There was an old Japanese story
about a guy named Yonosuke
who was popular with the
ladies of the pleasure district.
One gruesome scene
showed just how
popular he was.
One day, Yonosuke has his friends over for drinks
and with a devious smile,
invites them into an inner chamber.
Their eyes almost pop out their heads at what they see.
On the walls are pieces of paper
with words written in blood,
and on a string hang locks of hair from countless women.
Yonosuke opens a small box and shows them what’s inside,
whole female fingernails.
Big ones, small ones,
ones with the skin still attached,
and ones you can’t show to momma.
His friends are shocked, and can’t help but be totally
impressed.
Why was everyone so excited about this Japanese Jack the Ripper?
To understand, we have to look at the slippery relationship
between a prostitute and her clients.
In the Edo Period [1603 - 1868] of Japan,
the country went through a moist revolution.
They erected extravagant pleasure districts in the major cities
where men could enjoy the fantasy of love.
The stars of these places were courtesans.
These women sold more than just secks, they sold relationships,
actual girlfriend experiences.
A courtesan constantly told her clients she loved them,
and only them,
and clients did the same.
Men went on and on about how they would someday
free their queen from a life of service.
You might be surprised to find out that these
loving relationships between prostitutes and clients
were actually as real as yours or mine,
so yes they were fake.
Everyone knew it was a fantasy,
but they let themselves be fooled into playing the game anyways.
People often said,
“The standard lie of the prostitute is ‘I love you.’
The standard lie of the client is ‘I will marry you.’”
Ladies of the pleasure quarters had a bunch of ways to prove their love.
These were called shinjū 心中, or proof of love.
Shin 心 means heart or mind.
Jū 中 means inside or center.
So literally, it means something like… inside the heart.
This was early in the Edo Period.
Later on, the word shinjū would come to mean double love suicide,
which is a whole other wacky topic,
but today we talk about the shinjū that meant proof of love.
Ladies of the night entertained many men,
pouring honeyed words down their pp’s,
making each man feel like he was the one for her.
A client couldn’t see into his lover’s heart.
His view was blocked by her boobs.
So the only way to know if her love was true
was to ask her to perform a shinjū.
A shinjū would absolutely prove that she
didn’t want to lose a customer,
because of course this was just another part of the fantasy.
That was the world of the red lantern district.
Peel back one layer of fantasy, and you found another layer of self-deception.
It was layers all the way down.
The clients knew it, and paid for it.
Nothing spends more money than your dic--
It was normally secks workers in large cities
like Edo and Osaka who practiced shinjū.
The ones in smaller towns didn’t because they mostly served travelers,
men who came and went.
Hard to form long term relationships with such men.
There were 6 main types of shinjū.
So take my hand and let me lead you down this
night garden of bamboo shoots and chrysanthemums.
It’s okay.
I got you.
The most basic shinjū up a courtesan’s sleeves was the blood vow,
because it was so easy to do,
and since they were supposed to be secret,
there was less chance of her client running his mouth
and making the other clients jealous.
When doing anything with one client,
courtesans had to take care not to bruise the fragile egos of the others.
My dad always said,
“A samurai can endure many sword wounds,
but slashes to the heart cut deepest.”
The love vow practice started when prostitutes
wanted to gift something to their special clients,
but over time it became expected.
They wrote the vows on religious paper charms
from some temple or shrine, or from their patron god.
Vows could be about anything.
They had flowery language about how they really loved their clients, honest,
usually ending with something lighthearted like,
“...if we break this vow may the many gods and buddhas
punish us and our families.”
They wrote on as many charms as they wanted.
One courtesan used 31 charms.
Some women wrote on copies of sacred Buddhist texts.
Afterwards, the prostitute made a seal of blood,
or the couple would make it together.
The woman used a needle to prick
the middle or ring finger of her right hand
and dripped the blood next to her name.
The man did the same with his left hand.
