Marriage was divided into two sets of rites. One set, discussed in chapter 3, took place at the groom’s household. Another set, comprising Betrothal and departure, occurred at the bride’s residence. This second set prepared a young woman for entrance into her new life, but it also indicated symbolic ambivalence toward the notion of moving a daughter’s identification away from her own household. Central to betrothal was the presentation of gifts sent from the groom’s family to the bride’s household that marked the two as betrothed. Departure followed at a later date, at which time a bride and her procession stepped out on the road toward the groom’s residence and the concluding ceremony. Rites at the bride’s home served, in the paradoxical manner of ritual, to affirm her current identity while initiating the transformation of this identity by moving her from one side of the daughter and daughter-in-law per-specitval boundary to the other. This ritual paradox expressed the ambivalence inherent in the fertility model. The symbolic action suggested that in crossing the boundary she journeyed to her husband’s house in body but not always in spirit.
Exit rites from the quarters exhibited no such ambivalence. While a courtesan’s exit may have anticipated marriage, particularly if her contract was bought out, thus shortening her stay in the quarter, her departure was less about a definite sense of the future and more about a definite break with the past. Nevertheless, through common tales and literature of courtesans leaving their profession as lovers of the wealthy, the handsome, the powerful, or the just, the quarters provided their own myths of exit tinged with hopes of marriage and love. Saikaku’s fictionalized account of the marriage between the historical Yoshino and his novel’s protagonist is such an example. These stories valorized both the life of courtesans and life after prostitution. Without blurring the distinction between sexual values before and after exiting the quarters, such stories speak in the same paradoxical tone of ritual, namely affirmation and transformation. Rites of exit similarly served this process of affirming a woman as a courtesan while also anticipating her transformation into a woman whose life now lay beyond the walls of her pleasure quarter.
Betrothal
The conspicuous mark of betrothal was a gift presentation to the bride’s family by the groom’s household. Gifts were not, however, the only mark. Before betrothal, important steps were taken tying the couple and families together. Successful investigation into each family’s history, religious affiliation, and financial background was common, as was divining lucky days for the betrothal, procession, and marriage.1 In this way, families affirmed the match on both worldly and spiritual planes. Because of its contractual-spiritual nature binding individuals and families, betrothal was as important as the wedding ceremony that followed, which may be understood as ritually carrying through a promise between families. So important was betrothal in establishing the reality of a woman’s role as wife that broken engagements were functionally equivalent to divorce in some circumstances. Divorce temples, which were nunneries that the shogunate sanctioned to mediate divorce for women who entered their gates, reveal the importance of betrothal as marking ties already bound. The nunneries of Tokeiji and Mantokuji both accepted women seeking sanctuary as a means to break off engagements once betrothal gifts had been exchanged.2
Engagement presents served notice that the daughter and son were not only matched, but that a transaction had occurred that ideally made the match immutable. In this transaction, betrothal and the wedding ceremony proper worked in tandem. Betrothal signified a down payment, as it were, on the daughter’s nascent identity as daughter-in-law; the wedding ceremony symbolically worked to dye her in the ways of her new household and establish her fertility to serve it as a wife. What kind of transaction was involved in betrothal? Arima Sumiko and Nishigaki Yoshiko give one answer by putting forward three types of marriage consciousness (ishiki) that have been active in Japanese history.3 The first type is pillage marriage (ryakudatsukon). The term intentionally evokes the image of a woman being carried off against her will; coerced transport from home and family is the operative metaphor. It highlights the processional element of yometori marriage where the bride is taken to the groom’s house. Ritualized and celebratory transportation signals an accrual of ceremonialism (gishikika) hiding an ancient attitude toward women under the gloss of ritual veneer. This attitude holds that anyone or group such as parents and the household authority may uproot a woman even if it is against her wishes.4 The second type of consciousness comes under various names such as donation marriage (zdyokon), transaction marriage (baibaikon), and exchange marriage (kdkan-kon). As the names suggest, this arrangement is largely an economic transaction. The seller is the daughter’s family, the buyer is the groom’s household, and the product is the daughter and her sexuality. Gift giving in betrothal is the ritual expression of this purchase. As evidence of this consciousness, Arima and Nishigaki point to the word urenokori, which means both “unsold goods” and “old maid,” as a linguistic survival of this marriage consciousness.5 The final type of consciousness is that of contemporary Japan, where a woman and man come together largely of their own accord.6 Casting aside this final form of consciousness as a recent phenomenon with little precedent before postwar Japan, Arima and Nishigaki summarize Tokugawa marriage as largely void of any sensibility of female authority.7 As scholars whose methodology is representative of the kind I discussed in chapter i—that is, one focusing on social structures and ideologies of inequality—they stress that this sense of marriage reflects the period’s patriarchy and its social and economic disenfranchisement of women. Thus the typological Tokugawa yometori marriage pattern incorporated a sense of the woman spirited away through gilded ceremony, which, if the gold foil were peeled away, would reveal the cold, hard fact that a daughter betrothed was a daughter sold.
