Another day another video about bedroom stuff.
Today we talk about the old Japanese tradition of shudō 衆道, the Way of Youths.
It was the art of loving young men, very young men.
Male-male relationships in Japan before the modern era were mostly between men and much younger boys.
Some of your favorite samurai participated, as we’ll see later.
Seks between males was called nanshoku 男色.
The Japanese believed that the monk Kūkai 空海, the founder of Shingon Buddhism in
Japan, brought over nanshoku from China in the year 806.
Like he went to China, happened to see two men having seks, came back and said,
“Hey have you guys heard about dik?”
That’s not true, of course.
Nanshoku did not come from China via a Buddhist monk.
It came from yaoi anime--no-- Every culture had men who slept with men to some degree.
But in the minds of people, Buddhism and nanshoku were attached at the hip.
If you think it's weird that Buddhism would have anything to do with male seks, well prepare
to have your Buddhism cherry popped.
Monks lived in their temples under vows of celibacy.
Buddhism, a well-known hater of fun, forbade its monks from sleeping with women or men.
But those two things were not equal.
Which do you think they believed was the more serious crime?
Monks sleeping with women, or sleeping with men?
Take a guess.
If you’re wrong, you have to click like and type “I love this video” in the comments.
Look I didn’t make the rules, I just enforce them with joy.
If you guessed this one was worse, you’re wrong.
Accept your punishment.
You’re probably thinking of Europe. This is Japan.
Sleeping with women was scary and dangerous.
Monks who strayed suffered harsh punishments.
Some regions even had laws executing monks for it.
But there was barely any punishment for sleeping with other men.
It was a lesser evil, and so they chose the lesser evil.
Temples were full of seksually frustrated monks walking around with muscular forearms,
ready to explode at any moment.
Having seks with other men was still against the rules,
but it was like pushing an old lady out of the way on a crowded bus.
You know it’s wrong, but at some point you just gotta get off.
They saw nanshoku, sex between males, as an outlet for their urges.
The consequence: nanshoku went viral in Buddhist temples.
Literally. They all had STDs.
But the male love that happened in temples wasn’t the sort between adult men,
the monks were more into seks with their younger boy acolytes.
These were boys who grew up in the temples, learning scriptures, doing chores, and occasionally
warming the beds of older monks.
Buddhist monks became known for nanshoku.
One writer joked: “The priest goes to Yoshichō in his everyday garb.”
I love explaining jokes, so Yoshichō was a pleasure district known for male prostitutes.
Medieval George Carlin is saying that a Buddhist monk visiting male prostitutes was so common
they didn’t even have to wear a disguise, unlike if he were visiting female ones.
Even yamabushi, who were mountain priests that did not live in temples, gained a reputation
for being boy lovers.
There was a saying about them: “Acolytes first, the mountain god second.”
Nanshoku spread from the monastery to the battlefield, the realm of the samurai,
likely because samurai families sent their sons to monasteries to study,
where they learned about nanshoku the hard way.
And so the tradition of shudō 衆道 arose among the samurai, The Way of Youths.
“Way” meaning like a philosophy or an art, like the art of sword fighting, which it kinda is.
Leave it to the Japanese to turn seks into an art form to perfect.
In shudō, an adult man formed a romantic relationship with a youth.
A youth was called a wakashu 若衆.
I have a video all about the life of wakashu, but basically, the male lifecycle was like that of butterflies.
Like how caterpillars became pupa before becoming butterflies, boys became wakashu before becoming adult men.
Wakashu were generally around 11 years old to about mid-20s.
Ages varied, but they were not considered boys.
It was a stage after childhood.
In a shudō relationship, the man was a mentor.
He taught the wakashu how to grow up to be a samurai and occasionally how to grow his little samurai.
The wakashu was like an apprentice in the worst internship ever.
Some of your favorite samurai had one or more young male lovers.
Oda Nobunaga famously had Mori Ranmaru.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Miyamoto Musashi also followed the Way of Youths.
Actually, just name a famous samurai, he probably practiced shudō.
It seemed like the norm among samurai.
You think of these warlords as badasses, but apparently they were a bunch of delicate flowers.
Takeda Shingen had at least one love triangle with 2 wakashu.
There was a document where he swore to his main lover that he never slept with this other wakashu.
He only talked to his side hoe, honest!
He invited the gods to strike him down if he ever became unfaithful.
Plot twist: Bastard was probably lying.
It was in the Edo Period that the popularity of shudō climaxed.
It spread to commoners in the cities.