If a client asked his courtesan lover to write a vow,
she would ask him for one in return.
Some men of audacity would even ask the courtesan to write a vow,
but tell her he would not be writing one back,
because that’s how he rolled.
🎵 There goes my hero 🎵 🎵 Watch him as he goes 🎵
Remember, these were not true confessions of love.
They were part of the fantasy.
But there was one story about an honest courtesan,
so you know it’s fictional.
A loyal patron asked his courtesan for a vow of love.
She refused, saying she did not love him.
He said, “That’s okay, write me a vow of nonlove.”
So she gave him a vow saying how much she didn’t love him,
and the patron was quite happy.
If a couple happened to break up, the man would tear the vow in half,
giving one piece back but keeping the other half with her name on it.
The woman did the same, if he ever gave her a vow.
To really drive home the breakup,
he could even tell her to burn the vow and swallow the ashes.
Sometimes a courtesan would perform many shinjū,
she’d bend over backwards for him, and forwards,
but the man would still leave,
and she’d get mad enough to write him a blood note,
kind of a hate vow.
She would mix her blood with water and use that as ink.
For those huge assholes,
she might run out of blood and write the rest in real ink.
These women of pleasure penned a lot of vows,
not only for patrons, but for random rich men that came to town
who needed someone to stroke their egos to completion.
No prostitute fancied spending her days
endlessly pricking her middle finger,
it would have stung too much when she had to poke it up her clients’ bums.
So these women gathered blood in different ways.
One method was to poke a needle between her teeth and gums.
Not really sure how that was better.
And they probably did all kinds of things like using paint or animal blood.
One step above the vow on the escalator of love was the haircut.
Hair was called “a woman’s life,” so it was seen as a sacrifice.
A woman could cut any length of hair to give to her lover.
The more she cut, the happier he became.
“She cheated on you?”
“Yeah, but she gave me two curls and some pubes, so I forgave her.”
Giving hair to all your clients is a good way to catch a cold,
so these women found a way to send hair to everyone and their grandma
and still rock a full head of luscious locks.
You see, a prostitute’s best friend was a gravedigger.
Everyone needs that buddy you can count on to sell you hair he cut from a corpse.
If a lady found a worthy patron,
someone with great character and a greater bank account,
she might choose a tattoo as a shinjū,
usually putting it somewhere hidden, like on the inside
of the upper arm or on the inside of the thighs.
She could even put it in more obvious places, if she wasn’t shy.
One type of tattoo was pretty sweet, and required the man to do it too.
Shocking.
It was just a dot on their hands.
The dots were placed at the spot where
their thumbs would have been if they clasped hands.
The dots only matched the hands of that couple.
*aww*
High-ranking courtesans looked down on tattoos.
I can’t believe these hoes, they said.
But enough lower-ranking courtesans were doing them
that it created a market for professional tattoo artists.
Still, many courtesans drew the tattoo themselves to make it more genuine.
They used knives, razors, or needles to feed ink into the skin.
Needles made for more accurate tattoos,
but that might not be what they wanted, as we’ll see later.
The usual tattoo had the name of the man
followed by the character inochi 命, or life.
So it meant for life, or forever, or until death.
Sometimes she’d tattoo a whole ass poem
or a passage from a book that’s meaningful to her patron.
Is it really love if she doesn’t have the prologue of
A Game of Thrones on her ass?
The tattoo shinjū was a big deal.
Remember, prostitutes had many clients.
Get a tattoo of one man, and the others would be pissed and might leave.
Tying herself to one dude was risky business.
A good businesswoman diversified her male portfolio.
So courtesans had a few tricks up their kimonos.
One trick was to tattoo herself with a knife or razor,
which could make the ink blurry and hard to read.
“You are my one and only love, my dear ahemmm…”
Some courtesans tattooed a nickname instead,
a nickname that they called all their clients.
They had to be careful though, because experienced
connoisseurs of the cooch didn’t fall for this.
