Ritual

Masuho’s vision of love between men and women working together in the fields of a bucolic village may strike us as maudlin. However, it gives his model order, purpose, and a high degree of distinction over others. In short, Masuho infuses his sentimental creation with sacrality. His order allows him to put forward the literal godliness of love between men and women over a continental corruption of human relationships. He built this order from the multiple tones and notes of the Tokugawa symbolic universe such as yin and yang and kami and brought them to symphonic purpose with rites of first fruits offered to the mountain god by loving peasant men and women.

Masuho’s sacred order is a composition in three parts. Two are an exercise each in discrimination and incorporation. The exercise in discrimination delineates elements of his model with counter-notions of human relations in other models. Masuho does not create his model on principles of relativism or in a state of incognizance to the world and its complexities. The very creation itself is a declaration that other value models exist apart from his, but participation in his makes men and women distinct—indeed, true to their humanity—from people participating in other models. As Durkheim first insisted, creating distinctions among things, setting off a community, a body of ideas, an object, or a vision from others is the elementary task of sacralization.42 Masuho proved no different in his task. Values and behaviors in his model were highly attuned to asserting difference—setting themselves apart—from other values and behaviors. Mutual love and shared work among men and women easily contrasted with continental and Confucian ideals. And this contrast is exactly what he sought.

The second part is incorporation. Masuho brought together several elements of the symbolic universe in his order. Familiar with Yuiitsu Shinto, he readily acknowledged kami, buddhas, and, as the lynchpin of his model, the creative yin and yang life force. Yuiitsu had, since the fifteenth century under the energy of Yoshida Kanetomo (1434—1511), integrated elements of Shinto, esoteric Buddhism, and Confucianism within the framework of a unified, systematic Shinto, which it favored over other religious systems.43 The tree metaphor was a favorite of Kane-tomo’s in expounding on the primacy of Shinto. Buddhism was the fruit, Confucianism and Daoism the trunk and branches, and Shinto the roots from which all gained sustenance.44 It is not surprising, given this intellectual background employing both syncretism and distinctive rankings of teachings, that Masuho liberally used a variety of symbols to build a distinct model and favor it over others.

Masuho made yin and yang harmony the vital center of his model. However, the advocates of fertility also used the concept to serve their own model. Often using the metaphors of heaven and earth (tenchi), as well as yin and yang, fertility moralists found the suggestion of harmonious complements indispensable in giving sacred order to their model. Unlike Masuho’s explicitly anti-Confucian and anti-Chinese understanding of the male and female principles as complementary and equal in the creative process, promoters of fertility saw them as complementary and unequal. Women’s Imagawa (Onna imagawa), an exemplar of jokun and a popular educational text, states the interpretation unequivocally: “Heaven is the yang principle (yd) and is strong; it is the way of the man. Earth is the yin principle (in) and is passive; it is the way of the woman. The yin principle follows the yang, and as this is the true principle underlying the universe, it stands to reason that the way of husband and wife, when compared to the order in the universe, is that the husband is like heaven and is revered. This, in short, is the way of heaven and earth.”45

Masuho’s exercise of incorporating symbols is one that other models carried out. This use of a common symbol to support different values brings to mind what Epictetus said long ago: “What disturbs and alarms man are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about the things.”46 The divergent opinions and values of Masuho and fertility moralists found expression in the same yin and yang concept of harmonious complements. The stress on the varied meanings of a thing points to its essential character as a symbol, which operates “in the human world of meaning,” and its only worth is in vivifying, evoking, and mediating human meaning.47 Its substantiality, its form, its material construction, if any, do not generate meaning. Only when people grasp something as animating values, sentiments, behaviors, and principles important to them (Epictetus’s “opinions and fancies”) does it act as a symbol and evoke and mean something.

Discriminating values, behaviors, and principles as well as incorporating common symbols into competing models of how life ideally should be lived is brought to full realization through forms of ritual, which constitutes the third part of Masuho’s sacred order. He completed the vision of his model with the rite of village men and women offering the first fruits of the harvest to the mountain deity. Ritual is indispensable because it is at once able to embrace both the discrimination and incorporation that a value model mutually exercises. Fertility and pleasure depended on the rites of marriage and debut and first meeting to keep both discrimination of their values and incorporation of their symbolic worlds intact. These ceremonies achieved this because they created a controlled environment that intensified the divergent values of fertility and pleasure. At the same time, these celebrations of human relations gathered symbols from a common universe and shared the common task of transforming young women from daughters into women of different identities.

Controlling their environments of performance was an essential goal of these ceremonies. They mapped out and established place, space, time, things, and people in fixed worlds of order. Each created for its duration the ideal or very “model” of a value-oriented community in which full attention was focused on the perfect vivification of the collective’s values. If just for a moment, reality as it should be was the only reality playing in weddings, debuts, and first meetings. At the same time, neither of these ritual environments was hermetically closed to the world and to competing or contradictory claims. Precisely by controlling its environment, a wedding or a debut made obvious to its participants that the world existing outside the performance was both palpably different and undeniably there. In this way, such ceremonies possessed a “gnostic dimension.”48 This bifurcation of ritual and real environments was a model’s best method for marking the uniqueness of its values vis-a-vis other values coexisting in society. These socially transformative performances of the household and quarter, which I discuss in the next chapter, were events of sharp focus on the values of obedience and the hope of childbirth in one model and sexual play and status achievement in erotic labor in the other.

