Japan’s Edo Period (1603 - 1868) was an amazing time of peace,
drowning in prosperity and splattered with the hot juices of culture.
One huge source from which culture erupted
was a place closed off by walls and surrounded by a moat,
a magical district called Yoshiwara 吉原,
the pleasure quarters of Japan’s capital at the time.
Within these walls lived so many women ready to bring men’s desires to life,
and so many more not ready to.
And we’re gonna talk about all of them.
Most of them.
Watch out, I’m gonna be throwing a lot of names and terms at you,
I need you to do your best to pretend to remember them.
Yūjo 遊女 was a general word for prostitute.
The characters mean literally play girl or pleasure woman.
Another word for them is jorō/jōro 女郎.
Basically, anyone who slept with their clients for money.
Prostitutes tied their sashes in the front.
All the glitter and glamour was a fantasy.
These women mostly lived under the silk boots of their brothel owners,
resigned to years of selling their thicc bodies for a thin slice of the profits.
Not all prostitutes were the same.
Cheap ladies of pleasure were aplenty,
and even men whose money pouches were as lonely as their wives
could afford to spend some time with one.
But Yoshiwara also had high ranking prostitutes,
those we usually call by the word courtesan.
There were other less famous pleasure quarters like in Kyoto and Osaka,
but this video is about Yoshiwara, the jewel of the capital city of Edo,
the family jewels.
But most of this information applies to the other pleasure districts too.
In the first half of the Edo Period (1603 - 1868)
when Yoshiwara was young,
the women at the top of the pleasure pyramid,
the highest ranking courtesans, were called tayū 太夫.
Also often called castle topplers because their beauty could start wars.
Money flooded the pleasure district like Katrina.
Early clients were elite samurai and the nobility,
men whose wallets were as full as their balls,
men who wanted not just any woman,
but a woman with looks and brains and plenty of grace.
Prostitutes had a bunch of ranks, but we’ll just talk about the very top rank.
Have you ever tried to eat sushi but only had one chopstick?
Getting promoted to the highest rank of tayū was harder than that.
A council of respected residents, business owners, and courtesan managers
got together and had a whole Reddit discussion
about every inch of a courtesan.
She had to beat everyone else in looks, intelligence,
sophistication, and how much money she could make.
One record listed a few features they looked for: close smokey eyebrows,
larger eyes with big black pupils, face the shape of a melon seed,
double-jointed hands, small waist, and long legs.
Bad features were: having an upturned, high-ridged,
or flat nose, big mouth, chin too pointy or no chin at all,
bowlegs, and having unsteady eyes that darted around like a monkey.
That’s what it said.
A tayū couldn’t touch or talk about money, couldn’t eat in front of clients,
and from her mouth never escaped a vulgar word or topic.
She wore high platform sandals and tied a huge sash in the front,
sporting white makeup, blackened teeth, and a million ornaments in her hair.
A tayū didn’t just grant you access to her body, she graced you with song,
music, poetry, all of the cultured things.
They were the celebrities of the pleasure quarters,
regularly rejecting clients they thought were unworthy.
A tayū was like a fish.
Try to catch her without the proper skills and she’ll slip away,
leaving you wet and alone.
Even a tayū’s name was a big deal. It carried a legacy.
When one tayū retired, a later tayū could take up the name if she was worthy.
The name Takao was passed down like a prized katana to 11 women,
and the accomplishments of each woman added to its prestige.
Now all parties must come to an end,
fun things must become soft again.
In the second half of the Edo Period,
Yoshiwara’s glamorous makeup was wearing off.
The streets of the pleasure district were filled with
more and more merchants and commoners instead of Japan’s elites,
people who were fine with paying bargain prices for bargain quality.
So prices began dropping, and even the tayū became less sophisticated.
You might even have heard a tayū do the unthinkable and curse once in a blue moon.
The number of tayū fell as the years went by.
Prostitutes of that quality were too hard to find and too expensive for most of the
degenerates walking the alleys shopping for a warm bed with a cold wallet.
At its peak in 1642, Yoshiwara housed 75 tayū.
In 1761, there were only...
zero.
That’s right, they went extinct in the district.