This view of betrothal and marriage as a transaction reflecting patriarchal ideology and social structure draws equivalency between betrothal, transaction, and the devaluing of female authority. The equation is sound in terms of Arima and Nishigaki’s interest in drawing a direct relationship between Tokugawa notions of female value and the period’s poverty of female authority. Still, at another level of social and familial reality was the fact that most families loved their daughters and wanted the best for them, and for many such families betrothing their daughters and seeing them off in wedding rites signaled the hope that a good portion of that “best” had been achieved. When we pay attention to betrothal ritual as not simply a social expression of a patriarchal ideology, but also as a symbolic expression of love and hope for a daughter, then we gain a fuller meaning of betrothal as transaction: recognition that as a transaction betrothal was a shared sense by both parties that the item of concern— the bride—possessed value. Through ritual and symbol, betrothal gave a daughter and her family an important means to demonstrate what they held in their hearts as family—that she held value as a member of the household. It was due to the paucity of public realms of female value and authority that betrothal became an important avenue for a family to state symbolically the value of its daughter in the absence or narrowing of other avenues, such as household head, inheritance, and property ownership. Betrothal may have reflected the dominant social structure and ideology, but it also deflected power into the hands of a bride’s family to be exercised through symbol and ritual. Betrothal gifts, typically called yuino, acted as a sign of transaction, but in the end which party maintained emotional possession of a daughter upon completion of the transaction remained ambiguous. In his text, Namura states that the gifts act as a request for marriage (tanomi o tsukawasu).8 As touched upon above, mutual investigation into each household’s social and financial background, which constituted an important step in premarriage consultation between families, shows that for economically rising commoners with an ie-consciousness and family pride, sending a daughter into marriage was not a step taken lightly. For a daughter’s family, betrothal gifts signified not only the financial worth of the fiance’s household, but also showed the emotional worth she held in the eyes of both his family and her family. If betrothal, as Arima and Nishigaki argue, was the face of patriarchy through its function to craft women into items of exchange, it also acted through gift giving in the face of patriarchy to establish for a family and its daughter ritual affirmation of her value as a member of a family.
The recommendations that lifestyle guides made for betrothal presents were grounded in older, elite forms. As with the marriage ceremony at the groom’s house, these guides provided details for formal ritual styles. The details, however, acted less as fixed forms to be replicated whole and more as idealized guidelines meant for each home to adapt as necessary to its own customs, needs, and income. Namura recommends that the gift package include two kimono (or the material for making kimono), one of which would be white both inside and out, and the other a shade of red.9 (Ideally a bride would wear these kimono during the nuptial rites at the groom’s house, and the change from white kimono to one dyed with color marked the ironaoshi stage of the ceremony.) The colors are obvious symbols of the way wedding ceremonies balanced the themes of death/life and purity/fertility on the fulcrum of female sexuality. Other gifts could express the same symbolic language of white and red, as well as contemporary female customs. Sashida Fujiakira (1795—1871), a Shinto priest and teacher in a village called Nakato (now an area of western Tokyo), noted in his diary an example of betrothal gifts that had been prepared on an August day in 1851. Although lacking white and red kimono, it included wrapped gifts of white twine, as well as wrapped bundles of white facial powder and safflower (benibara) to be used for lip rouge.10 Application of makeup had long been a sign of marriage status among warrior women, and its inclusion among betrothal gifts in a Tokugawa village is evidence of the spread of this formerly elite custom to rural commoner women from economically comfortable families.11 A century and a half before, Namura’s text helped initiate this infusion of elite beauty and gift customs into the commoner population by, among other things, describing to his readers how, how much, and where to apply makeup.12
Whether expressed through kimono or white facial powder and lip rouge, the interplay of white and red in gifts was ubiquitous. The white kimono a daughter might have worn to her new home covered not only her body, but also a set of meanings about her body. As with corpses dressed in white for funerals, the bridal kimono suggested both a woman’s death and separation from her household and a new life in the role of daughter-in-law. White symbolizes purity. With her assumed chastity, she brought sexual purity, and thus untapped fertile potential, to the groom’s house. That potential to produce life was symbolized in the red color of her second kimono, which covered her body during the iro-naoshi stage of the wedding. Red signaled celebratory change from chaste daughter now dead to one household to fertile daughter-in-law now alive to another home, its way, and its desire for an heir. Her body was the same, but the meanings associated with it changed with the robes. Thinking of the white and red kimono as types of wrapping, as enclosures of her physical person that signify different meanings about the same body, the discussion of wrapping in chapter 4 comes again to the forefront. Treating something in a prescribed fashion—wrapping it in an obi or special paper—imparts meaning to it. Meaning may be apprehended to inhere in a thing, but this takes place only after human activity such as ritual practice has imparted that meaning. It is not that human activity and human apprehension are opposing views on sacred reality, but that human action predicates—and thus defines, orders, and articulates—human apprehension of sacrality. As further evidence of this dynamic of ritual activity, the practice of wrapping was extended to the preparation of kimono and other betrothal gifts. As Sashida’s account informs us, the white facial powder and rouge were wrapped in bundles. Likewise, Namura’s guide states the importance of wrapping the kimono and other gifts. Each roll is wrapped in two layers of special paper called sugihara, which was often used for objects for ceremonial occasions, and then each is wrapped again around the middle with a thin ribbon called mizuhiki13 In the text’s spirit of being a complete guide to female lifestyle, its last chapter’s final section, detailing Ogasawara wrapping techniques, gives examples of how to wrap some of these betrothal gifts.14 Wrapping these gifts, especially the rolls of kimono, which in turn the bride uses to wrap her body, was an activity that went beyond simply reflecting notions of aesthetics. It was an activity central to creating an articulation of fertility’s linked concerns: bringing a stranger into one’s household, making her identify with her new role, and placing hopes of generational continuity upon her body.
