Inside Imperial Japan's Brothels

After the first licensed brothel opened in the 17th century, how was sex work thought of in Japan throughout the following centuries? From the brothels in the pleasure quarters, to the rise and popularity of male sex workers and where geishas fit into the picture, Kate is joined by Elizabeth Lublin to explore this world. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. This is Betwixt the Sheet. So are you in the right place? Have you got your seat? Have you got your snacks ready? All right, let's crack on with it. But before we do, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult, too. Oh, God, we managed to get that one over and done with. I feel so much safer. Right, on with the show.

• 1:03Kate Lister?

  Well, thank you for joining me for an evening stroll, Betwixters. This time, we're taking in the beautiful cherry blossoms in 19th century Kyoto and keeping a sly eye out for all the sex workers around here. And interestingly, if we're subtle about it, we can take a glimpse into the tea houses and theatres, and we'll see that male sex workers were every bit as present as the women here. I mean, why not, right? But what's it like inside these spaces? How was sex work viewed and practised in Edo, Japan? A period which ran from the 17th to the 19th century? Well, I am flipping well ready to find out if you are. Let's do this.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  What do you require, madam?

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Oh, money, of course.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing it.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry.

• 2:19Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. In the Edo period of Japan, which started in the 17th century, sex work was very much accepted as just part of society. They had licensed pleasure districts. So how did the sex worker landscape change throughout this period and into the modern age? How was the relationship between men and male sex workers viewed within samurai society? And how did an influx of foreigners to Japan change everything? Well, today I'm joined by the wonderful Elizabeth Lublin, Associate Professor at Wayne State University, and she is going to take us back to Edo, Japan and help us find out more. Let's do this.

• 3:01Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Betsy Lublin. How are you doing?

• 3:07Speaker 05

  I am doing very well. How are you?

• 3:09Kate Lister?

  I'm thrilled to be talking to you. That's how I am. You're a professor of many things, but Japanese history and you have written and researched women in Edo, Tokugawa, Japan and sex work in Tokugawa, Japan. That is fascinating. Betsy, can I ask you, how did you get to this point? Is Japanese history and culture something you've always been interested in? What brought you to study in this?

• 3:36Speaker 05

  So the interest in Japan began when I was in high school and I did a study abroad programme for a summer, lived with a family, just fell in love with the culture, the people, the environment. And then I decided when I went to college to, instead of doing French or Spanish, which seemed to be a little bit too easy, not knocking those languages, but I decided to focus on Japanese and do East Asian studies, particularly looking at the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• 4:03Kate Lister?

  And so you are completely fluent in Japanese and you can just seamlessly move amongst them. They wouldn't even know that you were American?

• 4:12Speaker 05

  You know, it's funny you say that. My homestay brother way back when said that when I speak Japanese, I have an Ohio accent.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  So I don't know that they would think that I'm seamlessly speaking it, but I can get myself around.

• 4:25Kate Lister?

  I'm so in awe of people that can speak other languages. It's just amazing. What brought you to study in women in Japanese history and sex work in Japanese history?

• 4:34Speaker 05

  So the sex work came about through my dissertation, which was a look at the Japan Women's Christian Temperance Union.

• 4:40Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  So I was interested in looking at the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan's engagement with the West, modernization and the role of women in helping move Japan into a position of equality with the Western powers. And the WCTU, which was established in Japan in 1886, as part of a global expansion of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. I found the group absolutely fascinating, the ways in which they asserted for themselves or claimed for themselves a role in public, privilege that even though they were supposed to be confined either to the household or for the lower classes to factory or farm work. And the WCTU was very much interested in getting rid of or having abolished drinking, smoking,

• 5:25Speaker 05

  and licensed prostitution as well as concubinage. And so it was by looking at the reform activism, particularly in respect to women's sexual activity, that it expanded to looking from the late 19th and early 20th centuries to going back a little bit into the Tokugawa period and then looking at what sex work looked like, how it functioned, what role it had in state control, from the early 17th century to the mid 19th century.

• 5:53Kate Lister?

  The temperance movement that you're describing there, that sounds very similar to the temperance movements that were going on in the West. Was that Western influenced? And as a wider question, when did Japan start to be exposed to Western influences?

• 6:08Speaker 05

  So to answer your first question, yes, it was very much Western influenced. So I'm not exactly sure, you know, temperance organizations in, say, Britain date back to the early 1800s, maybe even the late 1700s. In the United States, women first organized in a serious way in Ohio in the early 1870s. And that was the Women's Christian Temperance Union. And when it went international, created a world organization. And in the mid 1880s, the very first missionary for the WCTU started traveling around the world. And Mary Clement Levin, was her name, she visited dozens of different countries. Japan was early on her travels and she was gone for many, many years.

