Marriage Rites

Post-procession rites were made up of four steps: i) transfer of her possessions; 2) the sharing of sacred wine; 3) change of bridal clothes; and 4) consummation of relations. The first step in marriage rites was the transfer of the bridal trousseau from the woman’s house to her groom’s residence and its display. These articles made up a large part of her dowry (jisan zaisan), and as such they functioned as a public display of material goods that would remain independent of a bride’s new household’s communal wealth. In a society where women were largely excluded from property inheritance, a woman’s trousseau of portable possessions came to take on great significance as one of the few things to which a woman could lay legal claim. Acting as her dowry, its items were hers and would remain so regardless of the future of her marriage. If the bride’s household employed porters to deliver the trousseau, the men might receive a

Payment from the groom’s family called niwasen.84 It was not payment for the dowry itself. The requirement for the groom’s family to pay for the transport of the dowry to display it gives meaning to the dowry in terms of the bride’s identity between two families. Niwasen also refers to a charge paid for the temporary safe storage of luggage until it can be collected at a later date. By paying the porters and displaying the bride’s items, the groom’s family acknowledged its duty to keep the dowry safe. Further, the point of the display was to put the articles, whose security had now been promised, in the most conspicuous place so that a bride’s family might show, through material and sometimes expensive and cherished objects, that its daughter, though now absent from her home, was still valuable to the family. The dowry represented throughout a woman’s tenure in her husband’s home constant and tangible proof of identity and connection to her natal home. Labeling each piece of the dowry with a daughter’s name and matching it with a receipt was one kind of practice that conspicuously put forward that identity. Her family kept the receipt as evidence of ownership.85 A husband who tried to pawn parts of her dowry as his own possessions committed a gross breach of decorum, and this action constituted one of the few circumstances under which a woman’s family, if it so chose, could initiate divorce.86 If a husband chose to divorce his wife, which he could do at will, then she would have the necessary receipts to prove her original ownership of the articles and extract them from the household wealth of her husband’s family. In divorce, the general meaning of niwasen overshadowed the narrow ritual denotation. The groom’s family, having temporarily, as it turned out, been entrusted with the dowry, was now obligated to release it to its owner. Paying to protect and display nontransferable property as part of the marriage ritual signified that the orientation of a bride’s identity and allegiance to her husband’s household, so fundamental to yome-tori marriage and the values of the fertility model, was actually partial and conditional.

Families of brides could take advantage of this stage of the wedding ceremony to the extent that their purses allowed. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the author of The Greater Learning for Women bemoans in his closing words the fact that too many parents spent far more money on their girls’ material comforts in marriage than time on their moral development. “Parents today give their daughters so many articles of clothes, furniture, and such when sending them off into marriage. It is better instead that parents teach well every article of this primer because it is treasure that will serve their daughters throughout their lives.”87 The

Writer understood the possession and display of material goods to be inherently problematic in achieving full incorporation of a daughter into another household. We get a sense of the potential composition of such goods in the list Namura provides (see appendix A). Some of the articles in the list are simply items of daily use, such as nail clippers and razors; others are expensive furniture pieces. Some are functionally useful while also holding significant feminine identity, such as sewing and weaving utensils. There are several articles necessary for writing, and there are items for entertainment, such as games and musical instruments. Although the list is highly specific, it is an ideal suggestion. Namura’s guide does not demand an all-or-nothing performance of the ritual steps it outlines. Instead, it offers commoner families an adaptable ideal based on their own choices and resources in employing the ritual giving and displaying of expensive articles to state their connection, support, and love for their daughters.