People started writing about it in flowery language.
The Way was open to all.
Writers wrote about shudō ideals and proper behaviors and what to do in the bedroom, even fun positions.
They put a fancy kimono on what was basically men sleeping with boys.
Shudō relationships were one-sided.
The man was supposed to thirst after the wakashu, and not the other way around.
But it’s not clear how much people followed this.
There were examples of wakashu yearning for a man or giving hints to men they liked.
Writers worshipped the forelock, that unique hair that all wakashu wore, an it became an erotic symbol.
They also oiled their spears over the furisode, a type of kimono that wakashu wore.
15 to 17 was considered the age where a wakashu was most beautiful, known as the “springtime of youth.”
Now you know what Gai-sensei was talking about.
Nooo, Gai-sensei, nooo.
After springtime, wakashu were called “falling flowers,” a poetic way of saying they got more hideous by the day.
Men were supposed to dress well and clean their teeth.
Bad breath was un-shudō-like because no self-respecting wakashu would ever go for men with bad breath.
Some writers encouraged wakashu to lightly powder their faces white, like women did.
Shudō couples had fun ways of expressing their love.
Some exchanged vows and sewed them onto their clothing, so the vow was always next to their skin.
More serious public displays of affection involved tattoos, cutting off hair,
cutting the skin to make a scar, pulling fingernails, and the ultimate expression of love,
the one for real genuine couples who were not compensating at all: cutting off a finger.
Seks was also one-sided.
The main seks act was through the bum.
The man was always the top, never the bottom.
Wakashu were not supposed to like seks.
Infiltrating the rear entrance was generally seen as displeasing.
Wakashu mostly endured it for the sake of their partner.
This does not mean that wakashu were forced into shudō relationships.
They had the power to reject men’s advances and shared the bed willingly.
Even though they didn’t like penetrative seks, it doesn’t mean they were coerced.
They agreed to seks for reasons other than pleasure, like duty, compassion,
or wanting to give their partners pleasure.
Both sides seemed genuine.
That’s why there existed the curious cases of love suicides.
These were Romeo and Romeo cases where both the man and wakashu killed themselves due to love.
Although you have to ask, for really young wakashu, did they understand what they were getting themselves into?
No, of course not, they were kids, why would ask that?
There were seks guides teaching people the way of the bedroom, like always carry around
plums that were pre-cut in case you ever needed lubrication.
Wait what?
How often did they run into situations where they had to penetrate in a pinch?
Books described all kinds of positions that are just too dirty to talk about, but I did
learn of two methods that shattered my innocence.
Still not describing them, you dirty viewer, but they were called “dry insertion” and
“tearing the hole,” and were designed to cause the wakashu as much pain as possible.
But why though?
One writer cautioned that if you withdrew your turtle head covered in poop, it would cause health issues.
I only mention this advice because “turtle head” is a wonderful euphemism.
If you’re Jewish you may not understand.
Some critics of shudō seks said it caused more hemorrhoids, but defenders said
yeah but it also made the anus more flexible.
I don’t really understand why that’s a positive.
Kissing was actually considered very intimate.
People didn’t usually kiss during foreplay, they did it while in the peak of sweaty passion.
Shudō porun exploded all over the capital, spattering pictures of male-on-male action everywhere.
ForelockHub was born.
Now with all the art and the writings about proper shudō ideals, we gotta keep in mind
that these were mostly made for men, a lot of them were male fantasies, especially the art.
It’s hard for historians to tell how much they followed these ideals in practice.
It’d be like watching porun and thinking that seks happens when your stepsister gets stuck under the bed.
No. You’re supposed to pull your stepsis out from her predicament.
And then sleep with he--
Some samurai lords took pride in having an entourage of beautiful young page boys and
sandal bearers like they were some hentai pokemon collection.
That’s right, sandal bearers, people who carried their lord’s sandals around, often
carried them right into the bedroom.
The fifth shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, was a big ol horndog.
He slept with over a hundred different wakashu.
He appointed an official whose job was to find him cute wakashu.
Imagine working hard for the shogunate your whole life only to end up pimping out boys for your lord.
He housed his wakashu in nearby buildings.
They were supposed to be ready every evening in case he fancied them.
Now I thought I knew a lot about the perviest supernatural creature, the kappa, the Pervert Squirrel,
but I just discovered that they believed the kappa could enter a man’s butt
and ignite in him the passion for male-male seks.
I’m not clear if entering meant penetration or it literally crawled into your butt.
Must do more research.
These shudō writers were out of control.
