Prostitution and Sex Industry During the Tokugawa Shogunate Period
Amy Stanley’s work provides us with a detailed and new perspective on the issue of prostitution during the Tokugawa period. Although extensive work has been done to examine prostitution during this period, Stanley distinguishes herself by the detail she affords to study the evolvement of the political, social and economic significance of the market for prostitution that spanned two centuries. Her book does not focus on examining the daily life of prostitutes or practices inside pleasure quarters. Instead, she uses women’s experience of prostitution to focus on how sex work as an industry transformed communities across Japan. This market of sexual services eventually clashed with the socio-political order in Tokugawa society and the consequences that resulted changed women’s positions and led to the undermining of the Tokugawa state. Stanley’s use of a wide range of sources provides an insightful read that traces the development of the sex industry during the Tokugawa period.
The book starts by questioning the popular belief that strict Tokugawa policies were detrimental to women’s status. Through an analysis of the diary of Umeza Masakage - the chief mining magistrate located in the town of Innai Ginzan in early 17th century - Stanley reveals how women were viewed merely as possessions or commodities to be sold or bought before the implementation of the Tokugawa legal order. His diary entries also reveal how women were considered property that could be sold in an attempt by their husbands to repay household debts. In the next chapter, she goes on to uncover how the Tokugawa legal system sought to transform women’s status. By creating a clear demarcation between a wife and a prostitute through confining each to its own space – the household for the former and legally designated pleasure quarters for the prostitutes, the Tokugawa legal system allowed women to be protected from further commodification and slavery by men. As such, the Tokugawa regime could not only project itself as a benevolent state upholding social order but also as the regime responsible for transforming women’s status from being a property of their husbands’ to legitimate subjects of the state. Hence, the orthodox understanding of Tokugawa law as oppressive is being re-interpreted here in light of the Tokugawa shogunate who fought against women’s reduction to a mere asset and diversified the roles women played in the state. However, as prostitution was granted a unique position within the state, prostitutes began gaining recognition as a morally acceptable occupation.
To prevent the ruin and dissolution of the ideal patriarchal household touted by the Tokugawa Shogunate, the trope of prostitutes cast as filial daughters emerged, as examined in Chapter 3. Nagasaki becomes a case-study in which we see how prostitutes took advantage of the proximity between their homes and Nagasaki’s licensed pleasure quarters. The ability to establish constant contact with their family meant prostitutes, instead of being rejected, were popularly embraced as dutiful daughters supporting their ageing parents. Nevertheless, there were also exceptions, such as former prostitutes who managed to resist the pressure of brothel keepers’ and left the industry by allowing their parents’ to come forward to assert their protection over them.
The last three chapters reveal how the high economic profits received from the increasing popularity of prostitution eventually resulted in the destruction of the ideal hierarchical household structure and the benevolent image of the government. In a bid to enable economic growth, the authorities allowed the expansion of prostitution outside licensed quarters to port cities such as Niigata, post-stations lining the government highways, and port towns situated along the Inland Sea. Stanley argues that the lack of strict regulations on sex work had adverse effects on women. As prostitutes were exchanged over increasingly long distances and became further from home, they were stripped of family ties. Hence, they were viewed as independent workers lusting for their economic profit rather than the filial daughters they once were. Stanley documents a shift where shogunal representatives such as Kawamura Nagataka, started blaming ‘greedy’ parents and their ‘shameless’ daughters who voluntarily entered into prostitution and encouraged the dissolution of the household,, in an attempt to preserve his reputation as ‘moral ruler and protector of the household’. A group of village headmen in post-station brothels and inns, likewise, lodged complaints about the pernicious influence of prostitutes – from encouraging divorce, to ‘bankrupting families and corrupting peasant girls’. The perception of prostitutes as ‘wicked women’ – a sharp contrast to their initial image of filial daughters, shows how the development of an intensely competitive industry created opportunities for prostitution to flourish – but when it started to threaten the ideal patriarchal authority, women were the ones who were blamed. In short, prostitutes came to symbolize the dangers entailed in the expansion of the market economy and the dislocations it brought to the ‘ideal’ social order.
Selling Women is an extensively researched, sophisticated piece of research. By using a whole trove of previously overlooked archival material to investigate the details of every claim and experience, Stanley manages to present a compelling picture of how prostitution, representing the market economy, threatened to undermine the Tokugawa social order and altered the place of women during the Tokugawa period. If there is a slight weakness, it would be that the conclusion was a little brief. In an attempt to trace out the continuing legacy and changes in early modern prostitution, Stanley makes references to wartime ‘comfort women’, the ‘panpan’ women during the occupation period, and the concept of ‘compensated dating’, but she does not explain what these entailed or how it paralleled or differed from prostitution during the Tokugawa period. Hence, it would be interesting if further work could be done on drawing the parallels between prostitution in the Tokugawa period and these forms of early modern prostitution.
Written in a style that is engaging and highly readable, Stanley’s work is a valuable contribution to women’s history in Japan as it revises my previous belief that women were oppressed under the Tokugawa period. Not only so, but it was also fascinating to see the evolving perception of prostitution during the Tokugawa period, and how powerful the market forces behind the sex industry could be – as it eventually spelt the order’s doom.