One item on Namura’s list is of great import to the meaning of the ceremony as a celebratory transfer of a woman’s fertility. If a bride’s identity and loyalty to her husband’s household were not fully transferable, as her dowry and its display suggested, then the control of her fertility most surely was. The prime symbol of this, a box of shells called kaioke, is at the top of Namura’s list. In acknowledging its import he states, “The kaioke is to be conveyed with the greatest decorum among all items transferred.”88 It was typically a hexagonal container, beautifully lacquered and painted, and, as an aesthetic piece, was no doubt as stunning as any other example of finery and furniture a bride might take with her into the groom’s house. Similar to his commentary on protective dolls, Takai redacts, in the 1847 text, the origins of the kaioke, which is absent in Namura’s original.89 This inclusion of the genesis of the shell box was not original to Takai’s text, as guides in the eighteenth century similarly explicated the beginnings of the container and provided illustrations of the box and women amusing themselves with its contents.90 These illustrations show the game of shell combining (kaiawase), which was a type of parlor game popular during the Heian and Kamakura periods.91 The two components of the game, clam shells (kai) and their storage box (oke), matured into one of a range of cultural pursuits like poetry, tea ceremony, and horticulture that, once the province of the social elite in earlier periods, became the cultural property of bourgeois commoners in the Tokugawa.92 Playing the shell-matching game and possessing a shell box were emphatic expressions of such cultural aesthetics in part due to the shells being crafted objects of beauty and cultural allusion.93

For example, written on one half-shell were the opening verses of a poem, with the closing verses inscribed on its matching half. The separated shells were then matched to complete the poem. Women placed them in the lacquered box one on top of the other so that they would fit snugly, filling the vessel. A young woman in possession of a shell box displayed a sense of refinement and cultural sophistication. Yet the game of shell matching was an activity that courtesans pursued as cultured women too, as Harunobu, in his 1770 illustrated series on courtesan life, shows in a sketch of two young apprentices matching and admiring shells in their spare time.94

The shells were not only signs of social refinement, but were also potent symbols of female fertility. Shells and their stylized container symbolized on many levels the transfer of a bride’s fertility for use in the husband’s household. With their rounded shapes and crevices, the similarity of shells to external female sex organs is obvious, and kai was a crude slang for female genitalia.95 Further, kai not only means “shell,” but is also a homophone meaning “to open” when applied to a different ideogram. The pun conveys the fact that shells, as housing living creatures, perfectly present fertility’s duality in the yometori ceremony. Protecting that which lives inside them, shells can tightly close. They can also be opened, offering up their living morsels for the sustenance of others. A daughter’s fertile body acted in the same manner. Having been nurtured at home and protected on the road during the bridal procession, her fertility came to the groom’s household firmly shut away. Once under the control of her husband’s family, her fertility could be opened through a combination of symbolic and physical acts that would ideally eventually offer up an heir and the promise of new life for the family.

Shells symbolize the full meaning of fertility as incorporating both chastity and sexual activity. In the fertility model, chastity ultimately meant obedience to the household and sexual activity for purposeful procreativity. The transfer of a shell box was not simply the transfer of fertility, but a dialogue between families. It was a statement by the bride’s family that its daughter was chaste and fertile and that her fertility could be used for the continuation of the groom’s family line. Acceptance of the vessel was a groom’s family’s acknowledgment of the bride’s chastity and its possession of her chastity for fertility.96 Each set of matching halfshells that a daughter so carefully placed atop one another to fill her vessel reflected the relational ideal of a wife being in harmonious union with her husband (juju wagd). The threat to household order that each bride carried with her through her own potential willfulness, viewed by

The fertility model as demonic, was symbolically put away with each set of shells nestled in perfect alignment. The liminal images of goddess and demon that intersected and blurred the identity of the bride during her procession sharpened, with the transfer of the shell box, into a single, pointed metaphor of the bride as fertility goddess. Yet as part of her dowry, it was in her control. Should the marriage fracture, she could take her box and her fertility to her natal home. However, the product of that fertility—a child—would customarily remain in the husband’s household as a rightful member.97 While the container of shells represented a woman’s possession of her own fertility, as surely as she possessed all other items she had brought with her into marriage, it also represented her lack of control over the production of her fertility.

With the transfer of the bride her fertility was now placed in the service of her husband’s family. However, her fertility still required ritual charging along with that of her groom. Triggering her fertility was completed through sharing sips of sacred wine with her groom that altered her identity and sexuality to that of a wife, whose body was to serve a single household through its energy and sexuality. Long considered the ambrosia of the gods, this exchange of sake has carried symbolic significance throughout much of Japanese cultural history. Sharing sake as a root act of communion trickled through the patchwork of ceremonies and their configurations that made up Tokugawa marriage—mukotori and yometori, high class and low, ritually complex and simple—and even first meeting rites in the quarters. Accordingly, ritual manuals such as Namu-ra’s placed great emphasis on the act because it not only signaled unity between a bride and her new household, but also indicated her fertility as an active force in her new household.

Namura describes a rite where the bride and groom sit before two bottles of rice wine. Decorative folded paper depicting a female butterfly sits atop one bottle, and a male butterfly decorates the other. The symbolic meaning of butterflies as creatures of metamorphosis is clear in the context of a wedding, where a bride and groom undertake rites of transformation. There are other symbolic associations between butterflies and couples coming together in union. Sadatake comments that butterflies flutter out with the sun to sip the morning dew from the surface of leaves and grass, and then spend the rest of the day flitting here and there among one another. He likens this to the warmth and good feelings people have for each other when drinking sake together. When the bride and groom sip rice wine, it is hoped that, like the playful butterflies with their fill of dew, the couple will find similar happiness and harmony.98

Sadatake then offers another explanation for the use of paper butterflies. The decorative folds also represent silkworm moths. Such creatures not only create silk strands in their larval stage, but also, once matured into moths, become prolific reproducers. For Sadatake they are a perfect metaphor for celebrating the hope of an heir.99

Namura and Sadatake also give a different order to this drinking rite. Namura, who bases his order on the Ogasawara name in ritual, advises the bride to put the cup of sake to her lips before her groom does; Sada-take, as the head of the Ise House, states the opposite. Outside of this, the two concur on much symbolic activity centered around charging the bride’s and groom’s sexuality. The bride drinks from the male vessel and the groom from the female vessel. The paper butterflies, once removed from their bottle tops, are placed side by side, with the female facing up and the male facing down, which is suggestive of coital positioning. The bride and groom sip the wine from their cups three times. This triple sipping is then repeated two more times. In total, the bride and groom sip wine nine times in three rounds of drinking, with each round requiring three sips, which is the standard structure in modern Shinto nuptial ceremonies. The idea of sexual union that both ritualists advance through the wine exchange is controlled, purposeful, and productive. Through this character it advances the ultimate concern of the fertility model for establishing household harmony and the single household identity of bride and groom, and for sacralizing anticipated sexual activity and reproduction. Within this broad consensus, though, Sadatake raises a point of difference concerning which participant should partake of the wine first. He argues for the groom with an exegesis of the myth where Izanami speaks before Izanagi in a nuptial ceremony preceding their first attempt to procreate. As a result of this ritual oversight, their sexual union produced a leech child. Only when they corrected the order of speech could they properly procreate. For Sadatake any celebration (iwai) was an act of worshiping kami, and thus the sake rite was an offering in the worship of the primordial couple, Izanagi and Izanami.100 Through this linkage, the exchange of wine between a bride and her groom implied an exchange of wine between them and the divine pair, thus connecting the ritually ideal present with the pristine past. The bride and groom’s identification with Izanami and Izanagi sacralized both their marital and imminent sexual union and required them to identify with the same ritual precedent of the gods.

Namura’s guide, as well as Osagawara House ritual, makes no mention of kami in the context of the bride and groom sharing ceremonial

Sake. Namura, as his myth of womanhood shows, was ready to create sacrality through the introduction of divine symbols, but the absence of such explicit symbolization in his description of marriage rites speaks to another perspective in viewing sacrality. In the absence of kami, the presence of people as ritual actors became the central focus. This centrality of human ritual actors is what the term “marriage before people” captures against the modern practice of “marriage before the kami'” It is not a difference between secular and sacred, but an acknowledgment that what expresses a group’s sense of the sacred, its ultimate concern, need not be reduced to the presence of deities. In this sense, the varieties of Tokugawa marriage broadly concurred, through the root act of sharing wine, that what was ultimately important in the ritual moment was the act of joining a new collective with a new identity, a new set of responsibilities and obligations, and a commitment to making the concerns of that collective one’s own.