• 6:50Speaker 05

  But the brief period of time, half a year she was in Japan, she tapped into a missionary influence that had been there from the late eighteen fifties that proposed or touted moral reform, temperance, monogamy, whatnot, as cornerstones of a modern civilized society. And it took off in Japan very much as then a way for Japan to become an equal of the Western imperialist powers at that point. To your second question, I mean, Western influence in Japan first appeared in the fifteen forties with missionaries, Catholic missionaries who attempted to Christianize. Catholicism, though, was eventually banned by the Tokugawa Shogunate in the sixteen thirties and the sixteen forties

• 7:33Speaker 05

  as part of an effort to control contact with the outside world.

• 7:37Kate Lister?

  I love that for them. Right? They they just went, no, no, enough of this. Off you go, you strange Christian people. We're closing the borders. No, we're gonna do stuff our way.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  From the eighteen forties, the only Europeans, Westerners who were allowed in Japan were the Dutch, and they were confined to a very small island, manmade island in the harbor of Nagasaki. And you had just one, two, maybe three ships that were allowed in each year to trade. The cargo was thoroughly examined to make sure that there were no Christian books, crosses, anything like that.

• 8:10Kate Lister?

  Oh, they weren't messing about, were they?

• 8:12Speaker 05

  They were not messing about.

• 8:14Kate Lister?

  So what happened then? At what point did they go, all right, we'll let you in? And then obviously, all the temperance movement people came over as well. But what was the shift?

• 8:25Speaker 05

  The shift came in really the eighteen fifties. The British and the Russians certainly had tried from the late seventeen hundreds to open up Japan's doors, to to crack open this wall against foreign trade. And they were interested in not just the trade, but they were interested in harbors to take haven during storms, for places to get supplies, refuel, get food, get water, whatnot. And so from the late seventeen hundreds, the pressure on Japan to change that policy. Of being open only to the Dutch. I mean, there was certainly contact with Korea, with China and with what is now Okinawa, but in terms of the West, it was just the Dutch. Finally, that broke open in the 1850s when an American by the name of Commodore Perry

• 9:09Speaker 05

  arrived with his black ships, these steamships that to the Japanese almost looked like volcanoes that were erupting.

• 9:16Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 9:16Speaker 05

  And the images, woodblock prints made of these Americans who arrived in the 1850s, they very much were pictured like traditional Japanese devils, oni. But Matthew Perry used gunboat diplomacy. He used the threat of military attack to force the Japanese to agree, the Shogunate to agree to a treaty. And he used then the Opium Wars. So he arrived in Japanese waters about a decade and a half after the first Opium War broke out. And so just over a decade after China had been forced to agree to this devastating unequal treaty. And so he played off that of, you know, if you want the same thing to happen to you as happened to China, we'll throw it at you. Following up on that was

• 10:00Speaker 05

  in the late 1850s, there was an American from New York who went as the first consul, first foreign diplomatic official to reside in Japan. And he negotiated a treaty which the British, the French, the Russians, whatnot, kind of jumped on to and created this structure of unequal treaties. And those came into effect in 1859, allowed missionaries to reside in the treaty ports, opened up trade, and there was this sequence then, this order of other cities, treaty ports that were opened to foreign residents.

• 10:30Kate Lister?

  So that means that for most of its history, with some contact going on, but Japan has been largely uninfluenced by European standards. See, that's fascinating because when you look at European sex work, the history of it, it's all kind of interlocked. You've got the same Catholic morality and religious. Infighting and like, oh, we're gonna ban it. Is it okay? Is it not okay? What was going on in Japan without that influence in the period that you are looking at?

• 11:02Speaker 05

  So if we're going to look at the Tokugawa period, if I could provide just a little bit of background. So in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu and his supporters won a massive battle that set the stage for the reunification of Japan or the unification of Japan. The previous century or so had been a period of, it's called the warring states period or the Sengoku period, when regional military rulers with their retainers had vied for power. And most of them, this was after the central government, the second military regime had collapsed. The imperial court was, for all intents and purposes, unengaged in politics. And these regional military rulers had wanted to just extend their own power.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  In the latter part of the 16th century, several of them started to have notions about unifying the country, creating a centralized government. And Tokugawa Ieyasu was a third of the unifiers. And in the early 1600s then, he needed to establish his authority. He needed to establish the legitimacy of the regime. He needed to deal with the social unrest that came from those military figures who had been defeated. And they were a sizable portion of the population. And so he carried out a number of different policies, he and his two immediate successors, to do exactly that, establish his legitimacy, control and bring about peace and prosperity.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  And for the most part, those are characteristic of much of the Tokugawa period, which lasted until 1868 and the overthrow of the Tokugawa, the Shogunate. One of those policies was to create a system of licensed, regulated, controlled, confined prostitution. So. There had been, back in the mid 1500s, previous regime had actually, for the very first time, acknowledged or identified prostitution as a legitimate profession and begun to tax it. The very first that we know of licensed brothel district was set up in the late 1890s. But under the Tokugawa regime, it became this nationwide system.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  And the very first brothel, licensed brothel that was part of this system was Yoshiwara, which to this day remains the most famous, infamous of Japanese licensed quarters. It opened in 1617 on the outskirts of Edo or Tokyo, the Shogunate's capital. Its creation actually came about because of an appeal from a brothel owner himself. And he claimed, he submitted a petition in 1612, and he said to the Tokugawa regime, you know, you should create this licensed district. Because a licensed district would, one, enable you to crack down on the kidnapping of children for sex work. It would allow you to regulate and control and monitor the male clients going to this brothel district,

