The Yoshiwara Red-Light District: Spotlighting Sex Workers in Japan’s ‘Nightless City’
The history of female sex work across the globe has, and continues to be obfuscated by endless layers of shame, social stigma and deliberate censorship. When the male voice and the male eye swallow the individual experiences of these women in the historical canon, as they have been allowed to do for centuries, we are forced to haphazardly reconstruct the reality of these experiences through splinters of dimly lit truth.
The lives of sex workers in the Yoshiwara Red-Light District were no exception to this archival suppression. Behind the impression of decadence and fast-paced pleasure created by many modern tourist companies to turn a profit, there lies a much darker, covert history of continued maltreatment.
In 1617, during the Edo period, the Tokugawa Shogunate decided to etch out a corner of Tokyo for hedonistic revelry. Due to the rows of lanterns that lined the streets and the bustling night time economy, it came to be known as Japan’s ‘nightless city’. It remained a licensed pleasure city until 1958, when the Anti-Prostitution Law (Baishun Bōshi Hō) abolished sex work across the country.
Throughout the three centuries of its lifetime, Yoshiwara was often praised by tourists. For example, in A Handbook for Travellers in Japan (1901), Basil Hall Chamberlain & W.B. Mason argued that ‘as the whole quarter is under special municipal surveillance, perfect order prevails, enabling the stranger to study, while walking along the streets, the manner in which the Japanese have solved one of the vexed questions of all ages.’
However, behind Chamberlain and Mason’s glittery veneer of ‘perfect order’ that seemed to effortlessly drape itself over the city, the sex workers who - in spite of being the economic backbone of the district - were treated as though they were easily expendable commodities.
The gate at the entrance of the city (The Yoshiwara Omon) featured a statue of the goddess Benten: the goddess of all that flows, including water, music, arts, love, wisdom, wealth and fortune. But even though the goddess was - and is - a renowned symbol of the expansive and infinite, the sex workers in Yoshiwara were physically confined within the stone walls of the city, in the same way that the suffering they had to endure has been historically confined by constant societal repression.
Thousands of female sex workers inhabited Yoshiwara during its lifespan. In the year 1700, approximately fifteen hundred women were employed in the location, but by the early 20th century, the number of women engaged in prostitution had risen to around nine thousand. These young women were often sold by their families to brothel keepers to pay off debts.
The system under which they were employed was thoroughly hierarchical. Whereas high-ranking oiran (courtesans) were encouraged to read, write, learn music, or even own their own businesses, the low-ranking courtesans who made up the majority of the localised workforce were never afforded the same intellectual luxuries. According to a 1642 census, over 900 workers at the time belonged to the lower class of sex workers, in comparison to only 106 high-class courtesans.
Furthermore, the lack of care and consideration offered to the sex workers of Yoshiwara during several periods of environmental catastrophe demonstrates how they were treated as though they were less than human. In 1855, the Ansei Quake created a nationwide coffin shortage. Whereas wealthy people were buried in sugar casks and barrels, sex workers were never spared such desperate attempts at preserving their dignity. Instead, the ‘Nagekomi Dera’ (or ‘throwaway temple’) was used as a dumping ground for approximately 25,000 women whose bodies were disposed of by the gates of the Jokanji temple, rolled in cheap mats. Many sex workers also died due to the fire that engulfed Yoshiwara during the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923.
Although Yoshiwara is no longer sanctioned by law as a pleasure city, many brothels in the modern day Taito district where Yoshiwara once was still operate discreetly by secretly ushering in customers, and rely on legal loopholes to keep their businesses active. For every sightseeing tour that promotes Yoshiwara in its complex and troubling history, there are tens of other tourism companies that promote it for its illicit modern flesh trade.
Through this, it is clear that the idealisation of Yoshiwara is not a thing of the past. It is present with us today, in our language and in our internet algorithms, in hushed whispers in the corners of dark rooms. The hand that once held the journalist’s quill and ink to write a review of Yoshiwara promoting its fragile facade of unrestrained self-indulgence, has become the same hand that rests its fingers on the keyboard to write a sensationalised half-story of what the Yoshiwara red-light district truly was.
But if there is one certain central message that we can take from Yoshiwara and all of its history, it is the importance of illuminating full truths with our words. Writing is a conduit, through which we can put a spotlight on what the Yoshiwara Red-Light district was, and hopefully, tell the stories of the thousands of women who were never passed a pen.
Fatiah Suleiman
Bibliography
‘Exploitation and culture: Heaven and Hell in Yoshiwara Pleasure Quarters’ Nippon.com, 29 March 2024.
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g02354/?cx_recs_click=true
‘Inside Tokyo’s Red Light District of Yoshiwara’, Omakase Tour 24 May 2024.
Lloyd, George ‘What Became of Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s Old Red-Light District ?’ Japan Today, 23 June 2020.
Photo: a painting by Utagawa Hiroshige II via Wikimedia Commons