Rice wine and harvests from the ocean were also included among
Betrothal presents. Namura lists two grades of wine and fish offerings: five barrels of sake and five types of sea produce or, as an alternative, three barrels of drink and three items from the sea.15 This grading of styles and matching of wine and sea products is evidence of earlier warrior ceremonial forms, which were sensitive to internal hierarchy within the samurai class, and it also reflected contemporary Tokugawa sensibilities of hierarchy and other indices of social order among commoners. As Sashida noted in his diary, the betrothal gifts leaving his village included two barrels of sake and two fish.16 Sea products in Namura’s version of the minimal three offerings include kelp, cuttlefish, and bream.17 He further recommends abalone and dried bonito as additions for those families of grooms who choose to offer a higher grade of yuino.18
Some of these items have a prominent place in the history ofJapan-ese ceremonialism regarding prosperity and success of various kinds. Abalone has a particularly strong historical association with luck and long life. Dried and cut into long strips, it is called noshi awahi. Signifying the hope of a successful and long life, noshi awahi was a celebratory food of the aristocracy in the Nara and Heian periods.19 Likely under the influence of the aristocracy and eager to emulate royal ways, the rising samurai incorporated the use of noshi awahi in various ceremonies.20 Typifying meals that celebrated the attainment of a long life (juga), its consumption became ubiquitous in ceremonies centering around hopes of the production and maintenance of life.21 With these felicitous meanings, noshi awahi also served as an accompanying and decorative flourish to gift-giving occasions, and most particularly for betrothal, where concerns of success and long life for two households were symbolically on intense display. On a related symbolic note, the gifts that Sashida describes included, in addition to two kinds of fish, barracuda (kamasu), which in his diary he uniquely spelled by applying three characters connoting the meaning of “gaining a full and long life.”22 As a traditional symbol signifying the same wish for success and longevity, noshi awahi became, by the middle of the Tokugawa period, a customary gift to be sent on occasions such as betrothals to celebrate hopes for prosperity and long life.23 As a mark of its prominence in the presentation of gifts, it is the first example of wrapping given in the final section of A Record of Treasures for Women that reviews styles of wrapping. The dried abalone and the other food items and sake formed a ritual meal to be shared by representatives of both families.24 Consumption of the groom’s family’s offerings signified not only acceptance of the gifts, but, as a meal symbolically tying two families together in a shared decision, it also held unique long-term consequences for each household measured against the respective loss or gain of a member.
In this way the contractual nature of betrothal gained a large measure of its power from ritual and its components, such as sake, food, wrapping, and communal eating, rather than juridical authority. The head of the Ise House, Sadatake, as we saw earlier, argued that all such celebrations are ways of worshiping kamt. In ritual the act of displaying items “wrapped in double folds, with presentations of fish and fowl, sake ewers, and the like in one’s parlor are offerings made to the kamt.”25 Sadatake was concerned that people were practicing rites without proper consciousness of the deities at whom the rites ultimately were directed. As a means of edification, he specifies different celebratory occasions and links them to their proper deities. Among these links, he aligns marriage with the creator gods Izanagi and Izanami.26 In this linkage Sadatake advocates a view that ritual actions ultimately refer to a divine realm, which through the power of ritual is made contiguous with the human world. However, by suggesting that while events and kamt change accordingly, and the act of displaying food, drink, and wrapped items remains the same whatever the occasion or deity, he obliquely emphasizes the primacy of core ritual actions and symbolic items as the constant feature of celebratory worship. The root ritual actions of displaying and consuming gift foods and drink between families signaled not only that a groom and bride were a match made in heaven and in the image of Izanagi and Izanami, but that they were also a match made between and for two families. Betrothal symbolically made the two families one in their agreement concerning one woman’s destiny. Still, this agreement acted as an evocative avenue for a daughter’s family to declare her value as a natal member in spite of her inevitable departure. This ambivalence became more apparent with departure rites.
