Although betrothal and departure accomplished the task of placing a daughter in the home of another family that she would ideally serve throughout her life, they also suggested ambivalence about such a onesided move. These cracks of uncertainty had the potential to split when wives chose to turn away from their husbands and in-laws and return home. The successful exit from a husband’s home and resolution of conflict could be accomplished through time, patience, bullying, or, as I examine here, the strategic use of available institutions, rituals, and symbols. Women in the quarters, like some wives in their husbands’ homes, also took advantage of rituals and symbols when they found their situation intolerable and contemplated flight. Unapproved departures from both household and quarter fell outside the ritual mechanics of fertility and pleasure models. Fertility idealized a wife’s role as permanent, and, with the exception of customary, ritually timed excursions, such as returning home after her nuptials, the model revealed a sense of anxiety toward a wife exiting on her own initiative and inclinations. Likewise, pleasure had a ritual structure for approved and timely exits only upon retirement or contractual buyout. Neither model possessed any sanctioned practice of a woman initiating premature departure. This absence turns our attention toward institutions, subversive symbols, ritual practices, and juridical processes scattered throughout the social and cultural landscape in which women attempted to escape roles and places they did not wish to occupy.
With the exception of the severely limited institution of divorce temples, of which there were only two, other forms of symbolic and strategic behavior are less easy to grasp historically. Much of this is due to their being in a different and shadowy category than the more public ritual and documented practices we have seen thus far in marriage, first meeting, pregnancy, betrothal, and retirement. Contrary to these practices, hopes of escape and the ritual activity and symbols tied to them were often either intensely individual or strategically conspiratorial and involving another person or group, such as a love interest or one’s family. The two sanctioned divorce temples, whose fame for mediation in terminating marriages was known far outside their immediate locales, however, stand in contrast to this historical enshroudment.71 Their presence in society represents in some ways the institutional and juridical, and thus controlled, legitimization of broader and murkier forms of female strategies and practices. All functionally acted, however, to initiate desired change in a woman’s life that, depending on the practice, either rode roughshod over (divorce) or slipped quietly past (escaping the quarters) the values of fertility and pleasure. Further, as a group, these practices are distinguished by “ritualizing.” Ritualizing is a deliberate and self-initiated practice falling outside the boundary and legitimacy of mainstream institutions and actions. It is ritual practiced “in the margins, on the thresholds” of society in the face of real and immediate needs.72 Whether practiced in the confines of a convent, at the base of a tree, or at a small shrine in the corner of a quarter, plots to escape were always, both by definition and by the social and legal makeup of Tokugawa Japan, peripheral activities. Ritualizing entails a variety of purposeful, strategic activities in which women could engage to effect departures that were as much individually desired as they were, in some cases, illegal, and in others officially sanctioned but never officially recommended.
These ritualizing practices make up a broad complex that centered on cutting social relations between individuals or between an individual and her group. In Japanese this complex is known as enkiri shinko (cutting-ties faith). Shinko (faith) may include notions of explicit religious belief and confession, but typically it involves reliance on ritual, addressing situational and concrete concerns, and an experimental, trial-and-error approach to see what works to address real and pressing needs.73 In this sense it is better to think of shinko as a “working faith.” The faith aspect suggests the hope of the participant in realizing the goal of her aspirations; the working aspect directs attention to ritual activities and symbolic behavior in which the person engaged as a response to her faith in attaining a goal. Shinko is activity that faithfully seeks definite results for the betterment of one’s life, usually understood to mean measurable improvement in this present life by gaining worldly benefits. The varied practices examined in the previous chapter dealing with safe birth may be thought of as anzan shinko (safe-birth faith), with the benefit being uneventful birth and the mother’s full recovery.
In the case of wives and courtesans who hoped to make an unapproved departure from the household and quarter through various actions of shinko, the benefits they sought were divorce and successful escape. The actions and results of enkiri shinko sat stubbornly opposite those of the rites of marriage and debut or first meeting, which were forms of another working faith called enmusubi shinko (creating-ties faith). The latter were formal, public rituals of celebration that tied not only a woman and man in a fixed relation, but also individuals to a larger collectivity such as a household or bordello. Enkiri is the antipode of enmusubi, the private conspiracy against public celebration. It represents symbols and actions, ranging from the juridical and magical to the divine and deceptive, that take place at the margins of society, on the underside of values, and in the face of celebratory rituals. This takes place at the margins of society when wives leave the center of their official identity—their husbands’ households—to effect divorce, and when courtesans pray in small, unlucky corners of the quarter to help them in their schemes to flee. It happens on the underside of values because these practices openly reject the values of fertility and pleasure. It takes place in the face of celebratory ritual because the actions of individual wives and courtesans attempt to tear asunder what enmusubi rites have brought together.