Now each tayū and other high ranking courtesans were
assigned 1 to 3 kamuro 禿 each, depending on their rank.
These were child assistants, girls-in-waiting.
They were 5 to 14 years old,
brought to the brothel for work at a really young age.
Pleasure houses sent scouts all over the country
looking for girls who had the potential to become beautiful women.
These girls were usually 7 to 9, but could be as young as 5.
They especially liked to visit beautiful places in the countryside
recently struck by famine or natural disasters, or families drowning in debt,
because these people were more likely to sell their daughters.
Upon entering the brothel, the girl became a kamuro
and was taught the ways of the pleasure district.
She was assigned to a courtesan.
An extra good looking and smart girl was assigned to a high ranking courtesan.
A courtesan took care of her girls and paid for all expenses,
and a kamuro attended to her big sister, like lighting her pipe,
bringing her meals, and running errands.
One of her main jobs was playing Cupid for her big sister and the clients.
She would send love letters and gifts back and forth.
Clients often asked a kamuro about her big sister.
What kind of flowers does she like? Does she love me?
Is this her real finger that she sent me?
Yeah, that really happened.
Of course, clients had to ask themselves hard questions like
could they trust the words of a kamuro who was loyal to her big sister,
and get hard answers like, “No.”
They did not see clients, but all kamuro had the
potential to become prostitutes when they grew up.
Brothel owners pulled aside any kamuro with potential
and taught her the three R’s:
Reading, ‘Riting, and Rocking the shamisen.
Her education also included powerful courtesan techniques like
playing other instruments, tea ceremony, and flower arrangement.
But a girl who lacked potential got no education and for the rest of her contract
just did child labor stuff like cleaning, washing clothes,
and hating her parents.
Kamuro grew up in the brothel and probably didn’t know much
about the world outside the red lantern district.
They dreamed of being assigned to high ranking courtesans
and of becoming courtesans themselves,
though they likely didn’t fully understand the life of a courtesan,
but no one wanted to be the loser kamuro stuck doing manual labor.
At around 13 or 14, a kamuro graduated.
Around this time was when her child contract would have ended,
and the brothel could choose to buy her for longer or not.
If they thought she was good enough, the girl became a courtesan.
If not, she became a shinzō 新造.
Shinzō 新造 literally meant “newly launched boat.”
In the first half of the Edo Period,
young shinzō were not allowed to sleep with clients,
because she might steal clients from higher ranking courtesans.
She only entertained men while they waited for her big sister,
talking to them, lighting their pipes, bringing them tea.
But in the second half of Edo,
she was basically a low level teenage secks worker,
able to see patrons on her own.
There were a lot of jokes that old clients
liked to seek out shinzō because of their age,
so that was probably not too uncommon.
Part of the graduation ceremony from kamuro to shinzō
included selling the right to deflower the graduate.
Most women stayed a shinzō for the rest of their careers,
never sailing to the higher ranks.
Yuna 湯女, bath house women.
Bath houses were nice innocent places where customers came
and washed themselves instead of bathing with their cheap water at home.
Then some visionary bath house owner had a bright idea.
Instead of a place where people bathed,
what about a place with good looking women?
Brilliant.
Bath houses started hiring attractive women to wait on guests,
and sometimes get in the bath chamber themselves to help guests,
for those men who were unsure how to bathe.
They scrubbed people’s backs, lathered shampoo, dried them with large fans,
and provided other services.
Some were in the front offering tea and flirtation.
In the evening, the baths closed and these yuna changed into silk kimonos
and played the shamisen, serving sake and a side of themselves.
These places had an indoor latticed area for disrobing.
That’ll become important later on.
These bath houses operated all over the capital city,
which meant they were illegal.
In the capital, prostitution was only allowed within the walls of Yoshiwara.
But bath house girls were so cheap and popular that these bath houses
sprang up everywhere outside the pleasure district,
eating into the profits of Yoshiwara businesses.
Business owners cried to the government, and in 1657,
the authorities closed all of these places.
This killed the bath house business, but not the bath house business owners,
who pretty much just changed the sign in front and called themselves teahouses.
Yuna became sancha 散茶.
Sancha 散茶 was what they called teahouse girls or waitresses.
Like bath houses, the teahouse business took off.
