Daughters entering into exclusive relationships with men either in the household or the pleasure quarters did so as “brides.” The pleasure model borrowed heavily and playfully from the nuptial ceremony of fertility in establishing its own rites of intimate association, including the person of the bride. A bride in the household activated her relationship with one man through yometori-style marriage; a bride in the quarters entered into her many relationships one man at a time through rites of first meeting. These rites gave each bride a stake in the institutional status available to her to develop her role as fully as possible in service to either the household or bordello. Further, as the metaphors of fertile goddess and first-class courtesan indicate, bridal rites from the idealized perspective of the models acted to transform women from daughters to brides of fertility and brides of pleasure by charging their sexual relations with men with a sense of institutional ultimate concern toward household posterity and bordello prosperity. From this basis of ultimate concern, the symbolic and behavioral trajectory of each entrance rite aimed at orienting a woman’s sexuality toward either the production of a child or a profit. In each rite, marriage and first meeting, this trajectory traveled in two stages: i) procession to the ceremony and 2) the formalization and consummation of relations.
Processions of fertility and pleasure
Entering into relations with a new husband or client required a woman to be a type of traveler. Travel in the Tokugawa period gained popularity with the peace of the times, the construction of roads built to accommodate commercial growth, and a growing class of economically comfortable commoners seeking leisure, sights, and spiritual renewal. The Tokaido, connecting the cities of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka, gained fame not only as a trade highway but also as a road of sightseeing and pilgrimage. Guidebooks such as Famous Sites along the Tokaido (Tdkaidd meishoki) were widely published and detailed famous sites along the highway, largely temples, shrines, and pilgrimage centers.61 For tourists and pilgrims, traveling to distant places was an excursion of possibilities, a time of leaving behind the normal order of the household, village, or city ward. Along the way there existed the threat of meeting thieves or con artists, the anticipation of touring sacred sites, the potential for religious encounters of insight and curing, and the simple hope of pleasant expe-
Riences common to any traveler. For some male travelers, securing a brief sexual encounter with a woman, such as an inn girl or waitress working in the gray area of public labor and private prostitution, was another possibility.62
Daughters on the way to their weddings and first meetings traveled on the road as well. Their trips were also excursions of possibilities. For a bride traveling to a largely unknown household there was the possibility of new relations and obligations, including perhaps having sex for the first time, securing her place and identity in the household, and likely becoming a mother. For a courtesan traveling to meet a new client there was, along with the absolute certainty of a sexual encounter—just another in a string of countless assignations—the possibility of gaining greater prestige with another paying customer who has committed himself to her and her bordello, of perhaps finding a suitably agreeable man to whom she was not averse to giving her sexual favors, and, if she were a dreamer, of meeting someone who might one day pay her contract and take her as his wife. A bride’s trip was the wedding procession that led her from her natal home to her husband’s household. A courtesan’s trip was a slow parade with her entourage through the streets of her quarter as her client awaited her arrival at a teahouse.
The definitive act of yometori marriage was the wedding procession of a bride moving from the house of her birth to the house where she would ideally give birth to an heir. Before she departed on her journey, another series of rites was concluded at her household and established her betrothal. The actual wedding ceremony following her arrival at the groom’s house was performed later. The practice of both betrothal and nuptial rites was commonly understood to constitute a wedding, and even abbreviated, simple ceremonies generally reflected this divided pattern.63 The journey between the two rites moved a woman away from one side of the daughter/wife perspectival boundary toward the other side. For this crossing A Record of Treasures for Women briefly describes the use of palanquins for carrying the bride. Passage between households involved both male and female representatives of the bride’s family. Women, particularly older women such as the bride’s mother or other female relative, however, did not just represent the family, but were also the spiritual protectors of the bride. Travel between households, between shedding a known past and attempting to create an unknown future, was a time of high liminality, of possible danger to the fertile potentiality of the bride.64 The illustration in Namura’s text depicting a procession reveals the men trudging ahead with eyes and heads straight,
But the three women walk within arm’s length of the palanquin with their eyes on it rather than the road (see fig. 3).65 Other period illustrations of processions typically show women close to the palanquin.66 Older women, their institutional standing and sexuality already long established, stood immune to that which threatened the young woman in the palanquin. She was the embodied question mark of social and sexual identity. In her palanquin she sat no longer as a daughter but not yet as a wife, no longer as a virgin in her parent’s home but not yet as a sexual partner in her husband’s household. Her unsettled status regarding her role and body raised dangers to her fertility and health that demanded symbolic remedies to avert the perils and impurities lurking in the bride’s shadow.