Escape from the household
Among commoners the power of unilateral divorce possessed by the husband’s household was one form of discipline that the man and his family could employ to threaten a woman whose behavior was not in line with that of the household. Among the warrior class divorce required consent from both families, negotiated settlement, and notification of the shogunate before finalization.74 Thus it is in the world of commoners that the right of divorce resting with the husband—which has long been viewed as one the clearest indicators of the dearth of female authority in the Tokugawa—was legally salient and practiced. This lack of female authority did not, however, leave women without options or prerogatives to reverse the power husbands and their households possessed. Actually, for many women the problem of legal prerogative in the hands of their husbands was less in the right to divorce than in the right not to divorce. A woman unhappy with her marriage and wanting out could try to make her husband and in-laws miserable with her behavior and thus hasten a divorce decree. In this way the fertility model’s seven classic reasons for divorce may also be seen as a conspiratorial blueprint for a woman to use in making her household wretched enough to divorce her. Divorce decrees are good sources for understanding the diverse human dramas produced by divorce among commoners in the Tokugawa period. Popularly called mikudarihan (three and a half lines), writs of divorce were often no longer than this, simply stated a reason for the divorce, and were signed by both the husband and wife. Many made clear through phrases such as “selfish” (wagamama) “ill suited” (fusd) and “misconduct” (fugydseki) that a wife’s bad behavior, whether strategically planned or not, had a direct impact on her loss of marital status.75 Although an unwanted divorce could be costly for a woman in terms of lost status and possible humiliation for her family, many women still desired it. Indeed, as divorce temples and their housing costs indicate, women were willing to pay for divorce through their own and natal families’ finances.76 Thus one dilemma that a woman had to overcome was not when a husband divorced her, but when he chose not to do so. Husbands and their households not only possessed the right of enkiri, but also by logical extension the right to keep the marriage ties, the right to maintain enmusubi. All the options available to women— juridical and institutional and devotional and magical—attempted to shift some of the power of enkiri to a woman’s corner. With this she could try to counteract her husband’s prerogative of enmusubi.
The most conspicuous options were the divorce temples of Tokeiji and Mantokuji. Tokeiji was founded in 1285 as a Zen nunnery in Kamakura.77 Mantokuji’s origins are less clear. A warrior descended from the shogunal Minamoto line, Nitta Yoshisue (d. 1246), purportedly founded it in the province of Kozuke. Beside their common function in mediating divorce, Mantokuji and Tokeiji also both were closely associated with the ruling Tokugawa family, from which much of their institutional authority derived. This is particularly true of Mantokuji. Many of its abbesses, as well as financial donations, came from the women’s quarters (doku) of the shogunate.78 Futher, leyasu claimed it as his ancestral temple in 1591 as a political bid to tie his family name to that of the temple’s founder, Yoshisue, and, through him, Minamoto Yoritomo, the founder of the country’s first shogunate, the Kamakura bakufu.79 leyasu’s funerary tablets were installed in Mantokuji’s main hall. They stood, until the passing of the shogunate, as a powerful symbol of the small temple’s political clout.80
In their capacity to mediate divorce, the convents were known as “cutting-ties temples” (enkiridera). Upon entering one of the convents a wife initiated a divorce suit against her husband, with temple authorities acting as mediator between her family and her husband. If efforts to get a husband to sign a writ of divorce through the office of the temple failed, Tokeiji initially required a woman to reside there for three years, after which she would be considered divorced and could leave to renew her life, but in the 1740s it reduced this period of service effectively to twenty-four months.81 Mantokuji required twenty-five months.82 However, apart from being nunneries, their function of mediating female-initiated divorce was not unique in Tokugawa society. Other institutions were available for a woman to house herself and pursue a claim against her husband. Such institutions were imbued with localized or extraterritorial power and included homes of daimyd retainers, offices and personal residences of magistrates, the homes of village heads, and even priest-run temples.83 Further, within each convent the legal process of divorce was handled by male secular authorities and largely separate from the daily devotional activities of the nunnery and its women, both tonsured nuns and wives seeking divorce.84
Rather than examining divorce temples as a Buddhist phenomenon, one may view them as reflecting a larger complex of similarly functioning institutions and practices of female-initiated enkiri. This wider view clarifies the dynamics of power and practice of divorce in a society where the values of fertility, particularly that of wifely obedience, were heavily idealized. Whether through a divorce temple, a magistrate’s house, the brute intervention of one’s family, or the practice of ritual magic, the quantifiable goal of a wife’s enkiri was to obtain a writ of divorce from her husband. These various methods available to a woman with hopes of gaining a divorce from her husband suggest a dynamic of power in which the execution of power by a group or individual lies in “guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome.”85 Because the authority to write a divorce notice and have the wife cosign it lay with the husband, a woman who wanted a divorce from an uncooperative spouse needed to take action to force or direct the power of her husband to write out a notice. This dynamic of a wife forcing her husband to wield his authority was at the heart of female-initiated enkiri.