• 13:58Speaker 05

  many of whom, again, were rootless. Their samurai leaders have been defeated in battle. It would also let you establish your moral authority over customs. And so the Tokugawa regime in 1617 said, sure, we'll do this. And then added benefit was also then the revenue that came from this district, being able to tax the brothels and the establishments that were there. As part of this, then, there became this contract system whereby parents would essentially indenture daughters. That was mostly how it operated. Parents would indenture daughters to a brothel in one of these licensed districts. And during the Tokugawa period, the contracts were restricted to 10 years.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  And women under 18 were technically not allowed to be indentured. The 10 years brothel owners played around with that. Certainly, the age restriction, parents and brothel owners played around with that. But one of the key things that Amy Stanley, who's a professor at Northwestern and has written about the Tokugawa period and sex work. She has noted that this creation of the system, it's been looked at as contributing to the oppression of women during the Tokugawa period. And this is a period when women were seen as the worst period in Japanese history in terms of women's rights has long been labeled the Tokugawa period. She's pointed out that the creation of this system actually, for the first time,

• 15:23Speaker 05

  was part of giving women certain protections and certain rights. So up until this point, women had been considered chattel or property of the household head. And so even wives could be sold off into prostitution. Here you had during the early Tokugawa period, wives could not be sold into prostitution.

• 15:40Kate Lister?

  It's a low bar, but I'm glad it's there.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 05

  It's a low bar. It's a very low bar. But the state is part of this construction of the system and the creation of a social order that was very much based on the patriarchal family. Women became not the property of the household head, but they became loyal subjects of the Tokugawa Shogunate. And with that came certain protections in the system. And I don't mean to say any of this to glorify, because you said it's a really low bar.

• 16:08Kate Lister?

  I mean, we're dealing with some fairly horrible stuff, but it's fascinating to hear that even within this really horrible stuff, for the first time ever afforded some kind of protection and recourse and legal recognition. So I suppose that the first official policy then was what we'd now call zoning, which is where you build an area and you restrict the sale of sex to those areas. Are they what they would call the floating worlds?

• 16:34Speaker 05

  So the floating world or the Ukio didn't include just the brothel districts.

• 16:39Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 16:40Speaker 05

  It also included theater areas and tea houses and other entertainment areas. Ukio is used more to think about, in some ways, the state of mind of the ephemerality of life and enjoy it while you can, in a sense. But yes, it is often equated to these licensed districts.

• 16:59Kate Lister?

  Okay. Were they very popular then?

• 17:00Speaker 05

  The licensed districts?

• 17:02Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  Oh, definitely. In short order, there were 35 that were established around Japan. So part of that establishment came along with yet another key policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate to establish its authority. And that was called alternate attendance, or in Japanese, sankin koutai. There were about 280 different administrative regions around Japan. Think of them like states in the United States or provinces in Canada. Prefectures in Japan now, each had its own military ruler and a castle town. And under the military ruler was this hierarchy of retainers. Some of the key military rulers, Tokugawa, yes, who hadn't actually defeated in the early 1600s.

• 17:47Speaker 05

  But they were too powerful, they controlled too much land, they had too many retainers that they couldn't simply be replaced. So part of this control system for all of these military rulers who had their own militaries was to require that they spend basically half of their time in this shogunate capital of Edo. And this is this alternate attendance system. So they had to maintain their residences, a residence in the capital of Edo, as well as a residence back in their home province, their home domain. And they had to carry with them or bring with them retinues of warriors. How many was dependent upon the size of their domain. And so half of the time they lived with the first wife and offspring of the first wife and then the administration in Edo.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  The other time they lived back in the domain and then they moved back and forth. So that system itself was a huge impetus to urbanization and to the development of designated trade routes. But part of what happened was that you had then this cohort of mostly male members of an administration living in Edo or living in castle towns and traveling back and forth. And so these brothel districts came to service that administrative sector of the country. But with the creation of castle towns and urbanization, you also had then commoner populations, artisans, merchants who flocked to these areas.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  And while they had their families, they making more money became major clients then of the brothel districts that were there.

• 19:19Kate Lister?