The chrysanthemum is the symbol of the Japanese imperial family.
It’s a sacred symbol.
These degenerate writers made it the symbol for male-male love,
because the inner part of the flower looked like the opening of a butt.
I don’t really see it, but I don’t have an eye for these things.
Alright this is important, so pay attention.
It has to do with their sexuality.
One question people often ask is, were they gay? Or bisexual?
If I had a dollar for everytime someone asked me that question. I’d have $2.
But it’s kind of the wrong question to ask. Here’s why.
Most of us are used to viewing sexuality this way, the boring way.
If you’re a man and you’re attracted to women, you’re heterosexual.
If you’re attracted to men, you’re homosexual.
And if you’re attracted to both, you’re really fun.
Unfortunately, when you try to ram that model into Japan in the Edo Period, it doesn’t fit.
Let’s take a typical Edo man.
He’s attracted to women. So he’s straight.
But he’s also attracted to wakashu. Okay okay, so he’s bisexual.
But he’s not attracted to men. Uh...?
Then as he grows older, he loses interest in wakashu and becomes attracted to women.
Uh...what the hell is he??
Okay calm down me.
Look they didn’t think there were two types of sexual partners, male and female.
They thought in terms of 3. Male, female, and wakashu.
Each point of the seks triangle had a different role in the bedroom and in society.
That’s why some historians call wakashu a third gender.
So men could sleep with wakashu.
Their relationship was one-way, meaning the object of desire was the wakashu, not the man.
The man wanted the wakashu seksually, not the other way around.
Men could also sleep with women, and men were not obligated to stay monogamous.
Now he could only have one wife, but he could sleep with other partners.
The relationship between man and wife was two-way, they both desired each other.
Also, men didn’t sleep with other men.
Now we’re only talking about seksual norms here, okay, how people were supposed to act.
But you always had people breaking these norms.
And this doesn’t even include prostitutes, which made things even messier,
but don’t they always?
And just to be clear, men did not see wakashu as substitutes for women.
Wakashu had a more masculine or androgynous beauty, different from the feminine beauty of women.
Shudō relationships were associated with masculinity, like grrr.
It came from the warrior tradition after all.
Women could sleep with men and wakashu before marriage, but after marriage,
they stayed monogamous with their husband.
The relationship between women and wakashu was two-way.
Sleeping with other women wasn’t a recognized union.
Wakashu could sleep with men or women, but in a shudō relationship, it wasn’t clear
if they had to stay monogamous.
Some shudō writers said yes, others disagreed.
Funny thing is, even if the couple agreed to be monogamous, they could still sleep with other women.
Seems it was only called cheating if the wakashu slept with another man, or the man slept with another wakashu.
There was also this phenomenomon, phenonena...that adult men started off their adulthood being
attracted to wakashu, but as they got older they slowly shifted their preference to women.
After men got married, they preferred mostly women.
Men older than 30 who still chased wakashu tail were frowned upon.
Shudō was seen as something you did as a young adult, but grew out of.
You could still do it as an old man, no one would stop you, you just wouldn’t be acting your age.
To use modern words, it was like a man started out gay, became bi, then became straight.
It seems bonkers.
Nowadays, we tend to think of sexuality as identity, as something that’s fixed, but
that’s why our modern ideas of sexuality don’t fit.
The Japanese didn’t have these concepts.
They did not think of their sexual orientation as identity.
They didn’t self identify by who they had seks with.
A woman sleeping with a man did not make her straight, and sleeping with another woman
did not make her a lesbian.
Seks was something they did, not who they were.
So men switching from gay to straight was like watching hentai when you’re young,
then switching to real, respectable porun when you grow up.
All good things come to a happy ending, and bad things too.
In the latter half of the Edo Period, shudō popularity deflated.
Some even called it a “vulgar practice” from an earlier age.
It got less and less popular until it died in the Meiji Period.
The government adopted Western hairstyles and clothing,
which eliminated the wakashu’s famous forelock and clothing.
Western dress and hairstyles reinforced the male-female dichotomy.
In some cases, the authorities aggressively suggested people wear Western hairstyles by
cutting off people’s topknots.
Under the Meiji government, only seks between married men and women was acceptable, and
male-male or female-female seks became obscene, enforced by law.
For more about the crazy lives of wakashu, check out this video here.
We have some new Patreon patrons this week, Cody Bouquet that rolls right off the tongue,
Miguel Alvarez, and Elizabeth MacDonald, I love your restaurant.
Alright, I love you, and spread the knowledge!