With each temple’s connection to shogunal authority, a woman rushing into either Mantokuji or Tokeiji was entering into one of many satellites branching off from the center of power in Edo. Herman Ooms identifies the period phrase “go to Edo” as one invested with great meaning.86 It implied a desire to seek justice as well as the knowledge of how to make justice work by traveling to Edo and engaging the sources of power for righting assumed wrongs. It was, as Ooms argues in his embrace of Bourdieu, a rhetorical and practical use of the “habitus”—a feel for and know-how of the rules of the social game—of the Toku-gawa juridical field.87 To “go to Edo” so as to rectify one’s situation may be understood also in the context of divorce temples, especially given their close association with bakufu power. A woman rushing into either Mantokuji or Tokeiji was rushing into an extended power center of Edo. She did not need to go to the city of Edo to rectify a claim against her husband because “Edo”—in this sense the opportunity to petition authority and gain for herself a sense of justice served—existed within the grounds of the nunneries. Other ad-hoc institutions of sanctuary and divorce, such as the homes of retainers, magistrates, and village headmen, also represented localized extensions of national, provincial, and village power.88 Despite the presence of institutions literally within sight of Mantokuji that also served as a refuge and offered divorce mediation, women who could afford it preferred the temple, presumably because of its known connection to Tokugawa power sources.89 This preference indicates the knowledge and sense—the habitus—that individuals possessed and employed in the hopes of making the juridical system work in their favor. Entrance into a divorce temple or another place of refuge did not itself guarantee a divorce.90 Nevertheless, it changed power relations almost immediately. Upon entering a place of recognized power, a woman was in the position to bargain in a manner that was not available to her outside such a power center. As indicated by the symbols of the constancy of family ties in betrothal, divorce brought a woman’s family actively to the forefront to represent her. Although the wife initiated proceedings with her decision to seek refuge, it was her family that acted on her behalf as it negotiated with her husband and his family through the office of the temple or other place of refuge. In this way, divorce was the reverse of betrothal: families came together not to negotiate enmu-subi, but rather enkiri. Still, a daughter’s decision, which was evidence of her sense of how the juridical system worked, moved a private conflict (between her and her husband and in-laws) into the public sphere— indeed, into the very heart of local political power—and created a broader conflict that now involved her family. Fertility’s behavioral ideals of tashinami immediately fell into inconsequence, and restoration of order took precedence. Order was the paramount concern of local authorities, who, as representatives of provincial and national power, were responsible for adjudicating claims of conflict and contradiction between spouses and households.91
The public, conflicting, and contradictory nature of divorce is captured in a late-Tokugawa case, which is valuable in itself because some of the documents were written by the female petitioner herself, a very unhappy wife named Kane who sought sanctuary in Tokeiji in the autumn of 1850. Her writings, when read in the light of fertility values and their idealization of the nobility of patience, stand in sharp contrast to the letter that Uesugi wrote to his granddaughter urging patience, introspection, and unfailing faith in her new husband. Kane made public her hatred of her husband, Kanjiro, and his behavior, which, assuming that her words are true, was horrendous. He was physically abusive, tried to force her into private prostitution, harangued her to get money from her family, and pawned parts of her dowry. On the other hand, Kanjiro strongly defended himself against these charges by asserting that Kane was hardly the victim she claimed to be. He filed a countersuit with the local magistrate two months later accusing her, among other things, of having an affair with a village neighbor. Because so many documents of divorce temples have been lost, the case of Kane and Kanjiro unfortunately ends with his countersuit.92 We can assume Kane, if she were ultimately successful in her claim, resided in the convent for Toke-iji’s required duration of service given Kanjiro’s adamant refusal to back down.
This conflict, or its potential, was not isolated to the realm of jurisprudence and the need to assert social order, just as it was not isolated only to divorce temples. It was played out as well through the context of household needs, ritual practice, and engagement with symbols. The issues involving household and marriage, pregnancy and children, and patterns of symbolic activity discussed throughout this study come to the forefront in many divorce notices. Examples of actual divorces serve to highlight how some of these issues lie scattered on the field of broken marriages.
The burdensome privilege of maintaining the household sometimes played a role in divorce. In 1842 the natal family of a woman named Oiyo acted to help her divorce her husband. As his writ of divorce states, she and her family desired that she return home. Her brother had died and left no heir, and thus it was incumbent upon her to return to her natal home and assist in some manner with maintaining the household.93 As mentioned in chapter 3, temporary female headship was one means of maintaining a household. Perhaps headship was Oiyo’s destiny, or her return home may have been made in anticipation of securing an adopted son-in-law for her to marry and who would then become official head.94 In another 1842 divorce notice we can glean a strange but telling twist on the centrality of household and marriage. A young man named Tora-goro sought sanctuary at a local official’s house in the vicinity of Manto-kuji and demanded a divorce from his new wife, Tomi. Although as husband he officially possessed unilateral authority to divorce her, he chose instead to follow a female pattern and sue for divorce from a position of sanctuary. No evidence in the writ is given, but it is likely that while he may have been unhappy with his new wife, his parents were happy with her dowry and did not want to lose it through divorce.95 A dowry was a woman’s own. While it contributed to the overall material wealth of a husband’s household, it remained legally hers and would be taken with her in divorce. In this capacity, though, a wife and her family might use some of her dowry to pay off a husband and his family in order to get a quick letter of divorce.96 This indicates that a husband and his family, once put in a corner, also were familiar with the juridical game and could play it to get something out of potentially nothing.