Departure
Departure rites prepared a woman for her processional journey into lim-inality, where her sexuality and social role were held suspended between the former chaste daughter and the as-yet fertile daughter-in-law. Rites at the groom’s household pulled her out of this suspended state to serve her new family with obedient and energetic harmony and the hope of productive fertility. Symbolically, the practice of pre-procession was to make the young woman a blank slate upon which her new family could begin writing its hopes. While departure literally accomplished the task of sending a daughter away, symbolically it subverted its task of wiping clean her and her family’s slate of identity and loyalty to each other. In this way, pre-procession both prepared an exit for a daughter to take her leave while also allowing a family to extend its hold on her and, as eventually happened in some cases, even anticipate her return.
Departure rites received their ambivalence from the interplay of death and fertility motifs. The dead and virgin daughter gradually gave way to the living and fertile daughter-in-law as she was carried in her palanquin and later participated in the rites conducted at the groom’s home, which, as we saw in chapter 3, were rich with metaphors of sexuality and new life. This was the symbolic trajectory of her wedding day. In his description of bridal departure, which is the front half of this trajectory, Namura concentrates on death symbolism. As becomes clear later in this section, death symbolism and departure for some like Namura were essential in promoting fertility values. This identity was controversial among some advocates of the fertility model and, further, expressed ambivalence toward, as much as promotion of, the model’s values.
Namura’s guide represents well this power of departure to evoke metaphors of funeral rites and the dead. In the opening section on wedding ritual, Namura reminds his readers that they are not to make their parents’ homes their own, but rather need to make their place inside their husbands’ homes.27 He then turns to the theme of one’s moral duty and notes that with marriage comes a new understanding of the home to which one returns. Marriage signaled the duty of going home to one’s husband and forsaking the practice of returning home to one’s parents. Namura stresses that a woman must not regard her parents’ home as her own, and that marriage for a woman meant she would not return to her natal home. This act of not returning was what made the bride like the dead. “As it is that the dead never return to their homes, people compare marriage to death in that a daughter never returns again to the home of her mother and father.”28 He follows this logic of resemblance with practices of resemblance, most notably the use of ceremonial fires or torches (kadobi), which were lit at the gates of houses during funerals and bridal departures as a means of sending off the dead as well as daughters.29 Like a daughter leaving on her journey to another household, a corpse, too, would pass by lit torches when carried out of the household on its journey to the other world. Other period texts describe similar practices and employ shared terminology for funeral and departure fires, such as “on the day of the wedding, when the bride passes through the gate, sending-away fires (okuribi) are lit.”30 In addition to the funerary symbol of fire, Namura also calls for the use of salt and ash at departure for purification.31 He does not give any specific instructions about these items, but this is probably because his audience was ritually knowledgeable concerning their use in funerals.
As ritual, the actions and symbols constituting departure were open to interpretation, and thus open to controversy in the fertility model. Namura is unequivocal in his interpretation. After noting the symbols of death (burning torches at the gate and employing salt and ash) appropriate for use in seeing off a daughter, Namura explicates these meanings by metaphorically referring them to the custom of cursing the dead. One cursed the dead to establish a taboo that kept them from returning too often to the living. Likewise, frequent returning of a daughter to her natal home was a matter best avoided, a taboo best respected, as it took her away from her new home and responsibilities.32 He links not returning home to a woman’s cultivation of tashinami—the idealized behavior of an obedient wife. “In that she does not return home she shows herself to be prudent, modest, and selfless.”33 Dead to her parents and to the home of her birth, she should turn to a new life in serving her parents-in-law and their—and also now her—household. In this way, Namura effectively sees the symbols of death and the rite of departure as supporting the fundamental concern of fertility that a bride live not simply in but for another household. Symbolic death, or at least its logic, freed her to offer her loyalty, skills, and sexuality to the authority of a new household.