Sometimes courtesans only wrote the first character of the guy’s name.
Tokuemon might become something like Toku-sama inochi.
That way she could make Tokuemon happy
and still see Tokubei on the weekends.
Tattoos were strong symbols because they couldn’t be erased…
or could they?
They actually had an early version of
tattoo laser removal surgery called burning.
They burned mugwort on the tattoo to cauterize it.
Life in the pleasure district got tougher as the Edo Period went on.
Customers became more familiar with courtesans and their strategies,
and got comfortable demanding more sacrifices from their ladies.
By the late 1700s, it became a challenge for
a man to force his courtesans to burn away
a rival’s name to replace it with his own.
In one case, a woman had to change the name on her arm 75 times.
These were terrible working conditions,
but how else was she gonna pay for college?
Tattoos started out as a nice gesture
but turned into something you had to do under intense pressure.
Kinda shows you the worsening conditions of secks work over time.
Which brings us to…
Nail pulling.
No wise man in Edo Japan ever said you should trust a prostitute.
The small gestures of love were just not doing it for clients.
They wanted more convincing proof.
Clients were fickle creatures and could take
their coin to another woman at any time.
The grass is always greener on the other vejayna.
If a wealthy patron was about to leave,
a courtesan had to reel him back by giving him her fingernail.
It was an easy decision
to get wrong.
Not only would it hurt like hell, it might also hurt her career.
Her other patrons would be pissed if they saw her missing nail,
and might even leave.
And what if her man rejected her?
Sometimes a patron just said,
“Thanks for the nail,” and went on a one way trip to fetch some milk,
leaving her shamed and her value falling.
Even if she wasn’t rejected,
losing all your other clients is a terrible business strategy --
it’s the first thing they teach in business school --
but there was a way to give your nail to one client without losing the others,
you just needed some preparation.
Let’s say Sakura the Courtesan wants to give her nail to her beloved client
Sasuke the Samurai.
She first meets with another client, Naruto the Ramen Seller.
She tells Naruto that she loves him truly, but to support herself,
she needs to give her nail to Sasuke before Sasuke leaves her for that bish Ino.
It’s purely a money thing.
She asks Naruto what he thinks she should do.
Hopefully Naruto falls for it and tells her to go ahead and give Sasuke her nail,
all the while thinking he’s her true love.
Now he could tell her to let Sasuke go,
but that would mean he’d be on the hook to support her.
It would be bad manners if he tells her to lose the Sasuke income
but not provide her with an alternative.
Either way, she ends up with a loyal patron.
Sakura then meets with all her non-Sasuke clients and tells them the same story.
If she does it right,
she would end up forming a closer bond with her other clients,
and still be able to give Sasuke her nail.
An experienced man would not fall for this,
but how many of them are there anyways?
Nail pulling is about as fun as HIV,
so there were some courtesans who apparently got really good at faking it.
They only sliced the top layer of the nail without removing the entire thing.
For the less skilled,
they always had the option of buying a nail from a grave digger.
So our friend Yonosuke from before wasn’t a serial killer,
he was just popular with the ladies of the pleasure houses,
able to convince so many of them to send him their nails.
If you thought nail pulling was bad, let me introduce you to…
finger cutting.
The perfect story about this is the sad story of a courtesan named Daibu in Osaka.
To show her devotion to her lover, she decided to send him her pinky.
She placed the poor innocent pinky,
which never did anything wrong in its life
except for that one day it stuck itself out while
she was drinking tea, which reeked of elitism,
but other than that it was a perfectly good finger…
she placed it on the railing of the
second floor window and asked a servant to do the deed.
The servant chopped it, but a finger free from its hand is hard to control.
The finger flew out the window and dropped into the garden below.
Daibu fainted as blood gushed over her clothes.
Now finger cutting required a lot of preparation.
You had to keep blood clotting medication nearby,
bandages, and smelling salts in case you fainted.
Daibu did none of that.
