Under a night bridge a woman stands holding a straw mat. The price of one mat was twenty-four mon, a quarter of the later okabasho rate and a hundredth of a quarter courtesan’s. The client finished in the shadow of the pier, and the woman returned to her place. These lowest-rank women, called yotaka (night-hawks), stood at the opposite pole from the brilliance of the tayū and oiran inside the quarter, forming the coldest floor of early-modern sex work. Without them the quarter system was not complete.

Shishō means women who sold sex without official licence or registration, legally or under tolerance, and the institution and trade itself. In the early-modern period it denoted the kakushi-baijo (hidden sellers), yotaka and bikuni who worked outside the quarter; in the modern period, women without a courtesan’s licence and the waitresses of the meishuya (unlicensed bar), the café and the special restaurant. As the antonym of the licensed-prostitution system, unlicensed prostitution made up the dual structure of regulated sex work from early-modern to postwar Japan.

Overview

Unlicensed prostitution arises necessarily in any society that adopts a system of regulated sex work. Once the state permits only particular women to trade by designated district and registration, work by other women forms a zone of the illegal or the tolerated. In modern Japan, with the establishment of the licensed system (the 1900 prostitute regulation), control rules for unlicensed prostitution were drawn up at the same time, and the two stood as a legal pair.

The scale of unlicensed prostitution always far exceeded that of the licensed. From the late Meiji into the Taishō period, the registered licensed prostitutes numbered around fifty thousand nationwide, while estimates of the unlicensed ran from a hundred thousand to over two hundred thousand. This overwhelming difference shows that the licensed system was a regulatory frame in name and managed only a small part of actual sex work.

Early-modern unlicensed prostitution

The core of early-modern unlicensed prostitution was the okabasho, businesses operating outside the licensed quarters (Yoshiwara, Shimabara, Shinmachi). The okabasho arose at post stations, temple and shrine gate towns and suburban entertainment districts, working under a half-tolerated, half-policed condition. Edo’s noted okabasho included Fukagawa, Honjo, Yotsuya, Naitō-Shinjuku and the meshimori-onna of Shinagawa; Kyoto had Gion and Pontochō outside the licensed Shimabara.

Below the okabasho were lower-rank forms: the yotaka, who sold on the street; the bikuni, who worked in nun’s guise; and the “boat-buns” who worked on the water. These were taken up by the poorest women, at prices under a hundredth of a quarter courtesan’s. The yotaka, most prominent in the later Edo period, worked under the bridges and along the embankments of Honjo, Ryōgoku and Asakusa, taking clients with a straw mat for a fee equal to a day’s lowest day-labour. Morisada mankō (1837–1853) preserves part of their reality.

The shogunate treated the okabasho, yotaka and bikuni as “hidden sellers” and an object of control. The arrested were as a rule sent to Yoshiwara and made to work without pay for a set period as “indentured drudges”. This both supported the licensed quarter financially and secured the enforcement of the control: the unlicensed were at once the competitor of the licensed quarter and, through the crackdown, its labour-supply source, a complementary relation. The post stations also had meshimori-onna, nominally serving-women but in fact selling sex, an intermediate form between licensed and unlicensed peculiar to early-modern road traffic.

Modern unlicensed prostitution

A new modern form was the meishuya (sake-name bar). Around 1887, after the decline of the archery galleries, shops re-formed under the signs of branded sake while keeping unlicensed women upstairs. Meishuya concentrated in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Nagoya; in Tokyo the districts below the Asakusa twelve-storey tower, Tamanoi and Kameido were noted centres. Nagai Kafū’s A Strange Tale from East of the River (1937) is the important literary work set in the Tamanoi meishuya district. The meishuya was legally a liquor shop, and the presence of unlicensed women was tolerated though sometimes raided; after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake the geography was reorganised and Tamanoi rose as a new centre.

From the late Taishō into the early Shōwa period a new form, the café, spread. At first a Western-style coffee shop, it shifted through stronger hostess service and sexual service into the “special café”, an effective unlicensed-prostitution form in modern Western dress, set in the entertainment districts of Ginza, Shinjuku, Shibuya and Dōtonbori. In prefectures where the licensed system was abolished by local assembly resolution from 1933, special cafés increased rapidly after abolition, so that abolition in practice often promoted a shift to the unlicensed form.

Wartime and postwar

In the wartime regime of the later 1930s the meishuya, special cafés and unlicensed prostitution faced strengthened control as objects of “morals purification”, while the military organised comfort stations in the field, gathering women through brokers; some meishuya and café hostesses and unlicensed women were sent to the stations in Manchuria and the south. From the defeat of 1945 into the early 1950s, the street workers called pan-pan increased sharply in the cities under occupation, serving the troops around stations, parks and bridges, and becoming a symbol of the postwar urban scene. Many were young women who had lost family and home in the war and turned to street work from need. GHQ and the Japanese police treated them as objects of control in the name of “public health” and “protection of the occupation troops”, carrying out forced examination, confinement and treatment, a more violent extension of the venereal-disease management of the licensed system.

With the full enforcement of the Anti-Prostitution Law on 1 April 1958, both licensed and unlicensed prostitution were legally banned. The licensed-district operators turned to soapland and cabaret, while the unlicensed form continued as the street worker, the unlicensed massage parlour and individual prostitution through introduction services, a remnant of the early-modern dual structure that survives in altered shape in present-day Japan.

The social position of unlicensed prostitution

From early-modern to postwar Japan, most women who became unlicensed prostitutes came from poverty: the inflow of women from the rural northeast, the Hokuriku, Shikoku and Kyushu to the cities, the impoverishment of families, and the collapse of livelihood through war and disaster were the main routes of entry. Their income was far below that of the licensed, and the degree of exploitation by operators and brokers was stronger; the instability of livelihood, social prejudice and the risk of infection chronically worsened their conditions. Under the licensed system the unlicensed were nominally an object of control, but in reality police tolerance, bribery and uneven enforcement limited its effect. The abolition movement, carried by the Christian temperance union and the Salvation Army, made the relief of unlicensed women part of its work, setting up “women’s homes” that received those wishing to leave the trade, a forerunner of the postwar women’s-protection facilities.

Cultural-historical significance

The history of unlicensed prostitution tends to be placed as the shadow of the licensed system, but in quantity it rather exceeded the licensed and made up the principal field of sex work from early-modern to postwar Japan. Its existence shows the limits of state management of sex and at the same time makes visible the structure by which poverty, gender, regional inequality and war damage incorporated the female body as an object of sale. Recent history, women’s history and social history re-evaluate unlicensed prostitution not as a mere antonym of the licensed but as a key concept for understanding the marginality and fluidity of modern Japanese society. This article too treats it as an independent subject, from both cultural praise and human-rights critique.

See also

• Licensed prostitution system
• Anti-Prostitution Law
• Kuruwa (pleasure quarter)
• Yoshiwara
• Tachinbo (street worker)