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The Politics of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Organizer: Amy Stanley, Harvard University
Chair: Yutaka Yabuta, Kansai Daigaku, Japan
Discussant: Anne Walthall, University of California, Irvine
Through the tumultuous last decades of the Tokugawa shogunate and the formative years of the Meiji state, the issue of prostitution served as a flashpoint for anxiety about gender roles, popular morality, and even Japan’s place in the world. This panel’s presentations focus on both the controversial figure of the prostitute and the contested space of the pleasure quarters in order to examine continuity and change in nineteenth century social and political discourse. Elizabeth Leicester explores this theme in Bunka/Bunsei era Kanazawa, as a domain official, a poet, a political theorist, and an essayist addressed ideas of gender and status difference in their writings on prostitution. Focusing on the pleasure quarters in the treaty port of Yokohama, Ann Marie Davis examines how Japanese and foreign representations rendered this space as a site for new kinds of social interactions. Finally, Amy Stanley investigates how an anti-prostitution movement in Musashi navigated the shifting political landscape of the late nineteenth century. By considering the multiple meanings of prostitution on both sides of the Tokugawa/Meiji divide, this panel seeks to understand the relationship between sexual mores, political change, and national identity.
Gender and Status Anxiety in Discourses on Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century
Elizabeth A. Leicester, University of Southern California
Status and gender, the anchors of Tokugawa social hierarchy, neither meshed perfectly with each other ideologically, nor sufficiently encompassed social experience. Representations of the prostitute, doubly marginalized as working in a low-status occupation or as a lower order of woman by nature, nevertheless exposed ambiguities in the symbolic order of Tokugawa hierarchy. The inadequacy of these systems to reflect society became critically obvious in early nineteenth-century Kanazawa, when officials observed an influx of vagrants and illegal prostitution, spurred by economic upheavals in the domain. A debate ensued over the causes of the illegal trade, its implications for governance, and the ultimate decision to open an official brothel quarter for the first time in the domain’s history in 1820. This paper explores a cluster of political essays from that period, written by officials and scholars of varying class and gender, which expose emergent anxieties about the competing and contraditory orders of status and gender. The theorist of political economy, Kaiho Seiryo, the haikai poet Kaga no Chiyo, a Kaga official Tomita Kagechika, and the essayist Tadano Makuzu, all wrote essays on women in which they posited the prostitute as an archetype in attempts to categorize and catalog women of various classes according to different formulations of society and moral cultivation, each with their own agenda in relation to the dominant political and social order. These ambivalencies were manifested in policies that were also contingent—the Kanazawa brothel quarters were closed twelve years later—and remained unresolved in the following decades.
Camouflaging Chaos with Pleasure: Images of Entertainment Districts in the Yokohama Treaty Port
Ann Marie L. Davis, University of California, Los Angeles, Japan
During the final weeks of the fifth year of Ansei (1858), forty-one innkeepers, brothel owners, and restaurateurs of Kanagawa convened to discuss the bakufu’s call for the construction of a new pleasure district. Deemed an essential component in the opening of the treaty port of Yokohama, the district was slated for inauguration within six months – in time for the opening of the port itself.
From its earliest inception, the entertainment quarters met with a number of setbacks and disasters. Typhoons and severe rainstorms caused several postponements of its opening, and a series of fires forced the district to relocate repeatedly. Despite trials and calamities, however, the quarters became an instant hit with transient merchants and sailors. Wealth and prosperity followed the district as it constantly had to relocate. Meanwhile local and international artists celebrated the quarters in Japanese wood block images (ukiyoe), European lithographic prints, and elaborately construed travel journals.
Such popular representations highlighted the quarters’ contradictory roles as “traditional” site for entertainment yet unprecedented space for foreign bodies to congregate and mingle. In contrast to the tumultuous and (literally) stormy setting in which they originated, the quarters were invariably rendered as colorful yet highly predictable social settings. Challenging the inchoate and chaotic backdrop of the treaty port, depictions of the Yokohama entertainment district revealed new and antagonistic bodies, which were camouflaged by order and regimes of pleasure.
Prostitution and Protest in Nineteenth-Century Musashi
Amy Stanley, Harvard University
Scholars often credit foreign influence for the emergence of an anti-prostitution movement in late Meiji Japan. But arguments against prostitution did not materialize only after foreigners arrived – throughout the second half of the Tokugawa period, peasants mounted protests against prostitution at nearby post stations, blaming the existence of brothels for social ills in their villages. They did not abandon these movements after the Meiji Restoration, but they adopted new vocabulary and found new allies among progressive politicians and labor union leaders.
This presentation focuses on protests against prostitution in Musashi Province (later Kumagaya Prefecture and then Saitama Prefecture), describing the successes and failures of these grassroots movements as they navigated the social and political changes of the late nineteenth century. As the province became a prefecture and the local administrative office gave way to the Prefectural Assembly, their arguments stayed surprisingly consistent, concentrating not on the welfare of women sold into prostitution but on problem of young men visiting brothels. An analysis of these indigenous traditions of resistance allows us to see continuity as well as change in the formation of social policy in nineteenth-century Japan.