  When you look at the history of sex work, or at least what I've seen of it, you tend to have where sex workers exist and there's a sort of a permissive attitude around it. What you tend to get in the West at least is they have more agency than good women, quote unquote, wives who are supposed to stay at home and have babies, but they never really have respect. They have, they occupy this strange. Middle ground between the two, where they kind of have more freedom than a wife. Like, they're allowed to go into public areas with men and, you know, have fun with them in pubs and this kind of stuff, but they're also not respected. Would that map on to something within these pleasure zones in Japan?

• 19:58Speaker 05

  Not the pleasure zones, not the red light districts, these licensed quarters. Because the vast majority, I mean, really, the vast majority of the girls and the young women and the women who worked sex workers in the licensed districts. They were sold, in a sense, into indentured servitude by impoverished parents. And the Tokugawa Shogunate, certainly during the first 200 years, so into the late 1700s, there was this overwhelming sense that the women who worked in these brothel districts were not necessarily working because they wanted to. They didn't have that kind of agency. They were there because they were being filial.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  Their parents had sold them into these contracts and gotten advances. And so the promissory note, the contract, whatever you want to call it, included money that parents could use to pay off debt, to ensure that they could, you know, buy the fertilizer that they needed for the planting for the next year. And the Tokugawa Shogunate bought into that. I mean, it was very much part of the Confucian rhetoric ideology that underscored a lot of social relations during the period. And so there wasn't that stigma. There was, though, for women who plied the trade or were sold into sex work, because, you know, sold is a different thing. Plied the trade implies, you know, suggests agency. But for those who were unlicensed prostitutes or fell outside of the licensed system.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  So while the Tokugawa created this licensed structure that was legal and regulated, as the economy grew, as travel proliferated, then inns along, in post stations, at harbors, in market towns, began to pop up where prostitution took place. And the Tokugawa Shogunate decided to, with some of that, to tacitly regulate it. And there were periodic rules that went out about the number of waitresses who could work or maids who could work at an inn and how much prostitution they could engage in. But that created this flourishing, and in a sense, they were part of that system. And it grew and grew and grew because so much money could be made from that. But then you had the totally illicit.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Prostitution, streetwalkers, women who sold themselves or were sold under bridges, in forests, on temple grounds, whatnot. There was a different attitude towards those young girls, those women, because they were outside of the system. And the attitude then didn't take into account the circumstances that might have led those women to be in those positions. Kidnapped, abusive husbands, pimps, whatnot. There was an attitude, again, that wasn't negative, that didn't see women who worked in the licensed quarters as transgressive. Though, to come back to Amy Stanley, she's pointed out that that actually began to change

• 22:48Speaker 05

  in the late 1700s. And it did, even with licensed quarters, as prostitution proliferated. And it moved from the major castle towns, Osaka, Edo, Nagasaki, whatnot, into the domains, into, you know, smaller areas, villages, towns. And when prostitution began to pop up there, sometimes in brothels, licensed, mostly not, then there was seen as, as the women themselves, and this more collectively hit women, that they were creating issues, they were damaging the family, they were destroying public morals. And so at late 1700s, the attitude began to change more towards women. The belief was then that they

• 23:33Speaker 05

  were using their agency. They were using prostitution as a, a way to proactively make money. And when that became part of the dominant impression, then the stigma against prostitutes really began to appear.

• 23:50Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Elizabeth after this short break.

• 24:05Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 24:48Kate Lister?

  As soon as they start earning their own money and they're doing it kind of for themselves, then the stigma comes.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  But even with that, it wasn't that they were doing it for themselves, because many of them were still sold or trafficked by family members.

• 25:01Kate Lister?

  Trying to get my head around how this makes sense to them, like trying to follow the thread. It sounds very organised. Is this, is this the Confucius reasoning of like everything in its place and everything has a place and as long as we're doing it over here in this place, under these rules, it's okay?

• 25:19Speaker 05

  That was very much a part of it. That women had their place and they had their function. It was also part of this idea of the patriarchal family and the family as being the basic building block of society. And if you didn't have strong families, farming families, for example, that were paying their taxes, then the domains couldn't continue to exist, the shogunate couldn't continue to exist. So women were playing a proper role, in a sense, by being filial daughters.

• 25:46Kate Lister?

  Did you have a kind of like a stratification of the types of women and men that were selling sex? Because you see that replicated all over the world, like very wealthy courtesans and then the people that are selling it out of, I suppose, desperation. Do you see that in Japanese history?

• 26:03Speaker 05

  Oh, definitely. So even from the very beginning of recorded sex work, paid sex work, there was this hierarchy of those who were skilled, were talented. During the Tokugawa period, you did have that very high level of courtesan, referred to as taiyou in Japanese. They were the ones who were able to entertain in the sense of they could recite poetry and they could play the shamisen or the shakuhachi, which is a Japanese flute. They could dance, they could sing. So in other words, they could entertain. And they had that training. As the Tokugawa period progressed, physical appearance became yet another important factor for determining status.