After making this commitment, sealed with sake, the bride changed her clothes. This change is called ironaoshi, meaning “correcting colors.” Although Namura specifies that these clothes should be part of the betrothal gift exchange between the families that occurred in the bride’s home as part of the pre-processional rites, he does not specify any particular color.101 Shades of red in the bride’s outfit were typical.102 A bride’s change from her white ceremonial kimono to a conventional one flushed with red spoke not only to a celebratory event (white and red typically signify an auspicious occasion in Japanese culture), but also directly to her social and sexual transformation. She arrived at the groom’s house as a potential, albeit inactive, force of social and sexual identity. She came dressed in white—colorless, as it were, and thus a neutral material by which her new family could “dye” her into the household’s ways.103 White is also a color associated with death. As we see in chapter 5, death was a potent, if controversial, part of marriage symbolism at the preprocessional stage, suggesting that the bride had symbolically died to one family in order to be born again into another family. She might have come with her shell box, which acted as a sign of both her untapped fertility and the promise of being a harmonious match for her new home. She came, in the symbolic end, as both a dead virgin daughter and a newborn fertile wife. The red-tinted kimono the bride now wore signaled her near-complete transformation. In ironaoshi a bride changed her colors from white to red, and by doing so signaled a change in her identity from that of dead virgin daughter to fertile wife, from a daughter blanched of one household’s traditions to a wife dyed in those of another.

She was no longer the ceremonial outsider but symbolically an incorporated daughter-in-law ready to give her time and effort to the affairs of her new household. At this point, the bride offered small gifts to her par-ents-in-law and other members of the groom’s family, thanking them for accepting her as a household member.104 Although now symbolically incorporated into the household, consummation of the relationship still awaited.

Namura advises that consummation be preceded by another round of wine drinking later in the evening.105 Additional consumption of wine outside the ceremony proper had its ritual detractors. Sadatake criticizes a second round of drinking, termed toko sakazuki. Literally meaning “bed sake,” it took place in the room where the couple would sleep.106 Sadatake acknowledges the practice with scorn. He states that it has no antiquity behind it but admits it has become quite fashionable in his time. He stresses that the Ise House never performed it and that “good people” do not take part in it.107 Namura is silent about the setting of this second sake exchange and does not use the term toko sakazuki, but he clearly places this second round of drinking as ritually proper.

Namura also recommends that the shell box be placed in the couple’s bedroom.108 Already a powerful symbol of sexual transfer and wifely harmony in the home, the box and shells may also have served as a type of potent amulet to help secure physical intimacy for the couple and reproductive success for the bride. In addition, he advises that the couple lie down with their pillows and heads pointing north.109 Along with this northward alignment, other bodily positions sometimes preceded sexual union. Some forms of rites called for the couple to lie in postures like that of the paper butterflies from the wine rite.110 In other words, the bride would lie on her back while the groom lay on his stomach. The custom of lying with heads facing north was not unique to Namura’ ritual guidance. It was likely a common wedding night tradition. Under any other, ordinary circumstance such a sleeping position would be considered indecent, a violation of taboo, as it resembles the placement of the dead, whose bodies were laid out with heads pointing north. A wedding night, however, was certainly not an ordinary circumstance. A Dictionary of Popular Language (Rigen shuran), which Ota Zensai (1759—1829) compiled between 1797 and the time of his death, states, “Pointing pillows to the north is either for the dead or the wedding night. Outside of these situations, it is taboo (imu).”111

A wedding, as Ota’s dictionary makes clear, shared with death the same extraordinary quality, a time set apart from time. It was an occasion

Of identity transformation for the couple collectively, but far more profoundly for the bride, whose transformation took place in another household. From the exit rites performed at her home on the day of departure, where death symbolism was at times prominent, to the entrance rites at the groom’s home, which sought to possess and promote her fertility, a bride experienced symbolic death as a daughter together with her rebirth as a fertile wife. Tying themes of death and fertility with identities of daughter and wife came to its final and full conclusion with actual sexual relations on the wedding night in a room laid out for the “dead.” Symbolically, at least, death and daughter vanished in the night, leaving only the household’s desire for fertility and a wife to rise with the morning sun.