Although Namura claims that the employment of funerary symbols is popular among all classes of people, the practice of mixing death ritual in wedding rites was not without its contemporary criticism.34 Sada-take strongly opposed death symbolism in marriage, although he, too, acknowledges in his work the popularity of the ritual trend. Further, he is familiar with the type of symbolic argument that Namura uses in advocating funerary symbols amidst marriage as supportive of fertility values, but he completely rejects it as grossly mistaken (hanahada ayamari nari).35 Rather than depend on death symbols and taboo for encouraging values in a daughter, Sadatake argues instead that parents need to teach their daughter before her wedding the importance of filial piety and obedience. As he notes, all the death symbolism in the world will not keep a household from divorcing and sending back a bride whose behavior has brought her husband or her in-laws unhappiness and regret.36 He argues further that reliance on symbols and rituals resembling the dead and funerals forgets that the purpose of a wedding is to celebrate the hope of household prosperity and children. When people mix symbols of death and mourning in a rite of fertility and life, they tempt fate and the power of resemblance. They invite on themselves childlessness and risk the extinction of their households. “The dead do not give birth to children. . . and thus if you resemble the dead, you, too, will not bear any children.”37
As fertility moralists Sadatake and Namura concurred on the importance of marriage in the lives of women, but as ritualists they parted ways on differences concerning the appropriateness and meaning of death symbolism in marriage ritual. Multiplicity of meanings and the power of evocation can give to ritual a sense of ambivalence even when it is linked to a unified clarity of value advocacy. The ambivalence of departure ritual, specifically its allusions to death, clouded the values that fertility moralists tried to associate with it. The use of ash and torches allowed parents to show love for their departed daughter through the symbols of grief and loss. Building upon betrothal, death symbolism and ritual resemblance may have acted more to affirm identity with and loyalty to one’s daughter and less, as Namura wants to argue, to cut her from family bonds. Treating the bride as dead was symbolically problematic, as Sadatake realized. However, the reasons for his objection—bad form, a poor substitution for moral education, and a foolish toying with fate— miss the larger problem that Namura sensed and attempted to answer through death symbolism: the danger of bridal return.
There were customary occasions for a young wife to return to her family for brief visitation. Although not cited in Namura’s text, the last step in virilocal wedding traditions called for satogaeri, or when a bride returned to her family and hometown for a number of days after her nuptials to present her parents with gifts and present herself as a new wife.38 However, outside of fixed times and events such as satogaeri, and in some cases birth, a wife who returned home repeatedly was cause for unease in the promoters of fertility values. Namura thought a wife’s frequent returns ought to be forbidden (yokuyoku kaeru koto o imu), and he found death symbolism appropriate for creating a sense of taboo, of respecting borders of time and place.39 Cursing the dead at funerals acted to create borders between the living and the nonliving so that spirits of the departed would not return outside the restraints and order of fixed ritual time. When the dead transgress boundaries of time and ritual custom they bring disorder to the world of the living. Namura sought through death symbolism to create a parallel between brides and the dead and the need to limit the return home of each to fixed times and formal occasions. Nevertheless, this similarity between the bride and the dead on the issue of returning home was symbolically problematic. The most notable fixed time for ritual interaction between the living and the dead in Japan was and continues to be the annual Buddhist festival of the dead, or o-bon. In high summer, spirits of deceased family members return to commune with the their living descendants after being guided by the light of fires set outside homes; at the conclusion of the festival they are sent away by fire. Burning fires and torches with the departure of a daughter in marriage signals farewell to her, as Namura insists. However, fire as a symbol of both a welcome and a send-off for the dead also signals a strong theme: family bonds of identity holding fast despite time’s passing.
The evocative power and multivocality of death symbolism suggesting permanent loss as well as anticipated return opens, rather than resolves, the issue of a daughter’s identity. Departure allowed a daughter’s family to give her away to another while still making emotional claims to her family membership. Betrothal and departure produced a symbolic tug-of-war over claims to a daughter/bride. In spite of the ubiquitous advocacy of fertility values in Tokugawa society, the rituals of marriage proved at times inharmonious with this advocacy. The tug-of-war that rituals exposed and values shunned was sometimes resolved only through marriage failure and divorce, which is another form of exit to which we will return shortly.
Retirement from the quarters
Retirement for a courtesan presented no such conflict of claims as existed in betrothal and departure. Her exit was not a move between families but a move out of a role and value system. Retirement rites suggested an ordering of sexual role and place that proposed what was good for a woman inside her quarter was ill fitting once she returned to the outside. As departure put a woman on the journey from chaste daughter to fertile daughter-in-law, retirement put a woman outside the gate of pleasure on a journey from the role and values of prostitution toward a sometimes uncertain future.