• 26:46Speaker 05

  Within the ranks of sex workers in the brothel districts. So curly hair, not good, freckles, not good. Certain kinds of things were important. But as prostitution proliferated, then the number of those who were much farther down the ranking, in a sense, those who didn't have those kinds of skills, they were just, it was about the sex. They became more and more common. So those at the very upper echelon, in a sense, who were able to very often dictate their clients. And clients would have to go through a number of different meetings and the rigmarole and all of that to merit time. The courtesans who commanded the highest of the salaries.

• 27:30Speaker 05

  They were a minuscule percentage of those who were engaged in sex work during the Tokugawa period. So one of the things that we can see is as the system grew, as sex work proliferated, as the economy expanded and became more of a cash-based economy, then the clients also became more and more those who were further down on the social order. So certainly by the mid Tokugawa period, even a carpenter was able to afford, not to put it crassly, but a roll in the hay, so to speak.

• 28:02Kate Lister?

  A thruppenny knee trembler.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 28:05Kate Lister?

  How close is the high-class courtesan related to the geisha? Where do they fit together?

• 28:16Speaker 05

  So the term geisha itself literally translates as a person of art. Those who study geisha say they weren't prostitutes. They were not sex workers. That their focus was on the arts. And there were women who worked as that and they entertained without then having sex as a part of the transaction. Some geisha did. But in a sense, I think for the high-level courtesans, the sex work remained the primary focus, if I can say that. And the dancing and the singing, the music playing, the conversation, whatnot, those were part of the package, but those weren't the main part of the package. Whereas with geisha, it was the performance. It was then the artistic element of it.

• 29:02Kate Lister?

  Okay. So we've got a system whereby parents are indenturing their children to the brothels and the pleasure quarter. That's a hell of a thing to get your head around. Like from a modern perspective, what on earth? But they would be indentured for 10 years. What was the goal at the end of the 10 years? What would you hope that happened after that you'd go back home? Like, what would, what would happen?

• 29:26Speaker 05

  I think marriage was.

• 29:27Kate Lister?

  Marriage. I'd almost forgotten about that. Yes. Right.

• 29:30Speaker 05

  Marriage was the hope.

• 29:31Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 29:32Speaker 05

  And if possible, if venereal disease, syphilis hadn't made a woman unable to have children, or whatever other damage happened to maternal organs in the process, I think marriage and children were the ultimate goal. Some women, and it's unclear, you know, what percentage, did find that that was not a path that they could take, and they ended up finding some other kind of urban employment. Some continued into unlicensed prostitution, unlicensed sex work. But marriage itself, part of why that would remain the goal, is that it was still the normative, it was still expected for women. And there's been some work done on why there were so few spinsters in Japan.

• 30:12Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  Because there was not the same stigma, that say, the Western Judeo-Christian stigma against women engaged in sex work, the idea that they were doing this out of loyalty and devotion to their families, women were able to leave and get married. So some, again, went back to their hometowns, some stayed in urban areas and married into the urban working class.

• 30:36Kate Lister?

  Oh, whenever I read a history or something, I try very hard to like piece it together to understand what is the the mental process, how it made sense to them. But this is a difficult one, selling your children to the brothels. I guess they didn't see any stigma with it. This is a mad question, and you'll have to forgive me. I don't want this to sound offensive, but could this be regarded as a good choice for parents to do this within the context of Japan at the time? Like, this was. I don't know, like they'd be taught how to read or they'd get an education or like, why were they doing it?

• 31:09Speaker 05

  Money.

• 31:10Kate Lister?

  Money.

• 31:11Speaker 05

  I mean, that's what that's what it came down to.

• 31:13Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  Into the Meiji period, so the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, a lot of the recruiters for licensed brothels at that point very much promised, and they they may have done this during the Tokugawa period itself, but during the Tokugawa period, only about fifty percent of men had basic literacy. And maybe ten percent of women did, and that was the really upper echelon of women, women of samurai families or really wealthy merchant artisan or peasant families. So. Education was not something that was going to be the draw.

• 31:41Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  For poor farming families. It was what cash could come in. And part of what was unfortunate is that often the cash that came in, say, you know, a a family signed a contract and got seventy five yen at that particular point in time. A good chunk of it was taken out automatically by the recruiter or by the brothel owner for travel expenses. For the daughter to then get to the brothel. And then money was taken out from the girls in the brothels, the women in the brothels. They got very little of what they made. And on top of then what little they got, they had to pay for their food and their clothing. And housing and if they were able to take any classes, say for the higher level courtesans, for the singing classes lessons that they took.

• 32:26Speaker 05

  But for the farming families, then they were lucky if once that initial lump sum was, you know, subdivided. That they had more than a year or two to get out of it, if the debt was particularly particularly high. But in Japan, there was a tradition of. For the poor families, sending out the young. To be indentured in some kind of capacity. So it was not unusual for families with numerous children. To send a young girl of six or seven to the household of a wealthy merchant or artisan to work as a nursemaid. Or to help a cook in the household. So that was not unusual.

• 33:03Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about male sex work. What was the attitude to that and evidence for it in Japan?

• 33:11Speaker 05

  So the attitude, for the most part, very permissive.

• 33:14Kate Lister?

  Hurrah.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  There had been a longstanding tradition by the sixteen hundreds within warrior society.

• 33:21Speaker 05

  Of male male sex. Japanese term is nancho.

• 33:24Kate Lister?

  Is that adult adult male sex, or is it getting a bit Greek where it's it's older man, younger man sex? I thought, oh, no, I think I know where we're going with this.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  Yes, getting a little bit Greek. And there was actually a term called shudo, way of the youth. And it was seen as a way for a more senior warrior to introduce a junior warrior into the ways of

• 33:49Kate Lister?

  There it is.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  social customs and whatnot. Uh, so that was very, very common and there wasn't a stigma against that. And for a variety of reasons, there was limited government control over that. In part because male male sexual relations didn't preclude marriage. And actually, they didn't end once a male got married. He would continue, men, Japanese men continued to frequent male prostitutes, male sex workers, as well as female sex workers. There was no concern about children.

• 34:19Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  But then even with that, I mean, it was very, very common in Japan to adopt a male heir. In other places, say, Korea, adoption not common, it needed to be bloodline in Japan. Adoption was very, very common. Um, so it was a way, if the couple, husband, wife couldn't have kids, to bring another in. But again, you didn't have any question with male sex work, male sex workers. If there was going to be no progeny, right?

• 34:41Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 34:42Speaker 05

  During the Tokugawa period, this practice that was a common among warriors seeped into commoner society. So artisans and merchants, not to the same extent, farmers, as we can tell, picked up on this particular practice. And male male sex work became increasingly commoditized. So the male sex workers, much like the female sex workers, became commodities as part of this uh, commercial growing economy. Male sex workers were not restricted to licensed districts. They did work out of brothels, they worked out of tea houses. One aspect of male male sex that has been researched is the role of kabuki.

• 35:24Kate Lister?

  The dance?

• 35:25Speaker 05

  Yes. So as you may know, kabuki theater, those who play the female characters on stage are male.

• 35:31Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  And so kabuki theaters themselves, they had this coterie of young men who were training to be actors as women on stage. And so the kabuki theater itself became a place or a site for assignations or finding then a sex partner.

• 35:49Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  The only real concern that the Tokugawa had about male sex work was if it erupted in some way into a fight debacle, something that disrupted the public order.

• 36:03Kate Lister?

  Back to that disrupting things again, then there's a problem. Wow.

• 36:08Speaker 05

  And periodically, there were crackdowns on morality that really targeted unlicensed female prostitutes, but the tea houses were male sex workers and other places were male sex workers, bath houses. They periodically got wrapped into those crackdowns, but again, permissive for the Tokugawa period.

• 36:27Kate Lister?

  So men could be selling sex out of the licensed brothels, the unlicensed brothels. That was completely fine. That wouldn't have been any issue for them at all.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  Again, as long as there was no disruption to the social order.

• 36:40Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  As long as you didn't have a client who was being delinquent in his duties.

• 36:47Kate Lister?

  Fair. Okay.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  As long as you didn't have clients who were making their families impoverished because they were spending all of the money. So there were certain kinds of circumstances, but by and large, it was very much a hands off kind of approach to male sex work.

• 37:02Kate Lister?

  This all sounds incredibly organized and efficient with administrative systems and bureaucracies. And when does this start to shift? Is it when Japan becomes more in contact with with the West, thanks to us going over and going, yeah, we'll have an open war with you as well. When does it start to change?

• 37:22Speaker 05

  So the license system didn't significantly change. The Western missionaries, mostly the Protestants, who began to arrive in the late 1850s, as I mentioned earlier, brought with them this moral code. They very much, you know, promoted it as for Japan to become enlightened, for Japan to be able to revise these unequal treaties with the Western powers, gain a position of equality, Japan has to become more civilized and enlightened. And that did involve not just creating representative government and modern systems of police, compulsory education, conscript army. It also involved then, in their minds, the monogamous family with no drinkiness, smokiness as part of that. So there was that background.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  Those ideas were very much taken up by reformists, most of whom were Christian, as their way to then say, okay, we can contribute to the making of Japan as the minority Christians because we're doing this for the nation state. But the system itself remained heavily licensed and regulated. And the Meiji government actually took, did even more to extend, to expand the system of licensed prostitution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, again, because it was a money-making proposition. So by the late 1900s, so say like 1890, late 1890s, estimates are that Japan had almost

• 38:45Speaker 05

  50,000 women working as licensed sex workers in almost 550 different licensed brothel districts around the country. So the changes that the Japanese government made in the 1870s, there were two main ones. One was to begin to require testing for syphilis, or VD, mostly syphilis, and then the creation of lock hospitals. And that came about very much through the pressure from the Russians and the British.

