there would be no room for the slightest possibility of rebellion or upheaval, the shogunate adopted neo-Confucianism, with its rigid codes of behavior and emphasis on hierarchy and respect for authority, as the official basis of government and the underlying ethical code for society. The system remained in force until the end of the Tokugawa period in 1853, after which in theory it began to change. But many of the attitudes and social structures which it engendered remain in place to this day.
The shoguns divided society into rigid classes, with a different set of laws governing each. Sumptuary laws were issued decreeing what each class could and could not wear, what they should eat, how they should wear their hair, where they could and could not live, whom they could marry, and how they should decorate their houses.
At the top of the hierarchy were the daimyo, provincial princes who governed their own domains but had to pledge fealty to the shogun. Then came the samurai, the military class who had grown in numbers mightily during the years of warfare and were now the army, police, and administrators of the new system. Below the samurai came the farmers, who ranked high because they were responsible for producing the rice by which everyone lived, though in fact they had miserable lives. They were followed by the artisans, who were also producers; they were craftsmen and builders.
Right at the bottom came tradesmen and merchants who, so the argument went, produced nothing. They just passed goods around from the producers to everyone else, skimming off a profit along the way, and were thus considered worthless parasites. In reality, of course, they were absolutely essential to the life of the country, ensuring that goods were shuttled from the provinces, where they were produced, to be sold in the cities.
In practice the main division was between the samurai and the rest, lumped together as “townsmen.” But the trouble with relegating merchants to the very bottom was that the samurai desperately needed and wanted the goods which the merchants sold and quickly spent their miserable stipends on them. Over the centuries their stipends never increased at all; they were rigidly prescribed. So the merchants started lending money, first to the samurai, then the daimyo, and eventually to the shogun himself, and thus became richer and richer.
There were a couple of classes so low that they did not even feature in the Tokugawa ranking system. One was the
hinin
(nonhumans), most of whom were beggars or did the work that no one else wanted to do. The other encompassed popular entertainers—everyone from grand courtesans, dancers, tea-serving wenches, saké servers, and itinerant prostitutes to actors, roving minstrels, musicians, jugglers, and jesters. They were all lumped together under the term
kawaramono
—riverbed folk—and (unless, like the courtesans, they were lucky enough to have a patron) they lived in ghettos in the dry riverbeds and along the river banks, frontier areas of the city which were outside government control, considered unsuitable for permanent habitation because of flooding. This was the class from which the geisha were to emerge.
Like everything else in the highly regulated Confucian society of seventeenth-century Japan, prostitution needed to be organized. The best way to manage it was to control it, to herd as many prostitutes as possible into one place and to make prostitution legal there but illegal anywhere else. Along with the kabuki theater, the pleasure quarters were classified as the “bad places” where the lower orders, and anyone else who wanted to, could go to let off steam and exercise their baser instincts. But, “bad” though they were, they fulfilled a recognized need. Ironically the geisha and the whole culture of eroticism arose directly out of the rigid strictures of Confucianism; the walled cities of pleasure which were to become the heart of the counterculture in Japan were
The shoguns divided society into rigid classes, with a different set of laws governing each. Sumptuary laws were issued decreeing what each class could and could not wear, what they should eat, how they should wear their hair, where they could and could not live, whom they could marry, and how they should decorate their houses.
At the top of the hierarchy were the daimyo, provincial princes who governed their own domains but had to pledge fealty to the shogun. Then came the samurai, the military class who had grown in numbers mightily during the years of warfare and were now the army, police, and administrators of the new system. Below the samurai came the farmers, who ranked high because they were responsible for producing the rice by which everyone lived, though in fact they had miserable lives. They were followed by the artisans, who were also producers; they were craftsmen and builders.
Right at the bottom came tradesmen and merchants who, so the argument went, produced nothing. They just passed goods around from the producers to everyone else, skimming off a profit along the way, and were thus considered worthless parasites. In reality, of course, they were absolutely essential to the life of the country, ensuring that goods were shuttled from the provinces, where they were produced, to be sold in the cities.
In practice the main division was between the samurai and the rest, lumped together as “townsmen.” But the trouble with relegating merchants to the very bottom was that the samurai desperately needed and wanted the goods which the merchants sold and quickly spent their miserable stipends on them. Over the centuries their stipends never increased at all; they were rigidly prescribed. So the merchants started lending money, first to the samurai, then the daimyo, and eventually to the shogun himself, and thus became richer and richer.
There were a couple of classes so low that they did not even feature in the Tokugawa ranking system. One was the
hinin
(nonhumans), most of whom were beggars or did the work that no one else wanted to do. The other encompassed popular entertainers—everyone from grand courtesans, dancers, tea-serving wenches, saké servers, and itinerant prostitutes to actors, roving minstrels, musicians, jugglers, and jesters. They were all lumped together under the term
kawaramono
—riverbed folk—and (unless, like the courtesans, they were lucky enough to have a patron) they lived in ghettos in the dry riverbeds and along the river banks, frontier areas of the city which were outside government control, considered unsuitable for permanent habitation because of flooding. This was the class from which the geisha were to emerge.
Like everything else in the highly regulated Confucian society of seventeenth-century Japan, prostitution needed to be organized. The best way to manage it was to control it, to herd as many prostitutes as possible into one place and to make prostitution legal there but illegal anywhere else. Along with the kabuki theater, the pleasure quarters were classified as the “bad places” where the lower orders, and anyone else who wanted to, could go to let off steam and exercise their baser instincts. But, “bad” though they were, they fulfilled a recognized need. Ironically the geisha and the whole culture of eroticism arose directly out of the rigid strictures of Confucianism; the walled cities of pleasure which were to become the heart of the counterculture in Japan were
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