Behind the lattice of a late-night brothel, a row of mouths painted with rouge: a core type of the early-modern Japanese urban nightscape. The customer judged from before the lattice, and the chosen woman was led up by the hand by a kamuro to the second-floor parlour. Amid the sound of setta, the plucking of a shamisen, and the tap of a pipe, the bond exchanged was not mere commercial sex but the whole of a “place where colour is sold” that early-modern Japan assembled as an institution.

Yuujo (遊女, courtesan, prostitute) is the general term for women whose work was sexual service in pre-modern Japan’s licensed quarters, post stations, teahouses, and harbour landings. Originating in the ancient ukareme, passing through the medieval keisei and shirabyoshi, it developed into a rank-hierarchy system topped by early-modern Yoshiwara, Shimabara, and Shinmachi. This article covers the lineage from antiquity, the internal rank, the conceptual distinction from the tayuu, oiran, geigi, and shogi, and the institutional change from the Meiji era.

Overview

The yuujo held a distinct position in early-modern Japan’s status society. Under the shogunate’s licensed-quarter system, she named a woman placed in a brothel whose work was to share the bed with customers. Narrowly it names the courtesan of the licensed quarters; broadly it includes the meshimori-onna of post stations, the private prostitutes of the okabasho, and the streetwalkers.

The social position of the early-modern yuujo is more complex than the present-day sense imagines. The highest-ranking tayuu and oiran were stars of urban culture with learning and arts, objects with whom samurai, daimyo, and wealthy merchants paid high fees to consort. Meanwhile most of the lower courtesans of the quarter and the private prostitutes of the okabasho and post stations were embedded in structures of poverty, human trafficking, and indenture, placed in harsh labour conditions. This article records both the cultural-historical significance and the human-rights problems.

Etymology and alternative names

The yu of “yuujo” derives from a word meaning, in antiquity, performing-arts service (song, dance, “god-play”) at shrine rituals. The ancient ukareme combined the dimension of a bearer of sacred performing arts with the dimension of sexual service to travellers. Etymologically, religious and artistic “play” later shifted in meaning to worldly and sexual “play”.

Early-modern alternative names are many. “Keisei” derives from the Chinese tale of “the beauty who topples a city and a state” and became a poetic synonym for the courtesan. “Shogi” was a Meiji-era legal term for the courtesan filing a business notice under the licensed-prostitution system. “Joro” was an Edo-period vulgar term. “Shirabyoshi” was a late-Heian to Kamakura courtesan accompanied by song and dance; “kugutsu” was a medieval wandering entertainer whose women also served as courtesans.

History

The Man’yoshu, book six, preserves waka attributed to an ukareme of the Jinki era (724–729). The poem of the ukareme Kojima, who attended a banquet of Haji no Mikoto, shows that the ancient ukareme held the learning to exchange waka at a banquet. The ancient ukareme inseparably combined sacred performing arts, banquet entertainment, and sexual service.

In the Heian period, with the development of court culture, performing-arts groups called shirabyoshi and kugutsu formed. The shirabyoshi were women performers in male dress, with Minamoto Yoshitsune’s lover Shizuka Gozen and the Gio and Hotoke Gozen who served Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa as representatives. They combined performing arts and sexual service, but in relations with nobles and samurai could gain a position close to lover or concubine.

From the Kamakura through the Muromachi periods, the lineage of kugutsu and shirabyoshi gradually developed into courtesan groups in cities and post stations. From the Sengoku into the Oda-Toyotomi period, rulers advanced the consolidation of pleasure quarters; Hideyoshi ordered consolidation at Kyoto’s Yanagimachi (later Shimabara) in 1589, the direct predecessor of the early-modern licensed-quarter system.

The Edo shogunate licensed a pleasure quarter (Yoshiwara) at Edo’s Fukiya-cho in 1617 on the petition of Shoji Jin’emon. After the 1657 Meireki Fire it moved behind Sensoji temple to become “Shin-Yoshiwara”. With Kyoto’s Shimabara and Osaka’s Shinmachi it was called one of the “three great quarters” and formed the core of early-modern courtesan culture.

A strict rank hierarchy was established within the licensed quarter. The highest tayuu excelled in learning, arts, and appearance and met customers by reservation at the ageya. Below the tayuu came ranks such as tenjin, kakoi, sancha, and baicha, down to the lowest hashi-joro, kirimise, and teppo-joro, a multi-layered structure. In Yoshiwara the tayuu rank peaked in the Genroku era (1688–1704), effectively vanished in the mid-eighteenth century, and was replaced by the “oiran” as the name for the highest rank. Outside the licensed quarter, many unlicensed private-prostitute districts called “okabasho” existed in Edo.

The quarter economy and human trafficking

The supply of courtesans was maintained by “selling off” from farming and fishing villages. A girl from a poor household was sold to a brothel under the name of “nenki-bokon” (term indenture), the structure being to repay the advance through labour during the contract period (typically around ten years). In reality, cosmetics, costume, and bedding costs were added as the courtesan’s debt, and many died of illness or by their own hand before the term ended. The Jokanji and the “throw-in temples” of Mikawashima received the bodies of courtesans who died unransomed; the throw-in total from Shin-Yoshiwara is estimated to exceed twenty thousand across the Edo period[citation needed].

The emancipation edict and the shift to the shogi concept

In October 1872 the Grand Council of State Edict No. 295, the “Liberation Edict for Performers and Prostitutes”, was issued. Occasioned by the Maria Luz incident (an international trial over Chinese coolies forced into labour under slave contract aboard a Peruvian ship), it applied the modern legal principle of prohibiting slave-like restraint domestically. All term-indenture contracts, including courtesans and geigi, were in principle voided, and the courtesan formally regained freedom.

In reality, the result was the reorganisation of the licensed-prostitution system under the new legal term “shogi”. Under each prefecture’s brothel-control regulations, the courtesan was fictively reframed as a tenant of a “rental parlour” filing a business notice, and the licensed-quarter business effectively continued. The 1900 shogi-control regulations stipulated the right of voluntary withdrawal, but the contractual debt-repayment obligation became the de facto obstacle to leaving.

Postwar abolition and the present-day districts

In January 1946 a GHQ memorandum abolished the licensed-prostitution system and banned the rental-parlour business. But operators continued as “special restaurant districts” (the akasen “red-line” areas), and the quarter’s scenery was effectively maintained. The 1956 Anti-Prostitution Law, fully enforced from 1 April 1958, ended the institutional survival of the licensed-prostitution system completely. The former quarters of Yoshiwara, Shimabara, and Shinmachi continue in another business form; Yoshiwara holds its own position in the postwar map of the sex trade as a soapland cluster.

The internal rank hierarchy

The rank hierarchy varied by quarter but shared a common structure. At the top stood the tayuu (oiran), the highest courtesan with the three of learning, arts, and appearance. Below came tenjin, kakoi, sancha, baicha, and hashi, strictly distinguished down to fee, hospitality form, costume, and the number of attendant kamuro and shinzo.

The minor girls attending a courtesan were called kamuro, living in a brothel from around age seven or eight and being trained in reading, shamisen, dance, tea, and flowers alongside chores. Around age fifteen she became a shinzo, and around age twenty, through the tsukidashi (debut), a full courtesan. This training process formed the institutional background by which the courtesan functioned as an embodiment of early-modern urban stylised beauty rather than a mere sex worker.

The geigi is conceptually distinct from the courtesan: she sells the art of music, song, and dance, and in principle sexual service is not part of her work. The courtesan “sells colour”; the geigi “sells art”. The distinction was institutionalised from mid-Edo, with geigi districts forming independently in Kyoto’s Gion, Osaka’s Kitashinchi, and Tokyo’s Shimbashi. In practice, however, some lower geigi did have sexual relations, and the distinction was fluid in practice.

Cultural influence

The early-modern courtesan was a central subject of ukiyo-e and shunga. The beauty pictures of Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro, and Kunisada depicted the Yoshiwara courtesan as an idealised urban-beauty image; Utamaro’s series and Kunisada’s works systematised courtesan culture visually. In shunga too the courtesan was a central subject, with the quarter’s customs and furnishings depicted in detail; these works hold value as primary sources transmitting early-modern urban culture.

Chikamatsu’s domestic joruri left many works on the lovers’-suicide of a courtesan and a townsman: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703, Ohatsu) and The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721, Koharu) stylised the courtesan-customer relationship as tragedy. Saikaku Ihara’s The Life of an Amorous Man and Five Women Who Loved Love (late seventeenth century) established the ukiyo-zoshi lineage set in the quarter. In kabuki too, the courtesan appeared frequently as the central figure of “keisei-buying” plays.

The costume and hairstyle of the courtesan, the oiran in particular, functioned as a trend source of early-modern Japan: the front obi knot, the figure-eight walk on high three-tooth clogs, and lavish hairstyles all spread from Yoshiwara to the town.

Present-day reappraisal and ethical note

Reappraisal of early-modern courtesan culture advanced with the development of women’s history and gender studies from the late twentieth century. Junko Saeki’s A Cultural History of the Courtesan (1987) and others shed light on the cultural-historical significance while recording the human-trafficking and human-rights side with care. The courtesan system gave decisive influence to early-modern Japanese urban culture while structurally containing the sale of women, indenture, difficulty of leaving, and violence within the quarter. This article centres on cultural-historical description while not overlooking the human-rights side. Maintaining a gaze on that historical violence is the premise of cultural-historical responsibility in reference to and reconstruction of early-modern courtesan culture.

Related terms

• Yoshiwara
• Shimabara
• Tayuu
• Oiran
• Geigi (geisha)
• Licensed prostitution system
• Anti-Prostitution Law
• Soapland
• Shunga
• Ukiyo-e