Departing the world of pleasure was built into the model as part of its own ideals about female sexuality. The few extant bordello contracts remaining make clear that the bordello’s legal possession of a woman was temporary. In 1862 a woman named Wato sold her younger sister,
Yasu, to a Yoshiwara bordello. The contract states the day Yasu had to start employment and the day it would end, which, according to the contract, made her term of service three years and four months.40 The contract does not give any reason for this precise time frame. It may have been a point of negotiation on which Wato and the bordello agreed, but the date may also have been configured in line with Yasu’s age to meet the quarters’ official retirement age of twenty-seven.41 Several senryu refer to the age of twenty-eight not only as the first full year of a woman’s life back in regular society, but also as a time of specific actions, which were small but socially powerful changes a woman made to her body that publicly altered her social identity from courtesan to ordinary person (heimin). One senryu puts it thus: “When a courtesan turns twenty-eight, she can wear socks—at last!” (Keisei wa nijuhachi ni yatto tabi).42 Reflecting their low status in the official Tokugawa social order, courtesans did not wear split-toed socks (tabi) with their sandals, as did townswomen. In the earliest days of the Yoshiwara, courtesans went completely barefoot. Footwear eventually became a stylish accessory, but they were still worn without tabi.43 The uncovered foot was a common marker of social hierarchy and not exclusive to courtesans. Other contractual employees laboring low on the social ladder, such as servants in households, both female and male, also did not wear socks.44 Retirement, however, allowed a woman to slip socks back on and publicly identify herself as possessing normal status. Another senryu observes, “At twenty-eight, both your world and your forehead widen” (Shaba mo hitai mo hirb naru nijuhachi).45 The widening of the forehead refers to the practice of shaving the eyebrows upon retirement, thus giving the appearance of a larger forehead. Since courtesans were typically not allowed to leave the quarter during employment, retirement not only led to a “wide” shaved forehead, but also to the wide world outside the walls.
Shaving the eyebrows was a sign of female social maturation and status. Another was blackening the teeth (haguro) upon engagement or marriage. Kitagawa Utamaro captured the contrast well in a print simply titled Mother and Daughter (Haha to musume) portraying a daughter with full brows looking upon her mother’s hairless face as the older woman applies blackening to her teeth.46 In the absence of brows, wives used brow blackening, especially after applying formal makeup. Among the long list of items Namura catalogs for a woman to take into marriage are implements for blackening teeth, ink and brush for drawing on brows, and a razor for shaving brows and fine hair on the forehead.47 With these tools a woman constructed a social body that acknowledged
Her status and sexuality as that of a wife. In sharp contrast, not unlike the young daughter of Utamaro’s print, courtesans were conspicuous with their white teeth and unshaved eyebrows. Light trimming of the brows was acceptable, but courtesans were encouraged to follow a “less is more” principle of beauty. Fujimoto Kizan (1626—1704), author of The Great Mirror of the Erotic Way (Shikido okagami), a 1678 dandy’s guide and etiquette book on the pleasure quarters, cautions that too much plucking of brows and use of blackening leaves a woman unattractive to her clients.48 This emphasis on beauty is based on not looking like shaved, ink-smeared townswomen (machi no onna).49 Leaving the brow’s unshaved created a different social body that embraced a markedly different role and set of sexual values. In this way, both fertility and pleasure moralists were sensitive to the body as an expression of particular morals via particular constructions of external beauty.50 Fujimoto notes such awareness in the contemporary custom of Shimabara’s courtesans of shaving their eyebrows the night before departure.51
This concern with women’s eyebrows prompts us to look upon them as a type of hair symbolism. Deliberate cutting of hair is a ubiquitous, pan-cultural act marking transition in social status and identity.52 In Japanese religious history the most conspicuous example is the shaved pate of a tonsured Buddhist monk or nun. Symbolism, however, does not depend on quantity for its evocative power. Historically, Japanese women have had preliminary, and even temporary, options available to them on the nun’s path—whether or not they chose to walk toward ordination and tonsure—that required them simply to cut short, rather than shave off, their hair.53 Bobbed rather than bald, such women still stood apart from ordinary women both visually and in the sexual values they and their distinct hair reflected—celibacy and distance from men. Similarly, the removal or nonremoval of even small lines of hair growth above the eyes resonated inside the chamber of Tokugawa sexual values. Hair symbolism is diverse. To make a categorical statement about it is to assure that a categorical refutation, via a single contrary example, is near at hand. Still, risking one’s own warning, longer or unadorned hair tends to reflect to some degree being outside the norms of society, and adorning and styling, pulling up, cutting, or removing hair tends to signify either initiation into/reentering the norms of society or living under a particularly strict and disciplined subset of rules in society.54 This characterization of hair symbolism is relevant in gaining perspective on why models of fertility and pleasure, in their constructions of social bodies, paid so much attention to so little hair. Eyebrows may be small wisps of hair, but their symbolism can be comparatively large. Women’s eyebrows took in the disparate meanings of multiple sexual values in Tokugawa culture and magnified them again in the ritualized activity of women either conspicuously beautifying them or shaving them off completely. The presence of hair above a courtesan’s eyes amplified, more than any sex act possibly could, her status from the norms and women outside the quarter. Like a wife, her sexual activity was a private act, even if publicly sanctioned and purchased, but her eyebrows were a public symbol of her status and role. Her eyebrows expressed the private act, the public role, and the valuation of both. Reentering ordinary society and its orientation toward a different set of values encouraged a retiring courtesan, at some point, to remove her carefully crafted eyebrows. As public symbol, the loss of hair above the eyes stated her separation from her outsider status as play lover to many men. A hairless forehead also symbolized her cultural preparedness, like that of many women her age, to limit her sexuality to one man and one household.
The preparation of clothes prior to departing her quarter also spoke of reorientation from pleasure and reentering wider society. Bordello custom and a woman’s rank determined the dispensing of clothes and bedding acquired during a courtesan’s career. A lower-ranking woman retiring with few kimono and accessories might take them with her upon retirement if she so chose, but a woman of higher status and reputation possessed not only many items, but also was involved in many layers of human relations within the quarter, such as with the teahouse staff, her bordello family, and her own entourage of teens and young girls. In the rounds of gift giving that were required upon a ranking courtesan’s retirement, donating her clothes and other items to staff members, her entourage, and friends was one way of meeting her farewell obliga-tions.55 The clothes and bedding a woman had purchased and received throughout her professional years reflected, like her eyebrows, the status and the valuation of her sexuality in the model of pleasure. The ritual language of customarily giving away one’s acquired finery upon retirement was acknowledgment that they had no place outside a courtesan’s life. This language was also echoed in the round of gift giving marking a woman’s departure when she, upon giving away her old clothes, received one or more new kimono depending on the wishes of her employer or redeemer. According to The Great Mirror of the Erotic Way, these new clothes should come from her bordello owner, her clients, or, if her contract was being redeemed, from the paying patron.56 The latter was under obligation to outfit her appropriately for an ordinary life with him outside the quarter. Appropriate to this exit into ordinariness, Fujimoto notes that the new clothing should reflect weaving patterns governing the rules of ordinary life (heizei hatto) rather than those of the floating world. He suggests the popular striped pattern called kanoko, which, with her shaved brows, would transform the former courtesan’s appearance into the very model of a commoner woman.57 On her last night in the Shimabara, she would visit her old teahouse of assignation to say farewell to the owner and staff. Shaved and cloaked in commoner clothing, and in so doing having moved from one side of her perspec-tival boundary to another, she would stand before her colleagues not as a courtesan but as an ordinary woman.
Retirement practices of shaving the eyebrows and changing clothes could take on additional meaning when a patron paid off a woman’s contract. This purchase usually totaled the remaining debt on the woman’s term of service plus any additional costs. The redemption price went up proportionately with the woman’s rank, popularity, and her owner’s inclination to pad her price. The contract Wato signed in selling Yasu states that if an interested party wished to take Yasu as a wife, concubine, or adopted daughter, then her contract could be bought out and her employment terminated.58 Yasu’s consent, significantly, had to be obtained for the sale of her contract. The document includes the phrase “upon the woman’s satisfaction” (joshi mo tokushin no ue) as a condition to purchasing her contract.59 With the backing of legal contracts—minus any coercion from their owners angling for a better deal—courtesans held some measure of control over a portion of their fates. They possessed legal authority to decline offers from clients either in hopes of better choices in the future or in determination to finish their terms of service and leave on their own terms. In this manner, a daughter toiling away in erotic labor legally had more authority over her destiny than a daughter (or son) in the household, who had no legal authority concerning decisions about her life. A woman accepting an offer of contractual redemption may have received, in addition to a new set of clothes appropriate for life on the outside of pleasure, a headdress called watahoshi, according to the rules of courtesy in The Great Mirror of the Erotic Way.60 This headdress had different colors and functions. Many brides wore a white watahoshi on their wedding day, but women also sported them in public as conventional headwear, and these came in a variety of colors such as red, purple, light blue, and saffron.61 Whether white bridal wear or colorful daily wear, it was meant to be worn outside of the quarter as a statement of a woman’s new identity. Torii Kiyonaga (1752—1815) depicts such a woman leaving her palanquin and entering the house of her new husband in a 1786 work (fig. 13). She is conspicuous in her commonness. She dons a wataboshi, and, unlike her porters, whose bare feet signal their lowly status as laborers, she walks toward her new home wearing tabi like any ordinary woman.
Other parallels signifying the transformative change of the exit experiences of brides and courtesans existed. A Yoshiwara courtesan likely washed her feet at the quarter’s well, located near the Inari tutelary shrine, prior to her departure.62 Such a practice was in line with a wider number of actions and symbols focusing on the feet and soil as measures of one’s place and role. Since place and role were malleable markers for women at critical points in the life cycle, it is not surprising that this reservoir of ritual and symbol involving aspects of the feet—and the dirt one’s feet pick up as one moves from one place to another—often centered on women in the process of change. This is particularly true of brides. Interpreting the “feet and dirt” of brides helps us understand the ritual context of a courtesan’s foot washing. Placing one’s feet on the new ground of a husband’s household demanded ritual attention to keep intact the distinction between the place and role of daughter and daughter-in-law. The idea that where one puts her feet grounds who she is
Figure 13 A now former courtesan is dropped off at her new home. From an original reproduction of Torii Kiyonaga’s illustration by Mitani Kazuma. Courtesy of Rippu Shob5, Tokyo.
