Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900
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The income for a samurai house—which came from a stipend—was fixed according to hereditary criteria, leaving rōnin (masterless samurai) and second or third sons in a precarious financial situation. One result was that they often took up scholarship, literature, religion, or the arts, in which they could establish a house of their own. Many of the leading writers and scholars of the early modern period—such as Gion Nankai, Hiraga Gennai, and Koikawa Harumachi—were samurai who had either lost or become disillusioned with their inherited positions or were of extremely low status, with insufficient means for survival, and consequently sought alternative professions in scholarship and the arts.
The social position of women was low. In a samurai family, a woman had no right to inherit the family name, property, or position. In the medieval period, when the samurai lived on the land as property owners and producers, samurai wives had an important position sustaining the household and family. But under the Tokugawa bakufu system, the samurai were no longer tied to the land, and so they gathered in the castle towns and became bureaucrats. The shōgun and the domain lords took over direct control of the farmers, who became the producers. In the seventeenth century, the samurai became similar to aristocrats in that they had male and female servants who took care of them. One consequence was that the role of the wife was reduced to that of a protected lady, with any power she might have had going entirely to her husband, who was master of the house. As the position of women declined and that of men rose, it became normal for the samurai, as head of the house, to have a mistress or to spend considerable time in the pleasure quarters.
The literature of the early modern period is often thought to be the literature of and by urban commoners (chōnin). Although some writers—such as Ihara Saikaku, Santō Kyoden, and Shikitei Sanba—were from artisan or merchant families, an overwhelming number came from samurai families. Asai Ryōi, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Gion Nankai, Hattori Nankaku, Hiraga Gennai, Koikawa Harumachi, Jippensha Ikku, and Takizawa Bakin—to mention only the most prominent names—were from warrior families, usually ones in severe decline. Even those not normally associated with samurai, such as Matsuo Bashō, were descendants of warriors. The literature of the early modern period is thus as much by the samurai as by the chōnin. A few writers had a peasant background, perhaps the best known being Issa, a haikai poet. Buson was the son of a well-to-do farmer.
THE ECONOMY AND THE THREE CITIES
At the end of the sixteenth century, foundries for minting gold and silver coins were built, leading to a unified gold- and silver-based currency. In 1636, the bakufu opened a foundry for minting zeni, or bronze coins, which provided the basis of a common currency. The bakufu and the daimyō, who were in need of cash, established large warehouses (kurayashiki) in cities such as Osaka, Edo, Tsuruga, and Ōtsu, to which merchants transported and in which they sold the rice and goods stored in the warehouses. The domain lords distributed the rice grown by their farmers to their vassals and sent the remainder to the warehouses in these large cities, where they exchanged it for hard currency which was used to pay the domain’s expenses. These merchants, referred to as “warehouse people” (kuramoto), also extended loans to the domain lords, thus becoming a key part of the domain’s financial structure. In the Genroku era, this system prospered, particularly in Osaka, which became known as the “kitchen of the country” because it contained as many as ninety-seven domain warehouses. Ideally positioned, Osaka became the national trading center for goods from the provinces, mainly rice, the country’s most important staple. As a result, gigantic sums of currency circulated through Osaka and provided enormous profits for the city’s merchants.
Before the mid-seventeenth century, when the supply routes and the financial (currency exchange) institutions still were inadequate, a special class of urban commoners—like those involved in minting gold and silver, managing the domain warehouses, and trading in Nagasaki—were the exclusive beneficiaries of the new currency and market economy, in which fortunes were made through the accumulation of capital. In 1671/1672, however, Kawamura Zuiken (1618–1699), receiving orders from the bakufu to create shipping routes for its annual rice tributes, successfully created an eastern shipping lane, from the Ōshū (the northeastern region of Honshū) to Edo and, more important, a western shipping lane from Sakata, at the northern end of the Japan Sea coast, down to Osaka. These new shipping lanes formed a national trade network that revolutionized the economy and made the Kamigata (Kyoto-Osaka) region the center of the new economy. In 1660, Yagobei of Tennōji was the only currency dealer in Osaka to exchange the currency from one part of the country for that from another, but ten years later, both a system of exchange dealers and a zeni exchange had been established. The 1670s through the 1680s gave rise to new, more financially powerful urban commoners and to such family businesses as the Kōnoike, Mitsui, and Sumitomo, which later became the huge Kamigata financial cartels.
The capital that accumulated at this time in the hands of Kyoto-Osaka chōnin also indirectly affected the farm villages in the provinces. The urban commoners hired the second and third sons of farming families as assistants who would work to become assistant managers and then, after many years of service, would set up their own business, thereby becoming members of the middle- or upper-class chōnin. These middle- to upper-class chōnin enjoyed such arts as waka (thirty-one-syllable verse), haikai, nō, kyōgen (comic drama), chanoyu, and kadō (incense). The vitality of the economy at this time was a major reason for the flourishing of literature and arts.
A salient feature of the late seventeenth century was the growth of an urban culture. The deliberate policy of the Tokugawa bakufu to place the samurai class in the regional castle towns and to force the daimyō to maintain residences in the new capital of Edo, combined with the new transportation networks and commercial infrastructure, resulted in the rapid development of the cities. Particularly significant was the enormous growth of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, where the local domain products and the rice that the daimyō collected as taxes were sent and stored, particularly in Edo and Osaka, where they were exchanged for currency. To facilitate the circulation of goods, special markets sprang up in the cities: a rice market at Dōjima in Osaka, fish markets at Zakoba in Osaka and Nihonbashi in Edo, and vegetable markets at Tenma in Osaka and Kanda in Edo. This commerce led, in turn, to the development of chains of wholesalers, middlemen, and retailers.
Edo was the home of the daimyō, hatamoto, and gokenin and their retainers and servants. Merchants and artisans gathered in Edo to supply this substantial population, which was a large source of their income. After the Great Meireki Fire of 1657, which destroyed most of Edo, including Edo Castle, the city was redesigned and reconstructed, leading to further expansion and growth. By the mid-eighteenth century, Edo had become a center for not only consumption but also commerce and production. In 1634 the population of Edo was about 150,000; by 1721 it had more than tripled to exceed 500,000; and by 1873 the inhabitants of Edo numbered nearly 600,000. (By contrast, the population of Paris in 1801 was 548,000.) Unlike Edo, which was populated by samurai and its supporters, Osaka was largely a merchant city, with a population of more than 380,000 in 1721. Its streets lined with domain warehouses, Osaka became in the seventeenth century the trade and distribution center for not only western Japan but also the entire nation and, by the early eighteenth century, had a population of more than 350,000. Kyoto, which had been the cultural capital of Japan for more than six hundred years and was the site of the imperial palace, had a thriving craft industry that produced dyed cloth and other wares. In addition, Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples were concentrated in Kyoto, giving it a religious character and making it a common destination for pilgrims from around the country. Nonetheless, the population of Kyoto, reflecting its shrinking economic and political importance, gradually decreased, from 410,000 in 1634 to 340,000 in 1721 to less than 240,000 in 1873.
THE LICENSED QUARTERS
The licensed quarters, particularly those in th
e three largest cities, played a major role in Japan’s early modern culture and literature. In a deliberate effort to bring prostitution under control and to separate it from society at large, the bakufu consolidated the existing brothels and placed them in designated licensed quarters (yūkaku), which were usually located on the periphery of the large cities, surrounded by a wall or moat, as in the case of Shimabara and Yoshiwara. Because of their construction, they were popularly referred to as the kuruwa (literally, castle wall). The licensed quarter had only one large gate, which controlled the clientele entering and prevented the courtesans from leaving at will. The bakufu eventually designated roughly twenty such areas throughout the country, of which the largest and most noteworthy were Shimabara in Kyoto, Yoshiwara in Edo, and Shinmachi in Osaka, followed by Maruyama in Nagasaki.
In 1589 the shōgun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, gathered together the dispersed brothels in Kyoto, the capital, in a single area called Yanagi-machi. In 1640, under the Tokugawa shōgunate, the houses were moved to the western part of the city, dubbed the Shimabara. A similar licensed quarter called Shinmachi, whose facilities were unrivaled throughout Japan, was built in Osaka. In contrast to Kyoto’s Shimabara, which served mainly upper-class and well-educated gentlemen, Shinmachi, which was situated near the provincial daimyō storehouses and the commercial port, served local wealthy merchants as well as those who came for business from all over Japan. Then, around 1618 the bakufu established the Yoshiwara licensed quarter in the Nihonbashi area of Edo. After the Great Meireki Fire of 1657, Yoshiwara was moved to the Asakusa area where, like Shimabara and Shinmachi, it became a major center of urban culture. The daimyō and the hatamoto stationed in Edo spent lavishly at Yoshiwara, as did wealthy townsmen.
Throughout most of the early modern period, the licensed quarter and the theater district were the two major entertainment centers, and they were closely connected. The kabuki, for example, drew its subject matter from the licensed quarters, and ukiyo-e (literally, pictures of the floating world) depicted courtesans and kabuki actors. Equally important, the licensed quarters became gathering places for intellectuals, artists, and performers, whose work had a profound impact on contemporary literature, drama, music, and art as well as on the fashion and customs of the times. During the 1770s and 1780s, as the center of popular culture increasingly shifted from Kyoto-Osaka to Edo, there was an explosion of popular literature in Edo, including the sharebon (books of wit and fashion) such as The Playboy Dialect (Yūshi hōgen, 1770), which described the ideal of tsū, or connoisseurship of the licensed quarters, specifically that of Yoshiwara. In contrast to the wealthy merchant and daimyō customers who had supported the golden age of high courtesan culture in the seventeenth century, the customers in Edo included petty merchants and middle- or lower-level samurai like the one found in The Playboy Dialect.
THE COURTESANS AND FEMALE ENTERTAINERS
The most general terms for women who worked in the licensed quarters were yūjo (literally, women who play or entertain) and jorō (women). Another general term was keisei (literally, castle toppler, a Chinese term alluding to the power of a woman to bring down a kingdom), which came to refer to high-ranking courtesans. In the licensed quarter, these women were arranged in a strictly hierarchical order that reflected their status and price.
Until the 1750s, tayō, a term generally used for a superior artist, was the highest rank of courtesan. Tayū were highly trained and educated performers skilled in such arts as music, dance, poetry, calligraphy, tea ceremony, and flower arrangement. Because there were very few, access to them was very difficult. Tayū could also reject men, who could see them only by special appointment. It is said that out of a thousand kamuro (preteenage attendants) in training, only three or five ever were elevated to the rank of tayū.2
Immediately below the tayū were the tenjin, called kōshi in Yoshiwara. Although kōshi also were considered to be of high rank and highly skilled, their price was 30 to 50 percent less than that of a tayū. They sat in the latticed parlors, where prospective customers could view them from outside, hence the name kōshi (lattice). In 1668 a new system, which incorporated hitherto illegal prostitutes, was established in Yoshiwara, adding the ranks of sancha (powdered tea) and umecha (plum tea) beneath those of tayū and kōshi. The sancha were originally teahouse waitresses who worked as prostitutes and did not reject clients, but under the new system their status rose. Their services cost half or less than what a kōshi charged.
By the 1760s, the situation had changed significantly. The tayū and kōshi had disappeared in Yoshiwara and been supplanted by the oiran, the highest-ranking courtesans. The highest oiran were the yobidashi (literally, persons on call), who could be seen only by making an appointment through a teahouse. The next level of oiran was the chūsan, who were displayed for selection in the latticed parlor. The third level, originally beneath that of an oiran, was the zashikimochi (parlor holder), who had her own parlor and anteroom, and the heyamochi (room holder), who had only one room, where she lived and met her clients.3
In the late eighteenth century, the oiran, like the tayū before them, were typically accompanied by kamuro and shinzō (literally, newly launched boat), who were apprentices from fourteen to twenty years of age. In Yoshiwara, a kamuro became a shinzō at the age of fourteen. The kamuro and shinzō took lessons in the arts, trained to become courtesans, and performed various tasks for their “elder sisters” (anejorō), who looked after them. The shinzō who attended the highest-ranking oiran sometimes entertained a client with talk and music until the oiran arrived.
In the seventeenth century, when customers wanted to visit a high-ranking yūjo, they did not go to her residence but instead went to a teahouse and made an appointment to visit a place called an ageya (performance house). In Yoshiwara, the ageya lined Nakanochō, the main street of the licensed quarter. At the ageya, the customers were entertained by geisha and professional jesters and were served food and drink while they waited for the tayū, who arrived with her retinue in an elaborate procession called the ageya-iri, or “entering the performance house.” By 1760 the ageya system, along with the tayū and kōshi, had disappeared in Yoshiwara (although it continued in Osaka until the end of the nineteenth century) and been replaced by a cheaper system: customers went to a guiding teahouse (hikitejaya) where they were entertained until they were taken to see the high-ranking courtesan at a courtesan residence (yūjoya).
The geisha (skilled person) was a professional entertainer in one or more of the traditional Japanese arts such as music, dance, and storytelling. The town (machi) geisha worked freelance at parties outside pleasure quarters, and the quarter (kuruwa) geisha entertained at parties in the pleasure quarters. The role of the quarter geisha (both men and women), who first appeared in Osaka in the 1710s and in Edo in the 1750s, became more important as the artistic talents of the high-ranking courtesans declined. Initially there were more male geisha (sometimes referred to as hōkan, who were often jesters and storytellers) than female geisha in Yoshiwara, but by 1800 female geisha outnumbered the men by three to one, and the term eventually applied only to women, as it does today. Geisha were performers, not prostitutes, although in the late Edo period, the line between these callings was often crossed.
Further down the social scale were the illegal courtesans who worked outside the licensed quarters. Those in unlicensed quarters, such as Fukagawa and Shinagawa in Edo, also were arranged in ranks. At the bottom of the scale were the various unlicensed prostitutes not connected to any quarter. They ranged from “bath women” (yuna), who washed and entertained bathers, to streetwalkers (tsujikimi) and night hawks (yotaka), who solicited on the streets.
LITERACY, SCHOLARSHIP, AND PRINTING
Through the sixteenth century, the average samurai was illiterate, as were farmers and urban commoners. But with the transformation of the samurai from warriors to bureaucrats, politicians, and the social elite, education became a primary concern. A school was established in Edo for the hatamoto; the var
ious domains created domain schools for their own samurai; and by the mid-seventeenth century, almost all samurai were literate. In contrast to their medieval counterparts, the new Tokugawa rulers adopted a policy of rule by law and morality—by letter rather than force—a policy that required mass education. With the introduction of a currency-based economy, a knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic became essential to farmers, artisans, and merchants, and as a result, private schools (terakoya) sprang up in both the cities and the farming villages. By the middle of the seventeenth century, middle- to upper-class chōnin and farmers were literate, and by the late seventeenth century, when Matsuo Bashō and Ihara Saikaku were writing, the audience of readers was large.
Earlier popular literature—such as The Tale of the Heike and the Taiheiki—often were texts orally presented (katarimono) by raconteurs and blind minstrels. But with the spread of literacy, both samurai and commoners had access to a literate culture, including various forms of refined or elite literature (such as waka, renga, monogatari, kanshi, and kanbun, which earlier had been the exclusive possession of the nobility, priests, and elite samurai) and a variety of new popular literature. Perhaps the most important form of popular literature in the seventeenth century was haikai (popular linked verse), which in the Muromachi period had been an adjunct to renga (classical linked verse). The Puppy Collection (Enoko shū), a collection of haikai edited in 1633 by two Kyoto urbanites, Matsue Shigeyori and Nonoguchi Ryūhō (disciples of Matsunaga Teitoku), was the first anthology of poetry by commoners.