Children and pregnancy sometimes played roles in the drama of divorce. Among commoners, the right of custody was generally the province of husbands, although in practice many different arrangements were made.97 This may be seen through divorce as well. An 1839 miku-darihan from Mino Province shows that a man named Sadasuke divorced his pregnant wife, Hii. In the notice he added an amendment stating that when Hii gave birth he would take custody of the child.98 Another case involved a pregnant petitioner at Mantokuji named Taki. She was one of only three women who sought refuge there known to have been the mothers of young children. She received a divorce through the temple in 1853. In the divorce agreement she gave up custody of her daughters to her husband, Ichiemon, and in return he agreed that Taki could keep the child she was carrying.99 Since Ichiemon was an adopted son-in-law, he moved out of Taki’s family home and took the daughters back to his father’s house. A wife living in her own natal home with an adopted son-in-law as husband, as was the case with Taki, had to seek refuge in order to initiate a divorce against him if he was not willing to write a notice of separation and sign it. The situation must have been terribly awkward for everyone involved, but an adopted son-in-law had his and his own natal family’s claim to represent in case of divorce, especially when a child—considered a precious commodity—was involved. Possibly due to his desire to keep his daughters, Ichiemon did not write out a divorce form immediately. Such a delay would have forced Taki to leave her own home and seek refuge in order to get him to act on her wishes. In this way, a wife taking refuge could work in the husband’s favor to produce a situation where he could then negotiate for something, such as children, in return for the divorce notice the woman so eagerly sought.
Divorce also produced many types of symbolic practices both within its juridical expression and in more obvious forms of ritual expression. Cutting was a salient action in many such practices. Returning to Sada-suke’s divorce of Hii, either he, his wife, or someone involved in the process made a cut between their two names on the divorce notice.100 Cutting (ktrij was the root metaphor of several symbolic practices tied to divorce—the cutting of ties, or enkiri. Hair is again an important example. Although women seeking divorce through convents lived the lifestyle of nuns, they did not receive tonsure. As with other preliminary and temporary stages on the nun’s path, nuns in divorce temples cut their hair short.101 Short hair symbolized their liminal status. They were not quite wives, and yet they were not nuns; they were through with their marriage, and yet they were not in possession of a letter of divorce. Cutting hair, however, was not only a sign of unclear status, but could also, conversely, be a sign of clear intention. Kane, for example, urged Kanjiro many times to write out a divorce notice before she finally sought refuge in Tokeiji. Prior to this final move she had left him to return to her own home and forwarded him a letter again requesting a divorce in which she placed hairpins and strands of hair she had cut.102 She hoped, although in the end to no avail, that the act of cutting off locks of her hair would be a powerful statement that her commitment to be rid of him was stronger than his commitment to remain with her. Similarly, in 1762 a woman named Miyo became ill and wanted to seclude herself by receiving a divorce and returning home. She shaved her head and left on her own. After this action, her husband quickly agreed to write her a divorce notice. He later discovered from an associate familiar with his ex-wife’s hometown that she had indeed taken vows and become a tonsured nun.103
Another cluster of practices marking clear intention and sharing in the metaphor of cutting also existed. We know little about them because, unlike cutting hair and seeking sanctuary in institutions of vested authority, they were shadowy and secretive. Still, they were strategic actions that sought to alter a husband’s power to maintain enmusuhi and effect enkiri. A passage relating the 1749 bridal procession of a princess, Isono-miya, on her way to wed into the Tokugawa family in Edo states that when the party passed by a particular tree at Itabashi on the Nakasendo highway, two people familiar with the area advised the procession to detour and not pass in front of the tree. As the writer records, this tree was known by many names, but its reputation was the same: women and men passing by it in wedding processions would suffer very brief marriage ties.104 In 1804 another princess and her procession party also decided to bypass this tree on her way to Edo to wed.105 This problematic tree was a nettle or hackberry (enoki). The tree and others of its species offered a powerful symbol of cutting ties. Unlike the princesses, who decided to avoid the tree, women who hoped for divorce embraced the symbol of the nettle tree because of its of ruinous reputation.106 A senryu describes this reputation as follows: “One goes to Itabashi to give thanks for the divorce letter” (Itabashi e mikudarihan no reimari).107 This poem uses the term reimairi to indicate visiting the nettle tree, which typically refers to visiting a shrine or temple to give thanks to the deity for prayers answered. Equating the tree with a temple or shrine visit suggests that reputable nettle trees operated in a manner common to a class of sacred places in Japan, such as trees, stones, and other natural phenomena, that are recognized and visited for their power to bring about beneficial results in people’s lives. They become a kind of “ecographic” space: natural settings assumed to have significance that people engage through ritual actions, both simple and complex.108 Often these natural objects in Japan are spatially segregated through the use of ropes and festoons of paper called shimenawa. By the Meiji period the nettle tree came to be represented on ema (wooden votive tablets upon which one writes her prayer or request) as surrounded by sacred rope and praying women attempting to effect enkiri.109