Finds various expression in marriage rituals. Among the betrothal gifts Sashida lists in his diary are two pairs of tabt and two pairs of straw sandals.63 Similarly, Namura lists footwear among many things a bride might bring with her in marriage.64 The literal idea expressed in the gift of new footwear is not to mix the dust on one’s old sandals with the ground of a new husband’s household. The phrase “pollution from the bottom” (shita kara no kegare) captures this idea well,65 and it reveals more than an aversion to dirty feet or footwear. It suggests an aversion to dirt’s carriers—shoes and thus the people who wear them—being out of place, crossing boundaries, and threatening the social order. Dirt is simply another name for something out of place and thus a threat to the social order and the way it systematizes things based on cultural notions of purity and pollution or, in the Japanese context, hare and kegare.66 Making a symbolic line of association between the need to distinguish one set of ground, sandals, and role from another set in marriage customs acts on the same source of unease as death symbolism in weddings: the anxiety of bridal return. Certainly many women stayed close to their families throughout their marriages by making frequent visits to their natal homes, but the symbolism suggests a cultural anxiety that perceived both a bounded order separating natal and marriage homes and a potentially unbounded bride. She posed the risk of encroaching boundaries with an ease and recurrence that could contribute to strains and disorder between her and her marriage household. Although new sandals suggest a hope for order and household harmony, they also intimate a fear of becoming worn and dirty from a wife never staying in place because she crosses, with too much frequency and informality, the boundary between natal and marriage homes and between daughter and daughter-in-law.
The symbolic association linking feet and footwear, the crossing of boundaries, and the change of role and identity may be seen in Toku-gawa divorce temples as well. The bakufu granted only two convents— Tokeiji and Mantokuji—the authority to mediate female-initiated divorce as long as the woman’s claim was just and she agreed to live the austere life of a nun until her suit was concluded. Each temple claimed historical ties to shogunal power and prestige, which made them powerful institutions straddling the border of both religious and governmental authority. A wife seeking sanctuary from her husband in either convent was entitled to protection from him as long as her sandals or any article of clothing or accessory attached to her body could be tossed ahead of her inside the temple’s gate.67 Whether or not a woman actually threw her sandals ahead of her to escape the clutches of a pursuing husband, such an action was grounded in the ritual logic that symbolically spoke to the real political authority of divorce temples. This is captured in a painting of Mantokuji that has become iconographic. It shows a wife attempting to rush into the open gate of the temple, throwing her sandals ahead of her into the convent’s grounds just as her pursuing husband’s hands are about to grasp her hair.68 Footwear was not simply a covering for one’s feet or a sign of one’s role, but was also an extension of the social body that, depending on the situation and needs of a woman, held the promise (of a bride) or the threat (of a woman seeking divorce) of changing loyalties, ties, and places.
Washing of the feet was also employed in some localities as a ritual for welcoming brides, and it functioned in the same symbolic manner as the removal of old sandals. Certain customs called for washing the bride’s feet on her wedding day as a way of removing “pollution from the bottom” by placing her feet in a water basin upon her entrance into the husband’s house.69 A courtesan washing her feet on the occasion of departing the quarter exhibited the same symbolic effect of status change as did a bride changing her footwear or washing her feet upon entering a household. In the case of a courtesan, the ritual practice of washing the feet (ashi arai) was tied to upward status change: she moved upward from an “outcast” class back into normal society. I enclose “outcast” in quotes because even though courtesans officially existed below the four classes of Tokugawa society—warrior, farmer, artisan, and merchant—which by definition made them hinin (non-persons) and therefore outcasts from the rest of society, their actual status was much more ambiguous. They labored under contracts with a set retirement deadline, which thus made them legally equal to laborers in ordinary society who toiled under the demanding strictures but ultimate promise of their contracts. The hinin were made up of a variety of people and occupations. Some of these occupations, most notably those of the eta—people who effectively constituted a caste of laboring families whose work was deemed polluting— were inherited. Other people, however, such as courtesans and those given hinin status as a form of legal punishment, were recognized as constituting a temporary, nonhereditary hinin class with various options available for moving back into the world of ordinary people (heimin).70 It is this sort of upward move—not simply one of status, but also one of social cleanliness—to which ashi arai as a term and as a practice generally refers. The practice of Yoshiwara courtesans washing the quarter’s dirt from their feet upon retirement and moving out from the actual ground and social role of prostitution reflected the same ritual and symbolic logic of bridal footwear and foot washing. The simple gesture of pouring water on the feet evoked an order of social classifications and boundaries of persons in Tokugawa society. Though the Yoshiwara could be a muddy place due to its marshy location, the “mud” a woman washed from her feet was less the literal mud of a marsh than the social mud of a role and its values. By washing it away, a retiring courtesan washed away a role and value system that was no longer a part of her life. Keeping the mud in its own place, she moved out and headed for a new one.
World History
