Institution

Masuho’s model of human relations does not put forward the value of mutual love in an abstract context. One place where he locates that love is the agricultural village, dotted with rice paddies and shadowed by mountains. The locales institutionalizing the enactment of the values of fertility and pleasure were the household and the bordellos of the quarters. Returning once more to Uesugi’s farewell letter, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, offers a helpful start in seeing the importance of place in the behavioral enactment of values. Uesugi urged his granddaughter always to remember this truth: the times and deeds of her life that would unfold in her future would do so not at the home of her birth but at the home of her marriage.

As I have said before, it has always been that a woman’s path is that of following her husband. Outside of those women serving their parents throughout their entire lives, a bride must be careful concerning how and toward whom she spends her emotions. She will be negligent in serving her parents-in-law if, as from the time of her birth, she follows the example of thinking only of her own parents. So will she also be negligent if all she knows that is good is the way of her own household. It is from desiring to do things according to the style of her own home (waga ie no fu) that she will never come to know her parents-in-law’s will. Upon becoming a bride in the house of her husband, a woman must take orders from her mother-inlaw and father-in-law and follow the household traditions (kafu) of her husband’s family.37

For Uesugi’s granddaughter, not only would her time be spent with her in-laws and her acts of obedience directed toward them, but such things would occur in a particular place: her marriage household. Of equal importance, moreover, is Uesugi’s recognition of two correlated matters that greatly intruded upon the idea of place. One concerned behavior and the other the use of hierarchy. Uesugi’s first insight is that not all households were the same, and behavior had to be modified appropriately to fit the expectations of one place over another. He recognized the potential for conflict between a bride’s feelings for her natal household and her in-laws’ wishes. A consistent theme in many examples of jokun is a backhanded acknowledgment of the ambivalence brides could experience when moving to their husbands’ homes. By preemptively criticizing the feeling of attachment to one’s own home, family, and accustomed ways of comporting herself, jokun writers exhibited sensitivity to the idea that a certain pattern of behavior could be carried out effectively only in a certain place. Unchanged behavior in a changed environment invited friction, strained relations, and put the institution at risk of becoming dysfunctional. Unchanged behavior, such as a wife’s thinking only of her own parents, was misdirected obedience that could undermine, and thus threaten, the household’s authority over its members. At times, such a threat had to be removed for the sake of the collective body. Thus among the seven conditions for divorce, removal of a disobedient or unfilial daughter-in-law was primary, taking precedence over the failure to produce an heir. Similarly, the quarters were also wary of unchanged behavior. Whereas total identity with one man was the foundation of obedience and the anchor of the household, the same behavior made a mockery of play. Since what were normal emotions and behaviors outside the quarters broke the rules of play, a non-playful relationship with a man could create a breach through which the competing reality of the outside could flood the quarters and threaten profits. As love for one man free of play could mean love free of charge, both iki and profits drowned in the emotional currents of the heart.

Both fertility and pleasure had measures to meet these threatening infractions of obedience and play. Among commoners the husband’s household had broad, unilateral powers of divorce as one means of dealing with violations of obedience. If disobedience entailed adultery, then, depending on decisions by local authorities and the household, punishment could range from execution or bodily injury to imprisonment or banishment.38 Bordello owners sometimes resorted to severe forms of corporal punishment. In The Life of an Amorous Man, Saikaku depicts such punishment in the Shimabara of a courtesan named Mikasa.39 She falls in love with Yonosuke, the novel’s protagonist. Worse, she refuses to follow the rules of play by declining to charge him for their time together despite her bordello owner’s orders to do so. Her master thus reduces her rank to kitchen girl, forces her to wear simple cotton clothes, and sends her on humble errands to buy miso and tofu. He promises her that if she would simply renounce her love for Yonosuke, her high rank would be restored and she would no longer suffer from such humiliation. Mikasa refuses. The master resorts to tying her half naked to a willow tree in the November cold. The punishment comes to an end only when Yonosuke threatens the master by promising to kill himself in order to die with Mikasa and then haunt him for the rest of his life. Harsh forms of discipline, while available to authority figures in the quarters, as Mika-sa’s story shows, were generally not used on ranking women because their bodies and good spirits were central to the success of the bordello.40 A courtesan’s body possessed pecuniary value for her employer; it was a commodity that he, his wife, and the courtesan’s female manager might decide to bruise, but it was not something they wanted to lose.

Physical punishment was not unique to the quarters. As a form of discipline it was an important element of control in the hierarchical - and institutional-based human relationships that made up much of Tokugawa social reality. Shop boys, Buddhist acolytes, apprentices, maids, menserv-ants, and samurai retainers could typically expect painful physical consequences for misbehavior and failures in their responsibilities. The quarters possessed their own understanding and fears of such behavioral breaches and failures. Buyo Inshi, an observer of events in the latter half of the Tokugawa period, notes that various infractions could bring punishment to a Yoshiwara courtesan exhibiting behavior ill-suited to the institution of playful sexuality. Among such infractions were displaying overly effusive feelings for a particular client, spending one’s leisure time with a customer, and positioning oneself to run away with a client and gain the “status of wife, concubine, or daughter” (saishojo bun).41 The first two violations, Buyo notes, were suspected precursors of the third. Each on its own, however, potentially threatened to undercut the economic prosperity and authority structure of the bordello.

Uesugi’s second insight concerning place is that it was structured through hierarchy, which a young woman could wisely use to her longterm advantage. A bride’s natal home and her husband’s home were usually similar in structure: they represented the same economic class, possessed the same hierarchy, and expected similar forms of behavior in their members. Fertility moralists, however, recognized that the institution of the household had to be understood beyond the mere fact of its social structure and hierarchy. They saw that meaning fully came only when a woman actively interacted with hierarchy rather than passively had it imposed on her. It is hierarchy itself that provided the social materials—status, role identity, and rules of behavior—necessary for a woman to establish a meaningful position. Again, Uesugi’s insight arises from an uneasiness over possible conflict. A woman’s interaction with the hierarchy of her husband’s home established a different configuration of role, identity, and status than that which existed in her own home. It is the potential for conflict between these configurations in orienting a woman from daughter to bride that led Uesugi to stress to his granddaughter the need to abandon interacting in the style of her own home (waga ie no ju) in order to interact in the family traditions of her husband’s home. He recognized that household hierarchy offered more than the imposition of itself on the individual. The virilocal household was, instead, a setting that offered her the opportunity to make her place. She could do so by utilizing its available structures of hierarchy, such as status, role identity, and behavior patterns. By “family traditions” of the husband’s home Uesugi meant the use of this hierarchy. With this awareness of the household, Uesugi placed the institution in human-centric focus. For him, the household was not so much a place imposing hierarchy on a submissive person, but rather a place where people used that hierarchy to make their place, to make meaningful space. A pleasure quarter, too, was no different in this respect. With its hierarchical grades of courtesan and ideals of behavior, it also made available the hierarchical structure necessary for a woman to make her space.

A view of institutional place from the perspective of persons acting through hierarchy—that is, being active participants rather than passive subjects—has important implications. First, such a view puts focus on the actions people perform as members of a hierarchical institution. Second, it constantly connects these actions to establishing an individual’s institutional position. These two corollaries are significant in approaching ritual action, which is the third component of the diagram of the fertility and pleasure models. Ritual as a form of action sought to transform a woman’s status and identity and orient her to the new and changing social realities that were intruding upon her life. In so doing it delineated the coexistence of conflicting sexual values and their models, and by pulling together common symbols from the Tokugawa religious universe it gave each model an ideally ordered and distinct reality.