If teahouses don’t sound exciting to you, that’s because you’re thinking of places
where they sit and drink tea and drone on about history and culture.
If that does sound exciting to you, I love you,
but teahouses were like today’s hostess clubs slash lounges
slash nightclubs where people gather for music,
entertainment, and prostitution.
Known for not rejecting customers and being affordable,
they became the most popular type of secks workers.
Teahouses started opening in Yoshiwara itself.
They kept the latticed divider style and made it face the street
to showcase the beautiful women prisoners.
Over time, the status of sancha rose like a pp in the presence of one,
especially after the tayū disappeared.
These women adopted a new rank called chūsan 昼三
and by 1750 became the highest ranking courtesans in Yoshiwara.
Around this time, the people of Yoshiwara started using the word oiran 花魁
as a general word for high ranking courtesans.
A chūsan was an oiran.
The district had its own vocabulary and way of speaking,
often cooking up new words like this.
The word was used mostly within Yoshiwara.
Oiran were the idols of the pleasure quarters, famous and lacking freedom.
They wore extravagant clothing and hair decorations,
copying a lot of what the tayū used to wear.
One of the most well known entertainers in the pleasure district were geisha 芸者.
The word just meant artist or performer.
The very first geisha were these cultured and mesmerizing…
men. Yep they were men.
Dudes who could entertain a party like it’s 1699.
They sang, danced, and played music, but didn’t offer secks.
If you were throwing a birthday party and the clown called in sick,
you could never go wrong with hiring a geisha
to make it a fun night while you eat a birthday cake for one.
Over time, because it was the pleasure quarters,
female geisha stepped onto the scene and just took over the stage.
The men couldn’t compete and one day they turned around
and saw that the majority of geisha were women.
It was a common sight to see geisha
traveling in pairs on the streets of Yoshiwara,
with shamisen carriers walking after.
Every self-respecting geisha knew the shamisen like the back of her sleeves.
They went for an understated, simple beauty,
because they wanted a contrast from the flashiness of courtesans,
but mostly because the law banned geisha
from dressing like courtesans and snatching their clients.
A geisha tied her sash in the back because remember the front tied sash
was like a “Now Open” sign for her sushi restaurant.
Geisha officially did not “roll over,”
which was street talk for sleeping with someone.
But did geisha actually roll over for their clients?
People have argued both sides.
One side says they did not,
because it was a respectable profession
and geisha were not allowed to compete with actual prostitutes.
They only offered entertainment.
The other side…
are actual historians.
Geisha were like the hulk.
They be smashing that shamisen like they just snorted gamma rays.
Because the main job of a geisha was
playing music, singing, and dancing.
Many prided themselves on their skills rather than their bodies.
But strolling through the muddy streets of Yoshiwara,
one can’t help but collect stains.
Geisha were propositioned all the time.
When those coins whispered their sweet jingling melody,
it would have been hard for a poor worker to cover her ears.
Over time, the musical skills of geisha declined
as more people sought them out for their after party services.
There were even areas of the city of Edo outside of Yoshiwara
where most geisha sold secks openly.
Or as openly as you could while avoiding the cops.
The word geisha became a euphemism for prostitute.
As late as 1955 this euphemism existed.
The history of geisha and secks work is fascinating,
but that’s a whole other topic.
Of course, modern day geisha are not secks workers
so don’t go around asking them weird questions.
Geisha were also known as geiko 芸子.
The word meant another type of performer initially,
but eventually the terms became interchangeable.
Nowadays, we call them geisha if they’re from the Tokyo region.
From the Kyoto area they’re called geiko,
and an apprentice geiko is called maiko 舞妓.
In the Tokyo region, an apprentice geisha is called hangyoku 半玉.
You can recognize maiko and hangyoku because
they wear more colorful clothing than geisha,
and more ornaments in their hair.
They only color the lower lip red.
Their sash hangs long in the back, unlike the geisha’s short sash.
Yes, there were many female entertainers in the pleasure quarters of Japan,
most of them had rough lives trying to satisfy their clients everyday.
Some performed extreme acts, desperate to keep their patrons.
Click here to see the things they did.
It’s not for the faint of heart, only the mighty of balls.
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