While the presence of votive tablets depicting nettle trees suggests a degree of institutionalization of divorce devotionalism by at least the Meiji period, various Tokugawa-period senryu also show evidence of devotional and ritual activity centered around nettle trees. One gives a specific idea on how some women used the tree to effect divorce: “When you pray to rend your tie, strip the bark from the nettle tree” (Namaki saku gan wa enoki no kawa o muki).110 The symbolic act of separating bark from tree suggests the desired effect of separating a wife from her husband’s household. Another interpretation also intimates a practice of magical efficacy. After peeling bark from the tree and taking it home with her, a woman would then grind it into a powder and slip it into the food she had prepared for her husband. Ingesting the bark of a tree noted for its power of shortening relationships would prove efficacious in altering a husband’s desire to stay in the relationship.111 Although dependence on prayer and magical properties are qualitatively different actions than that of seeking sanctuary in a convent, they all speak of the same working faith (shinko) in achieving separation. In this common spirit of shinko, several senryu compare the nettle tree and Tokeiji, often through a play on the word “pine” (matsu) as a metaphor for Tokeiji. In literature, the convent is referred to as Matsugaoka, which is the name of the hilly, pine-covered area surrounding the temple. This use of pine is especially effective not only in linking the convent to the enoki tree, but also in showing that while the practice of faith is varied, the substance of faith —the hope of divorce—is not. One poem states, “First the nettle tree— if this won’t cut, then try the pine” (Mazu enoki sore de ikanu to matsu de kiri).112 Another poem, implying that devotion to the divorce tree is a readily convenient and cheaper option, creates a parallel between the convent and the tree by playing on the notion of rushing into a nunnery to seek sanctuary. “Rather than the far away pine, try rushing to the nettle tree” (Tooi matsu yori enoki e kakete miru).113
This last senryu suggests the impracticality of divorce temples for most women seeking to cut marriage ties. Not only were the convents few and far between, but they were also costly. A stay of a few weeks, let alone two or three years, required a substantial financial commitment from a woman and her family. Nettle-tree ritual, while presumably largely ineffective compared to divorce temples, was widely available and free. Still, nettle worship and other forms of ritualizing, such as cutting hair, as we saw with Kane and Miyo, were not driven simply by convenience and economics, but rather as one part of an array of practices that a woman might attempt in her life. In the end, cutting hair, cutting strips of bark, and cutting losses and running to a convent were practiced on the same working faith that sought to gain the benefit of better days ahead.
Escape from pleasure
Some women in the quarters also sought to secure the benefit of a better future through symbols and practices available to them within the walls of pleasure. Although the Yoshiwara, along with the Shimabara and Shinmachi, was typically considered a glittering island of style and panache in the dreary, gray seas of Confucian social order, the attention to symbols and practices that it shared with the wider society obscured the shoreline between island and sea. At the same time, the fact that religious symbols coexisted at both the periphery and in the center is evidence of the ability of Japanese religion to make graphic the heterogeneity of society and the multiplicity of values. Further, with respect to the quarters, its religious symbols could sometimes promote both the corporate concerns of bordellos for profit through paid sex and the individual concerns of courtesans to cut ties and escape. In the Yoshiwara, no symbol embraced this kind of heterogeneity more than Kurosuke Inari, the quarter’s tutelary deity (chinju).
As one manifestation of the popular cult of the deity Inari, Kuro-suke’s history and symbology is tied to that deity. Inari worship originally spread throughout the country from its western base at Kyoto’s Fushimi Shrine. It became particularly popular in eastern Japan and in the city of Edo when the western daimyo, under the system of sankin kotai that required all daimyo to set up second residences in Edo, brought Inari worship to the city by establishing secondary shrines within the spacious precincts of their new homes. Peripatetic ritual specialists and healers also helped spread Inari throughout the country.114 This diffusion fit the urbanization of the early modern period, which Edo emphatically epitomized. In the cities a tutelary deity did not encompass an entire population, as it might in a village, but instead represented an urban subdivision and functioned as the religious and social center for that particular population.115 Inari found a home as a tutelary deity in a number of Edo’s burgeoning subdivisions, including the Yoshiwara.
Mythology in the Yoshiwara traced a different history. Its founding myth of Kurosuke reaches back to the year 711, when a farmer named Chiba Kurosuke began to worship Inari in his rice field.116 The year is significant to the official mythology of Inari as constructed by the Fushimi Grand Shrine. On the first day of the horse in the second month of 711, the god is said to have alighted on Inari Mountain, where its worship and name first originated.117 This day, called hatsu-uma, became the fete day of Inari at all Fushimi-sponsored shrines throughout Japan, including Kurosuke’s shrine. Kurosuke’s myth states that on Chiba’s rice paddies a black fox and white fox descended from heaven as Inari’s messengers.118 The black fox landed on the footpaths between the paddies, and the farmer recognized the animal as highly auspicious. He established a small shrine on the footpath and began making offerings. Soon the god gained a reputation for answering all pleas made to it. Nine centuries later, when the Yoshiwara was built on the same spot where tradition claimed that Chiba Kurosuke first worshiped Inari, the quarter erected a small shrine to the kami making it its tutelary deity. When a conflagration consumed Edo in 1657, the Yoshiwara moved from its original location to a more remote area to keep it separate from the rebuilding of a still expanding city. Pleasure’s proprietors also brought Kurosuke into this new location.119
