In the summer of i8o8, the granddaughter of Uesugi Yozan (1746— 1822), lord of the Yonezawa domain, married. Thinking that an appropriate farewell gift should employ ancient wisdom to guide her in her new life as a wife, Uesugi decided on an epistle based on a classic Chinese ethical treatise, Precepts for Women.1 Rooting his letter in the moral themes of Precepts, he wrote in contemporary Japanese, penned an evocative title—Young Leaves of a Peach (Momo no wakaba) —and sent it off with his granddaughter when she left for her new home with her husband’s family.2 Uesugi’s creation of an ethical guide on wifely conduct, bearing a title rife with suggestions of fertility, and his offering it as a gift to his granddaughter on the occasion of her marriage reveal noteworthy associations. With a single gift, he linked behavior (a wife’s conduct), rites (marriage), institutional location (household), and a specific valuation of female sexuality (procreation). Tying ritual actions to forms of behavior practiced in the home, and based on a belief that a woman’s sexuality had value in its procreative potential formed a model of womanhood that assumed position in the center of society. Alternatives to this model played out on the periphery, such as the celibacy of the nunnery and the pleasure of the urban quarters. The quarters especially cast a long and contrasting shadow on the center. Like the former, the quarters constituted a model of womanhood that linked ritual practice, ideals of behavior, institutional location, and an explicit valuation of sexuality.
“Model” is a noun and a verb. A value model incorporates both. As a noun, a value model functions as a model for ideal communal life— in other words, an ideal world. The human mind, books, and art have always been loci of ideal worlds. The Mishnah, the rabbinical attempt to construct a perfect Jewish world in the absence of an actual one due to the Diaspora and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, is a powerful example, in the history of religions, of an ideal world of mind and word. Similarly, texts like Uesugi’s epistle and other forms of jokun produced their own ideal worlds—worlds of womanhood—to show not how life is really lived, but rather how life should be lived. From the periphery of pleasure also came texts and art that portrayed a very different but equally ideal world of womanhood. As a verb, a value model encourages a person to model her behavior and relations with others in her institutional collective on a set of values that is promoted as beneficial to the betterment of the person and her institution. Ritual practice played out against institutions, behaviors, and role identity is key to this modeling. No matter how dissimilar value models may be in comparison to one another or how they may compete against one another, they all embrace ritual practice and its confluent elements to promote a model of human relations based on values that are considered good and necessary for living life as it should be lived.
Uesugi offered his granddaughter more than plain prose. He gave her a guide to a world of ritual-based values that he believed were good and necessary for living properly in the world. With his guide his granddaughter would familiarize herself with her role as a wife, pattern her life on the community of her husband’s household, and extend his family line by providing an heir while using her energy and skills to maintain his—and now also her—household. This was the value model of fertility. Parallel and peripheral to this, young women in the pleasure quarters were to orient themselves as courtesans, model their lives on the structures, rhythms, and morals of the quarter, and cultivate relationships with men founded on the principle of fulfilling male desires through the performance of ideal behavior in the context of play. This was the value model of pleasure.
We may begin to understand these value models better by examining a third Tokugawa model that promoted an ideal different from that of fertility and pleasure. Multiple models existed, from nunnery-based Buddhism and its advocacy of celibacy, to youth groups of men and women in villages that advocated their own ideals of sexual behavior. The Shinto priest Masuho Zanko (1655—1742) promoted yet another model and gave it a structure similar to that of fertility and pleasure: i) the delineation of distinct values and forms of idealized behavior; 2) the identification of institutional place; and 3) the centrality of ritual.
World History