• 39:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah, that sounds like us. That's the Contagious Diseases Act, isn't it? That was our brilliant idea of forcing women to a vaginal examination but doing nothing for the men at all.

• 39:26Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 39:27Kate Lister?

  Well done.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  And it was. It was very much based on the Contagious Disease Act in terms of, and actually, the British government oversaw a handful of lock hospitals.

• 39:37Kate Lister?

  Were they useful lock hospitals? Or was it that just does interfering again?

• 39:42Speaker 05

  I would say, well, that's a tricky one because you could say on the one hand for women, yes, it was totally humiliating, degrading. But if it took them out of having to service 10, 15 guys a day for a week. I mean, that's a crass way of thinking of it.

• 40:01Kate Lister?

  But that's the reality of it.

• 40:03Speaker 05

  That's the reality of it.

• 40:04Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  Um, so one of the key changes again that the Japanese government made under pressure from the Russians and then really the British was to create this system of examining the medical test and then the quarantine and the treatment. And initially that started out just for the sex workers who were who were servicing foreigners. And then in the 1870s, it extended to all women in licensed brothels in the designated quarters. So that was one major change to the system. Again, very much in line with practices in Europe. The other was to change kind of the thinking and the rhetoric around the contracts. In 1872, there was a Peruvian ship by the name of the Maria Luz, which put down anchor in the harbor Yokohama.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  It was full of almost 300 Chinese coolies who were going to be taken to Peru to work in the mines. I think two of them jumped ship, swam over to a British warship, managed to get rescued. And once they were on the British warship, they claimed that they were being sold into slavery. The captain of the British warship got in touch with a British diplomat, became this international incident of the Peruvians engaging in trafficking of humans. The Japanese got involved clearly. They were urged by the British to intercede to force then this Peruvian ship to not only release but return all of the coolies to China. Peruvian government at one point. Called out the Japanese for being hypocrites.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  Because Japan is part of its rationale for demanding that the release and return of the the coolies was this claim that we don't allow indentured servitude in Japan. And a Peruvian official simply pulled out a contract for a licensed brothel at the time. And Japanese totally embarrassed. That led to Central Court issuing an order freeing all slaves. And it actually, the, the order includes the word, Japanese word for slaves. And it called for the immediate release of all sex workers in the brothels. Geisha was actually included in there as well, because they were under contract indentured servants. Two days after that release order was issued, the Tokyo government itself came out with

• 42:17Speaker 05

  new rules for Yoshiwara and the licensed district in Tokyo. And these new rules actually used words about self determination. And essentially, they allowed women to contract themselves out to brothels, to rent rooms from brothels and work as sex workers. And the brothel owners were allowed by license then to rent out establishments in the licensed quarters. And then those rooms they rented out to the sex workers. Nothing basically changed, right? This was, this was cosmetic, this was wording. Women continued to be sold by their parents. The wording also actually said that the, you know, parents had to do it, family members had to approve. You know, people pretended to be family members in order to get the contract signed.

• 43:01Speaker 05

  So it was this symbolic cosmetic change to the system of licensed prostitution that under those auspices, because self determination was much more enlightening, right? And that was how the Japanese government spun it. So it was under this slightly tweaked system that the Meiji government took licensed prostitution and just expanded it. And over the course of the Meiji period, massive taxation on farming, extra taxation during the Russo Japanese War, Depression after Russo Japanese War, the number of young women from not only rural areas, but urban areas, who were sold into prostitution expanded.

• 43:42Speaker 05

  You also had this belief as brothel districts appeared around military encampments. I had mentioned that Japan created the system of conscript army. These military encampments then became sites where the enterprising

• 43:57Speaker 05

  Established brothels to serve the military. And that was OK, because there was this idea, and this is common. This was not certainly just Japan, that the soldiers themselves needed to have that sexual outlet so that they wouldn't go rape and pillage the honorable daughter, so to speak, in the neighboring communities. You also had, as the Japanese empire expanded, massive immigration out of Japan to deal with population stresses, the creating of colonies. Most of those had a very uneven male female ratio. So women were exported. They were trafficked overseas to service the growing Japanese empire.

• 44:36Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Elizabeth after this short break.

• 44:53Speaker 06

  What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

• 45:04Speaker 06

  I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 45:51Kate Lister?

  So when were the districts like Yoshiwara, when were they closed? When was it just like, right, that's it, that we no more? Like, none of this weird linguistic argument about who's got determination? Or when was it just, I presume they're not still there. Maybe they are.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  Well, so, I mean, Yoshiwara is still there, and it's a fairly seedy part of Tokyo. But it was 1957. The Japanese government passed a law legally abolishing licensed prostitution. But you still have it. I mean, there are tea houses and soap baths and whatnot around US military bases and neighborhoods of major urban areas, in Tokyo, certainly, and Osaka, elsewhere. So there is still licensed prostitution, but not government regulated.