Edo eventually enveloped this new locale as well, but by this stage of development the Yoshiwara and its surroundings, including the great Buddhist temple of Sensoji, had become an integral component of commoner culture and of profitable and popular festivals and entertainments. As a sign of the deity’s popularity and the Yoshiwara’s widening influence on the cultural life of the city, with its famed festivals, Kurosuke Inari and its shrine received the honorary sobriquet of first-rank revered deity (Shoichii Kurosuke Inari daimyojin), which is a designation typical of Inari shrines. The history behind Kurosuke gaining this title is not clear. One period source, For Your Amusement and Pleasure (Kiyu shoran), states that the title was granted in 1734 as part of the careful planning of Yoshiwara’s leaders to build up Kurosuke’s fete days as major festivals. In their orchestrations of festival creation, the leaders took careful note of famous festivals in Kyoto such as Gion and those of the Shimabara pleasure quarter.120 With this title and the god’s reputation as a popular draw with both the quarter’s residents and people outside the Yoshiwara, a new and larger shrine was erected to replace the deity’s smaller abode.121
Kurosuke was not the only sacred symbol in the Yoshiwara given in service to the quarter’s need to promote the communal benefits of profits and sex. Another one was the kayou kami (travel god). According to the Yoshiwara Compendium, courtesans customarily wrote on the seal of obligatory “love letters” to their clients the term kayou kami, which was the Yoshiwara’s name for the more commonly designated dosojin (traveler’s deity).122 Through its root meaning of “travel,” dosojin broadly incorporates meanings of boundary crossings and liminal spaces and experiences. Stone statues on the roadside, variously depicting an embracing couple, Jizo, a phallus, and other motifs, ubiquitously stand as representatives of dosojin.123 Their multiple representations may suggest any number of meanings, though a prominent one is sexual energy and creativity— symbolically the crossing of male and female borders—as shown explicitly by the loving couple and phallus motifs. In the Yoshiwara, a courtesan’s handwriting on her letter’s seal, rather than on stone statuary, represented, simply and elegantly, kayou kami, and it expressed several meanings common to the symbol of dosojin, such as traveler’s god, border guardian, and sexual energy. As the verb kayou denotes intentional and regular travel, the seal of kayou kami served to protect a courtesan’s client the next time he was traveling to rendezvous with her, which required crossing a border between ordinary society and the world of pleasure. With her letter in hand, the client also had dosojin in hand, not as a fixed, stone statuary, but rather as written seal—intensely personal, portable, and ready for his next journey and crossing from one world to the next.124
Kurosuke Inari, compared to kayou kami, was far more complex. In addition to its capacity to incorporate meanings of sexuality and corporate prosperity like kayou kami, it also evoked resistance to these meanings, such as those lying at the heart of a courtesan’s desire to cut her ties. This symbolic complexity tied both enmusubi shinko and enkiri shinko to Kurosuke. The capacity to incorporate “shared semantics and private persuasions” typifies Inari worship and its symbolism.125 Inari is at once broadly communal and intensely individual, supportive of harmony and group identity as well as dangerously suggestive of the breaking of social norms and acting on one’s own; it is boisterous and public as well as silent and personal. As a manifestation of Inari, then, Kurosuke was symbolically well suited for both tasks of tutelary deity and private god, of enmusubi and enkiri, despite the high contrariety. Typical of Inari legends, the Yoshiwara’s origin myth associating Kurosuke with foxes and rice fields, and its suggestion of rice cultivation and production is at the root of the deity’s multivalent symbolism.126 Growth, strength, health, prosperity, sexuality, and change are just a few of the meanings Inari has generated through its core signification in fecundity and rice cultivation. In addition, Inari’s strong association with foxes creates additional levels of evocation that we have already noted in metaphors tied to courtesans. Inari’s multiplicity of meanings could be evoked by a number of needs and concerns, both corporate and individual. In the remaining pages I examine three of these meanings—prosperity, sexuality, and change— that were critical to Kurosuke’s symbolic feat of expressing the heterogeneous needs of the god’s community and the god’s individual petitioners.
In each of the four corners of the Yoshiwara stood a shrine to a particular Inari deity, but Kurosuke was the center of cultic life.127 The kami was also famed outside the quarter. A contemporary writer and observer of the times, Saito Gesshin (1804—1878), made special note of Kurosuke as one of the city’s most popular Inari deities during the Hatsu-uma Festival.128 Since it was a nationwide celebration, the Yoshiwara’s festival competed with those of other Inari shrines to attract the public. Kuro-suke’s shrine rivaled other major Inari sites in Edo for hosting some the most popular and crowded festivals in the city.129 As purveyors of good times, the Yoshiwara’s bordello and teahouse owners were skilled at using religious festivals to increase visitor traffic inside the quarter in order to increase profits. Bright lanterns were hung from each of the quarter’s four shrines during the festival. This sight, especially at night, became a hugely popular draw, bringing in throngs of people from the outside to view them, according to Saito.130 Although he does not detail other activities, it is easy to imagine such visitors in the “culture of prayer and play” making offerings at Kurosuke’s shrine and then spending more of their money in the quarter’s teahouses, restaurants, and bordellos.131 Such was the marketing strategy of the quarter’s leaders as seekers of gain in worldly benefits as business. The intertwining of religious and economic activities, while not unique to Japan, is readily observable in Japanese cultural history. Whether derivative, as in the building of markets outside temple gates and on the roadside of pilgrimage routes, or central, like the purchasing of ritual and devotional items such as amulets, votive tablets, and belly wraps, economics and religion have easily mixed together in the Japanese experience. Some interpreters of the Yoshiwara criticize its easy fusion. To paraphrase one such critic, Kurosuke’s festivals burned only with a passion for money and thus there was no true spiritual fire in the hearts of the people.132 This criticism, steeped as it is in a conceptualization of religion as something measurably true and, at its best, unconcerned with worldly matters, ignores the context of community and seeking of worldly benefits in Japanese religion. When focus is placed on the wealth-creation meaning of Inari, there emerges in Kurosuke’s festival a symmetry between symbol and practice, between prosperity and purpose, and between sacred and profane.
Much of the Yoshiwara’s prosperity was tied to sexuality. The two were inseparable, and they became linked most intensely in the summer festival dedicated to Kurosuke. Unlike the Hatsu-uma Festival, which was a celebration of all Inari throughout the country, the summer festival was Kurosuke’s own as the tutelary deity of the Yoshiwara. It was held on the first day of the eighth month, which placed it in the middle of a month’s worth of festivities in the quarter. It was one of several events that the Yoshiwara’s proprietors created throughout the early decades of the eighteenth century.133 In addition to Kurosuke’s fete days, the cherry blossom festival, held in the third month, and the seventh-month lantern festival, which grew out of an o-bon memorial for a popular tayu named Tamagiku (1702—1726), made up the quarter’s largest yearly celebrations.134 The Yoshiwara began to combine Kurosuke’s fete day, as it did with other celebratory days of the calendar, with additional forms of entertainment such as public exhibitions of dancing and singing. These originally ad-hoc forms of merriment developed over the years into a major festival in celebration of Kurosuke, which was famed throughout the city for its parades of floats and musicians. These were not traditions of antiquity, but rather of contemporary manufacture.135 Nevertheless, through its innovations and fabrications of festivals, the quarter acted in the same manner as many Tokugawa communities, even the most “traditional” of all: the rural village. Despite the perception of village life as fixed and antiquated in its festivals and religious observances, many rural communities in the Tokugawa period frequently improvised on tradition and even created new festivals to attract more people and acquire more renown and prosperity for the village.136 The proprietors of the Yoshiwara constructed their elaborate events for the same reasons of increased patronage, fame, and wealth.
The elaborateness of Kurosuke’s fete day was impressive. Large floats moved through the five boulevards of the quarter and stopped at each teahouse, where a courtesan and her teen and child attendants danced atop the vehicles.137 Courtesans dressed in white kimono paraded with musicians down the streets, singing, drumming, and dancing.138 It was surely a sight not to be missed. For many courtesans, however, this day also meant fulfilling their responsibility to secure as many of their regular clients as possible. On this day clients paid double for sexual services, thus doubling the coffers of the women’s bordellos. This practice of double-price days (monbi, monobi) often fell on festival days when the quarter was brimming with customers, and Kurosuke’s celebration, with its parade and floats, was perennially one of the Yoshiwara’s biggest times for visitors and sightseers.139 Courtesans likely dreaded such days, for if they failed to secure enough reservations from their clientele, they were forced to offset the shortfall of their bordellos’ books with their own money.140 Still, from the standpoint of the collective’s success and continuity, double-price days well typified how economic activity and sexual activity were pursued as one, and intensely so within the energetic celebrations taking place on the festival day of the community’s deity. As tutelary deity, Kurosuke symbolized the community united in common purpose and identity in the pursuit of economic gain through sexual play.
As Inari, Kurosuke was not limited to collective concerns; it also evoked meanings of individual concerns. Along with prosperity and sexuality, the notion of “change” is another meaning clustered around the symbolism of Inari, as captured in the growth and change that rice plants undergo from seedlings to mature, sprouting stalks. Unlike prosperity and sexuality, which in the context of the Yoshiwara were linked to communal identity and success, change was often linked to the individual identity of a courtesan. Inari’s close association with foxes directly touches on this notion of change and courtesans. Foxes in Japanese folk religion have long been characterized as tricksters and changelings. The underlying religio-sexual logic of many fox legends is that it is a yin creature always on the prowl for yang, which it needs in order to ascend into celestial realms. This logic produces the mythic theme of foxes taking advantage of unsuspecting men by changing into the form of a desirable woman, engaging in sexual relations, and, for a time, marrying them. Through this sexual trickery they gain possession of the men’s yang by receiving semen through intercourse.141 Such themes were easily linked to courtesans. A skillful courtesan’s role required her not only to make a man expend his semen, but also to make him spend his money, all under the playful illusion of a sincere and loving relationship. Slang and comic poetry often reveal this association. “White-faced foxes,” for example, was common jargon for courtesans, referring both to an incarnation of Inari as a white fox and the white powder the women wore on their faces when meeting clients.142 A senryu links the Yoshiwara’s tutelary god to the quarter’s women through the common denominator of the fox: “Kurosuke’s parishioners are, of course, foxes!” (Kurosuke ga ujiko yappari kitsune nari)143
The association between change, courtesans, and foxes, however, is not restricted to the image of the skilled woman plying her trade of iki. Many courtesans indeed sought change through the divine mediation of Kurosuke the fox deity. The change they hoped for, however, was one in role, in venue, in life. Unlike with a tutelary deity of a village or city ward, Kurosuke’s charges were not part of an organic community; they were from ordinary society, its villages and towns, lying beyond the god’s walls. Further, by definition, their contractual presence in the community was temporary. Most women were content to wait for either retirement or a lucky match with a client to exit the quarter’s gate. Others hoped to escape back into the outside world as soon as they were able. To reduce the chances of women taking flight, the Yoshiwara had a fulltime watchman guarding the quarter’s sole gate. That the potential for escape was an acknowledged reality is seen not only in the presence of a watchman, but also in the language of a courtesan’s contract. To return again to Yasu’s contract, it threatens that if she escapes or elopes, her sister and relatives will be responsible for compensating the bordello in her absence and for finding her and returning her to her duties.144 If change were desired, as a quarter’s own contractual language recognized that it might, then it could not be obtained in such a simple manner as walking out of the gate.