It must have been her first time.
Her servants were so busy running around freaking out
trying to find medication and bandages
that they didn’t have time to look for her finger.
When they finally stopped the bleeding,
she awoke and asked, “Where is my finger?”
One servant said, “Indeed, it seems to have flown westward.”
They ran to the garden looking for it, but it was indeed gone.
Daibu went to her lover and confessed what happened.
Being her lover, the man was very understanding.
He understood the lies of whores.
He accused her of sending her finger to another man
and then concocting this ridiculous story.
Even when she brought her servant as witness,
he claimed that no woman from the pleasure district could be trusted.
But in the end, Daibu was able to convince him,
by cutting off her ring finger.
Buddha said: “When cutting a finger, first close the window.”
It was fairly rare for a courtesan to cut her finger,
I don’t want you to think that the typical lady of the pleasure houses
was walking around unable to point at things.
What happened more often was this.
Sometimes a client would demand that his
courtesan cut her own finger to prove her love.
This kicked off a twisted game that really shows you
the layers of fantasy and deception in the red lantern district.
He didn’t actually want her to do it, he just wanted to know if she was willing to.
Thing was, she also understood this, and would pretend to cut her finger.
She knew he would stop her before she could,
but he would be watching like a hawk
for any sign of hesitation.
Therefore, the best strategy for her was to not hesitate,
to really try to do the cut and trust that he would stop her in time.
Usually he did, and she would pass the test,
but there was always that chance that he would wait a bit too long.
So what started out as a fake way to show devotion turned into something real.
She really did risk her finger for him.
Most high ranking courtesans stayed away from
finger cutting because they knew their worth,
it was the lower ranking ones who resorted to extreme actions for their patrons.
After chopping a finger, you no longer have it on hand.
It’s hard to fake having one less finger,
so you might think that
a client could be sure she was loyal if he received her digit.
Not quite.
Because she could give her finger to one man,
and ask her bestie Goro the Grave Digger
for more fingers to give to others.
There were even stories of women making fingers out of rice flour dough,
although unless she’s the Pillsbury Doughgirl,
I can’t see how that could have worked.
It was a hard job, you couldn’t count on your clients believing your lies.
It was hard to count anything, especially when you were missing a finger.
We don’t know where finger cutting first started, but even the yakuza do it today.
It also evolved into the Japanese pinky promise,
where kids lock pinkies and sing a cute little song.
Yubikiri genman Pinky swear
uso tsuitara hari senbon nomasu if you tell a lie drink 1000 needles
yubi kitta cut off your finger
Then they release their pinkies.
The final shinjū on the list is stabbing, running a knife through your flesh.
For love.
There was a story about a bathhouse girl named Koya.
One day, her lover teased her a bit.
He said that sure, she gave him her heart fully,
but there was another woman who was more affectionate.
Koya demanded, “Who is this affectionate bish?”
The man told her about another bathhouse girl
who recently gave a finger to her lover.
Not to be outdone, Koya grabbed a sword and cut her neck.
The man ran away in fear, but Koya sure showed that other girl.
She actually survived, and later said,
yeah that was a pretty dumb thing I did in the moment.
Stabbing or cutting your body was super rare,
an act for only the most intimate of couples.
You can bet the couple got real close afterwards.
Getting real close had consequences though.
Bebe-related consequences.
Getting pregnant was a big deal to prostitutes,
not only did you have to stop working for a few months,
you also had to risk death by childbirth.
So Japanese courtesans created some crazy ways to deal with the pregnancy problem.
Click here to see what they did.
I also love my patrons on Patreon, sign up and who knows,
I might write you a vow if you ask for it.
We have a new Emperor patron today:
Nicholas Comer.
Congratulations, I’m sending you my pinky.
Watch out for it in the mail.
We also have some other patrons:
Liz Kaplan, Janel Rambo, Rychan6, and Kyle Mack.
Thank you so much.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge!