fusion with Kyoto culture. Where Yoshiwara worked as the pinnacle of townsman culture, Shimabara connected to the culture of the court nobility and the upper warriors, developing by taking the traditions of waka, tea, Noh and ceremony into itself. Recent local and women’s history warns against treating Shimabara only as an object of cultural praise: the high status of the tayū was given to a few, and the women of the lower ranks, and those forced into unlicensed prostitution, must be recorded alongside them. This article holds both the cultural significance and the human-rights problem in view.

See also

• Yoshiwara
• Kuruwa (pleasure quarter)
• Licensed prostitution system
• Ukiyo-e
• Shunga
• Anti-Prostitution Law