Female-initiated change—unapproved departure before retirement or the buyout of a contract—required strategy. A woman had many options. If she desired to flee Kurosuke’s domain and change her identity, she might approach the shrine surreptitiously and pray to the kami for divine assistance. The artist Utagawa Kuninao depicts such a moment in an 1841 illustration for a book of love stories. Utagawa’s courtesan stands alone at night, praying fervently in front of Kurosuke’s shrine (fig. 14). Several senryu capture the peculiar moment of making an entreaty to Kurosuke for successful escape from the deity’s own community. One poem puts it, “The only entreaty to Kurosuke is to forsake him” (Kurosuke o mikagiru yo na gan bakari).145 Another similarly states, “The only plea offered to Kurosuke is to change and leave” (Kurosuke e bakete detai no gan bakari).146 This last senryu holds a double meaning in its use of the
Figure 14 A courtesan at night petitioning Kurosuke Inari at his shrine in the Yoshiwara. From an original reproduction of Utagawa Kuninao’s illustration by Mitani Kazuma. Courtesy of Rippu Shob5, Tokyo.
Verb “change” (bakeru). It not only implies the desire to alter one’s identity to that of an ordinary woman, but also suggests using trickery to achieve it.
Successful escape for a courtesan often required one last act of trickery. Like foxes changing forms, some courtesans tried to escape by changing their appearance. One way was to “change” one’s gender by dressing in male attire in order to pass under the watchman’s gaze as just another departing visitor. Another senryu points to this strategy. “At Kurosuke’s side one changes into a man” (Kurosuke no waki de otoko ni bakete iru)}44 Such trickery was at times successful, thus forcing gatemen to be extra vigilant.148 A woman donning men’s attire was a practice aimed at reaching a specific result, but it had links to broader forms of practice. As mentioned earlier, a pregnant woman donned men’s clothing as a homeopathic element in a magical rite meant to secure the male gender for her fetus. Also, one the most popular religious confraternities in the second half of the Tokugawa period, the millennial Fuji-ko, stressed radical equality between men and women. Male and female members changed clothes as a sign of their equality and faith in anticipation of the new world that would be ushered in with the coming of the new Buddha, Miroku.149 While it was obviously strategic behavior meant to aid her own escape, the intentional changing of clothes was also linked to similar actions designed to encourage and effect change: change of fetal gender, of a world age, or, in the case of a courtesan, of one’s social identity and place. “Changing” one’s state of health was another deceptive technique that a woman might use to escape the quarter. Outside of retirement and the buyout of her contract, a courtesan’s only other approved reason for departure was serious illness. Yasu’s contract states that if she were to contract a long-term and grave illness she would be let go and returned home.150 Feigning sickness was sometimes a successful ploy for Yoshiwara women hoping for an early exit.151 A seriously ill woman was of no use to her bordello. Since she could no longer perform her erotic labor, and since her illness was a chronic drain on her employer, her contract was cancelled. A final strategy of change was the use of votive tablets to petition Kurosuke for various benefits. According to one interpretation of an intriguing senryu, a courtesan might have a ghostwriter (daisaku) pen a verse, likely cryptic, on a votive tablet and offer it at Kurosuke’s shrine for her if her request was one that needed to be guarded along with her identity.152 The poem suggests that the prayer placards directed toward the kami were full of ghost verses (daiku): “Offer to Kurosuke votive tablets covered in ghost verses” (Kurosuke e daiku darake no ema o age).1'53
Along with ghost verses, Kursosuke was covered in meanings and evocations that both worked toward and against the heterogeneous needs of its community as a single collective and a collection of individual women. As much the spiritual locus of an isolated community as it was the focus of popular festivals drawing visitors from the outside, as much a tutelary deity as a god of personal petition, and as much a symbol of community identity as the hope of an individual to escape from that community, Kurosuke’s multivalency represents well the Tokugawa ritual and symbolic landscape of female exits and their ambivalence practiced amidst heavily idealized values. Betrothal, bridal departure, and retirement from the quarters were formal and celebratory occasions of exits, but they were fraught with evocative symbols that acted on the potential unease about a woman’s real loyalties and sense of place embedded in the models of fertility and pleasure. This underlying ambivalence could erupt in other exits—private, strategic, and antipodal to formal celebratory ritual. Such exits were peripheral, intentional, and pointedly set against the values of fertility and pleasure. Each exit is evidence that the fates of Tokugawa women were not so easily sealed by powerful discourses obsessed with sexuality and ideals of behavior. If these discourses cast a shadow over women’s lives so as to produce the so-called dark age for women, then ritual and symbol offered a light that could shine through sexual ideologies and their idealized values and shine on unraveled bonds of natal identity, hopes for a better tomorrow, and even secret, unapproved pathways toward that tomorrow.
World History