• 46:34Kate Lister?

  With all of the government regulation, I'm just wondering, as a historian, what are the sources that you've got to work with? Does that give you like a really rich database of names, lives, who these people were? Because like, sometimes you see flashes that like, like in Italy, when the state was regulating sex work in the 17th and 18th centuries, you get names and addresses. Do you have anything like that that survives in Japan?

• 46:58Speaker 05

  The names and the addresses, or some of that biographical information, is very, very sparse. Where it's available, it comes from the court records, for the most part. So court records of women, say, during the Tokugawa period, who were trying to get out of contracts, who were claiming abuse as a reason to get out of contracts. So those court cases, sometimes police records have a little bit of information. You know, one of the biggest roundups of unlicensed prostitutes resulted in several thousand being relocated into brothel districts where they had to serve as punishment for three years.

• 47:37Kate Lister?

  Holy shit. Wow. Okay.

• 47:40Speaker 05

  So some of those police records have names, addresses, genealogies, or something more about family, not. So the experiences, the lives of the men and women, boys and girls who were involved in sex work, really, really scarce and hard to get at. Takes a lot of digging and searching. Otherwise, you've got records that, I mean, one whole category of records is part of the pop culture of the period, during the Tokugawa period. So woodblock prints. There are a lot that depict the Yoshiwara. There's a whole subcategory of woodblock prints that were, um, some people use the word pornographic to describe.

• 48:20Speaker 05

  Others contest that, but they were very graphic pictures, um, that showed people actually engaged in sex. Some say that those actually worked as sex manuals for people. You also have literature that came out. The licensed quarters in the lives of the commoners in urban areas became a focus of pop culture beginning in the late 1600s. So there are short stories, there are plays that are set, puppet plays, begins puppet plays, whatnot, set in the licensed quarters. You had, you know, travel guides. So as the tourism industry boomed and people were making pilgrimages to temples and shrines and also to urban areas. There were these guides, so you have whole guides to like Yoshiwara.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  That identified individual sex workers at the different brothels and sometimes had their attributes. Maps of where sex work took place, licensed sex work took place. You have that, you have diaries from individuals male. So one of the, the problems with the primary source material is that it is almost all from the perspective of men. So men were the ones who were, were drawing the woodblock prints. They were the ones who were writing the short stories in the plays. Their diaries are the ones that have remained extant or available. Court records, many of them were written by men. So you have to sift through that lens in a sense. And that lens has created a glorified view of life in St. Yoshiwara as, yes, it was all these beautiful, you know,

• 49:47Speaker 05

  high level courtesans who were skilled, when the reality of it was, it was a, a very demeaning, harsh life.

• 49:55Kate Lister?

  I think I read that there was a temple on the outskirts of, of Yoshiwara where courtesans were supposed, uh, or sex workers, that their bodies would, were dumped there. And even today, it's like a shrine for the unknown people that, that were just left there. That always like struck me as like a quite a haunting image when, just as you said, you pushed past all of this, the shunga erotica and this kind of idea that it was the floating world of pleasure. And the sort of the reality of it is a lot more brutal and cruel.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  Very much so. And true, in the licensed quarters even more so, if I can say even more so, outside of licensed quarters. I mean, in the licensed quarters, there were some protections. The men who went in, they had to register when they went in. If they were samurai, they had to leave their swords when they went in. The brothels were supposed to restrict them to being there for 24 hours and they left. And sometimes the brothel owners there could provide some basic protections if somebody came in and was really abusive, whereas, you know, you were lucky if you had that kind of protection as a streetwalker.

• 51:00Kate Lister?

  Betsy, you have been fascinating to talk to. I knew that you would be. If anyone wants to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Are you on social media at all?

• 51:08Speaker 05

  I am not on social media at all.

• 51:10Kate Lister?

  Good for you. Don't do it. It's an awful place.

• 51:12Speaker 05

  You know, I decided there's only so much time in the day, so I don't have a Twitter account or an Instagram account, or I'm barely on Facebook. You can link me through the website at Wayne State University, or Google me for various publications. Those are the main ways. And if anybody wanted to get in touch with me, my email is part of that Wayne State website. And I'd be happy if anybody wants, you know, thoughts about things to read, maybe, wants to do a little bit more work, got a list of sources.

• 51:40Kate Lister?

  Amazing. Thank you so much. You've been an absolute treat.

• 51:44Speaker 05

  Thank you very much for having me. I really do appreciate it.

• 51:46Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Elizabeth for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get, your podcasts. Coming up, we've got an episode with the spectacular Philippa Gregory on Jane Berlin, and if she really was the Tudor traitor that got Anne Boleyn bumped off. And I'll be taking you inside the brothels of the Wild West frontier of America. If you wanted to say hello, or if you had an idea for an episode, then give us an email at [email protected]. This podcast was produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheats, the Drew Sack scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit.

• 52:30Kate Lister?

  This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.