By controlling the ritual environment so as to present an ideal image of reality in a world that the ritual actors know is imperfect and complicated, celebrations of fertility and pleasure exercised their discriminatory half At the same time, they also exercised incorporation by assimilating common symbols and ritual elements with human situations of personal change and role transformation. This symbolic and social character of the celebratory rituals of fertility and pleasure is telling of a society like the Tokugawa, marked as it was by growing complexity, such as the sanctioned coexistence of central and peripheral institutions that relied on ritual ceremonies both to express divergent values and to establish new human relationships between men and women necessary for the

Figure 2 A filial daughter leaves her impoverished family to serve as a courtesan. From

Maintenance of the collective good. (In addition, other practices like those centered around pregnancy, divorce, and escape—each exhibiting its own symbols and challenges of personal change—stood apart in varying degrees from fertility’s and pleasure’s idealized values and thus compounded the socio-ritual environment even more, as we will see.)

This ritual character of incorporation is conspicuous in the rites of marriage, debut, and first meeting. Fertility and pleasure pulled from the same religious universe, and each populated its model with a host of multivalent symbols, concepts, and rituals in their respective attempts to achieve distinct orders. Although critical in orienting a woman toward a new identity as either wife or courtesan, rituals in the home and quarter were fraught with a multiplicity of symbolic meanings that could induce ambivalence toward, as much as affirmation of, values and roles. In addition to incorporating elements from the symbolic universe, fertility and pleasure also incorporated women as outsiders. Both models opened their doors to, and really existed only because of, the same sociological fact: women on the move. Rituals of sexual values cannot be understood apart from this movement. Incorporating a woman into a new household as a bride or into a bordello as a courtesan presented to each institution the potential for disharmony. Part of this potential derived from women entering these institutions under a crisis-in-change. By this I mean the common human experience of facing a major life decision in which a person lacks full control. As discussed in chapter i, one

The Greater Learning for Courtesans. Courtesy of Ozorasha, Tokyo.

Of the root existential crises often necessitating a ritual response is when one reaches the limit of one’s ability to come to a morally satisfactory acceptance of a major life event. Confronting this “ethical paradox” relates to the crisis-in-change some women experienced when they left their homes to become brides or courtesans.49 Fertility moralists were well aware of this ethical paradox and of the conflicting claims of ulti-macy and disharmony it could produce between the need for a man’s household to bring in a woman and her ambivalence toward dislocation and identity change. The common theme in jokun beseeching young women to submit to their husbands and in-laws and give their hearts to their new homes reveals this awareness of a bride’s ethical paradox. On what side of a perspectival boundary does her ultimate concern lie? Does she serve her parents and siblings or her in-laws and husband? Is she a daughter and sister or a daughter-in-law and wife? The pleasure model, too, was also sensitive to this ethical paradox. Is a woman a daughter loyally serving her parents or a courtesan loyally serving her bordello by satisfying the sexual needs of its clients?

On this question the pleasure model, like fertility, produced its own idealized writings describing women who resigned themselves to a new life. One example is The Greater Learning for Courtesans (Yujo daigaku).50 This text not only playfully alludes to the fertility classic, The Greater Learning for Women, in its title, but also borrows the important concept of filial piety (kd) to justify a daughter leaving her parents. One illustration, simply titled Kd, captures well this use of filial piety by the pleasure model (see fig. 2). A girl parts from her weeping mother as a buyer from the pleasure quarter looks on. He stands next to a palanquin with two indifferent porters waiting for her to enter the coach so they can transport her to the bordello. Tugging at their mother’s kimono are the girl’s two young siblings. The sketch portrays the sacrifice many daughters made to improve their families’ shaky economic circumstances by following their parents’ decision to sell them to the quarters. Such family strains are reflected in period literature, too, where the ethical paradox of kd can always be relied on to create dramatic tension. In the puppet play The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Chushingura), Okaru, having lost her position as lady-in-waiting due to the murder of her lord, resigns herself to her father’s decision to sell her to a bordello in the Shimabara.51 She departs for the city in the buyer’s palanquin, leaving her small village and sobbing mother behind. Although they are highly emotionally charged portrayals, these scenes of daughters making sacrifices for their families’ sake reveal a key element concerning ritual, symbol, and crisis-in-change. The concept of filial piety was only one (albeit important and universally recognized) of many concepts and symbols the Tokugawa symbolic universe made available. Fertility and pleasure models mutually incorporated and advocated kd to cope with the fact that among some women moving into the institutions of virilocal household and bordello were those bearing ambivalence, confusion, resentment, or resistance to the change in their lives.

The rituals that fertility and pleasure employed boldly asserted each model’s starkly different attitudes toward female sexuality. Often they also created worlds oddly similar in their symbolic structures and in their need to take in women from the outside and behaviorally enact specific values. Ritual made the models at once unique and self-contained and simultaneously parallel and porous. It was the main method of separating one value model from another, and yet it also permitted other value models to share a degree of symbolic content and use these symbols to mediate similar human experiences. This character becomes clearer when rites of entrance into the worlds of fertility and pleasure take center stage in the next chapter.