This type of female mediation in weddings, which the presence of older women suggests, is seen most conspicuously in the figure of the ritual specialist called katsurame. These women were active mainly in western Japan, particularly in the area around Kyoto and Osaka, during the medieval and early modern periods. Although claiming a long line of ecstatic ritual specialization reaching back to the legendary reign of the empress Jingu (r. 201—269), katsurame both expanded and altered their ritual functions throughout their history. They produced various records to legitimate new ritual tasks with stamps of either antiquity or authority.67 Their Jingu records “proved” both antiquity and authority when katsurame began performing rituals of safe birth and selling amulets. Their most distinguishing feature was a long, white head wrap, which is said to be derived from the belly wrap that Jingu wore while pregnant with her son and future emperor, Ojin (r. 270—310).68 By the early seventeenth century katsurame were active in providing a range of ritual performances at weddings, such as singing celebratory songs, performing purification rituals, and leading bridal processions from one household to the other.69 In their function as professional ritual specialists, they represent a broad range of ritual technicians who wandered the land prior to and during the Tokugawa period. Many of them were peripatetic and offered to individuals, families, and communities services of divination, exorcism, and purification.70
A household could employ other women to function similarly to protect the bride and her fertility at the outset of the procession. Ise Sada-take states in his explication of wedding ritual that the fear of demons (akuma) bringing harm to the bride during her procession led some families to employ female specialists whose task was to clear the bridal pathway of evil spirits and demons (akumabarai). Sadatake describes the spe-
Figure 3 Illustration of a wedding procession from the 1692 edition of A Record of Treasures for Women. Courtesy of T5yoko Gakuen Joshi Tanki Daigaku Josei Bunka Kenkyujo, Tokyo.
Cialist as an ecstatic and colorful character who is “tall in stature with a face of frightening countenance, and her hair, dyed or decorated, hangs loosely askew.”71 Although he points out that the Ise House has never called for the attendance of such a person, he acknowledges that it is currently a popular custom with some.72
Another way a family might try to keep a departing daughter safe on the way to marriage was to have her travel with a doll, typically fashioned from paper or cotton, which was used commonly as a ritual substitute to protect children from illness and malevolent forces.73 Dolls functioned to protect the bride on a journey that was considered potentially hazardous. In addition to protecting traveling brides, dolls might also constitute one part of a bride’s trousseau that she brought with her into marriage in anticipation of soon bearing children and using them to protect her offspring.74 Namura, for example, lists such a doll among over one hundred items a bride might bring to marriage.75 Outside of this list Namura makes no mention of such dolls, but Takai, in his 1847 edition, includes an entire paragraph on the custom of dolls as ritual substitutes. He ties this custom to the ancient activity of the kami, an editorial flourish of nationalistic concern, but he also describes the practice of girls keeping these small figurines close to their bodies, tucked in their clothes, until they marry.76 Paralleling the health aspects of marriage discussed above as one type of religious motive, Takai suggests that upon marriage a young woman is no longer in need of the doll’s protective power to keep away illness and ill luck. With marriage a woman reaches a social, physiological, and spiritual stage of development in life that liberates her from the vulnerability to the reckless behavior of youth, childhood illnesses, and baleful spirits that prey on the young. The concerned parents whom Namura criticizes, those who with the best intentions but the worst judgment rushed their children into marriage, reflected in their worry this understanding of marriage and the protection it offered. But to everything there is a season, and until her parents properly trained her for marriage, a girl had to depend on good parenting, prayers to the buddhas and gods for good health, and protective dolls. Even in the procession toward marriage that season had not yet turned, and on a road full of dangers to their health and fertility a number of brides kept their dolls close until the journey finally ended at new households, where they assumed a new identity and responsibilities.
The wedding procession was both a utilitarian and symbolic exercise grounded in the necessities of the yometori pattern so central to the fer-
Tility model. The pattern’s virilocality demanded that the bride move to the groom’s home, but the model’s concern, and those of the two families, for her health and fertility also required spiritual protection of them while she was on the road. It was important to protect the bride in order to deliver her with her health and fertility intact. The procession was an orderly march into conflict: protection of a bride’s body against the potential for spiritual aggression toward it. This battle between fertility and destructive forces for the bride’s bodily and spiritual health reflected the metaphors of the life-giving goddess (Izanami and Amaterasu) and life-devouring demon (yasha) that Namura lays out in his text’s sacred history of women. Each bride in her procession, in her liminality of being neither a daughter nor daughter-in-law, stood at the intersection of this sacred history. She was poised in her palanquin between godliness and demonism, fecundity and emptiness, obedience and willfulness, and a household’s highest hope and its deepest fear. What protective female escorts and dolls ultimately delivered to the groom’s family—a goddess or demon—would be uncovered only in the course of time and in accordance with the family’s own judgment of the bride.
Processions in the pleasure quarters were also important in marking paths toward formal relations between women and their clients. Called dochu, which means “during travel,” these processions led a courtesan from her bordello to the house of assignation where she would meet her waiting client, and the term itself may have originated from the journeys of palace officials between Kyoto and Edo. In the Yoshiwara, which had two streets named Kyoto and Edo, the parading of a courtesan between these avenues was a visual pun that reflected the stateliness of her short journey.77 The Yoshiwara Compendium (Yoshiwara taizen) claims that the procession between the streets of Kyoto and Edo was designed to emulate the mood of a lengthy and important journey, such as official business travel between the two cities.78 In the same manner that economic and other considerations influenced the degree of display and richness in wedding processions, a courtesan’s dochu varied depending on her rank, the desire and wealth of her client, and the particular occasion for the procession. For clients able to afford a relationship with a woman of the tayu class or commit their finances to sponsoring the debut of a young woman into the top ranks, the processional display of a woman parading with her full retinue in tow was quite impressive.
Such display was also a treat for bystanders. The public and popular nature of the dochu moved it beyond the realm of purposeful walking to a type of misemono: an enjoyable and unusual spectacle that broke with
The monotony of everyday life.79 A courtesan, as the star of her own dochu, became a figure of the extraordinary. She and her entourage walked with stately purpose past crowds of people stopping to catch a glimpse of her, including perhaps a future client. While entertaining to watch, it was a dignified procession; it was not a circus parade. A courtesan held her head erect and looked straight ahead to avoid catching the eye of friends or colleagues and calling out to them, thus breaking the seriousness of the moment.80 A significant feature of the procession was the courtesan’s choreography. The pleasure quarters of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto all used similar styles of ceremonial walking based on a slow, arching swing of the foot outward from the side of the body and then leisurely planted forward.81 This manner of walking contributed to the public spectacle of the procession as misemono by slowing the gait of a courtesan and intensifying attention on her body and its movements. In this way a courtesan effected misemono: with each swing of the foot and turn of the ankle she registered a small kick to the consciousness of ordinary life.
As in a bridal procession, women were conspicuous in a courtesan’s procession (see fig. 4). In the dochu, however, their role was to create the sense of spectacle necessary in effecting misemono. Male laborers participated, but only as porters carrying lanterns printed with the name of the courtesan’s bordello or a long umbrella used to shade a parading courtesan. In the eighteenth century, large processions included musicians and geisha playing supporting roles as entertainers for the client and his friends. Even small dochu included female attendants escorting the courtesan to her appointment. Whereas the fertility model emphasized the use of older women in the bride’s procession, the pleasure model did just the opposite in the courtesan’s: female escorts in the quarters were younger than the courtesan—her teenage apprentices and child attendants. The only older woman involved who was professionally related to the courtesan was her manager, typically a retired courtesan herself. Unlike the bridal procession, with its concern for guarding a woman’s sexuality to serve a single man and his family, the pleasure procession was a celebration of female sexuality in service to any man willing to pay the price to enrich a bordello’s coffers. Made up of females of different ranks, professional development, ages, and sexual potential, the dochu formed, in effect, a lineage and learning curve of carnal pleasure.
A courtesan’s style and attitude while participating in the procession reflect the importance the ceremony held for the pleasure model. It was one of many forms of play integral to and perfected by the quarters, but
As play it was far from frivolous. For the client, the dochu stimulated his desire by sharpening the erotic anticipation, while it also confirmed his status within the unabashed materialism of the quarter: what his money could buy was on public display for all to see. For the courtesan, it may also have been an erotic moment—a choreography of exhibitionism— but it was definitely, as with her client, public confirmation of her status within the hierarchy of the quarter. In the nineteenth century, when the Yoshiwara was well in decline from its earlier and more glamorous days, only the top courtesan of a bordello formally paraded to her appointment with her client.82 In this way, as the dochu became less common, it also became ever more a symbol of status reserved only for a precious few women within the entire quarter.
Symbolically the dochu acted as a type of bridal procession: it was the celebratory movement of a woman into a formalized relation with a man and with institutional hierarchy. Further, this movement placed a courtesan in a moment of liminality while on the road to her future. Like the bride standing at the intersection of the fertile goddess and destructive demon, the prostitute paraded to her own intersection of the pleasure model’s contrasting metaphors of the bodhisattva-like tayu and the deceptive fox, of the extraordinarily sincere and empathetic woman and
Figure 4 A courtesan parades with her entourage. From an original reproduction of Kitagawa Utamaro’s illustration by Mitani Kazuma. Courtesy of Rippu Shob5,
Tokyo.
The merely coy and clever courtesan. In the moment of the dochu, the act publicly acknowledging her high status as a first-rank courtesan, she and her sexuality were on parade for the benefit of one particular man waiting to formalize ties with her and her alone. She marched for no one else; she was one man’s bride—if only on that day. The next day she would parade for yet another client desiring to create faithful bonds with only her.
Rites of marriage and first meeting
Ritually similar processions of fertility and pleasure put the values of the competing models into sharp relief. The rites of marriage and first meeting continued this process of ritual incorporation and value discrimination. The ceremony in the groom’s household effectively functioned as a fertility rite. As Sadatake prosaically puts it, “Marriage ceremonies are for the purpose of giving birth to a child.”83 From the fertility model’s perspective, the ceremony sought to possess a bride’s fertility and activate it, and incorporate her into the purposeful activities of the household. Paralleling this was the rite of first meeting in the quarters, which brought into sexual play a skewed imitation of marriage rites. This was not play meant to mock wedding ritual, but rather to co-opt its normative meaning, turn it on its head, and drain all notions of fertility from relations between a courtesan and her clients.
World History
