SOURCE: Shively, Donald H. “The Social Environment of Tokuawa Kabuki.” In Studies in Kabuki: Its Acting, Music, and Historical Context, edited by James R. Brandon, William P. Malm, and Donald H. Shively, pp. 36-61. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1978.

[In the following excerpt, Shively argues that the close connection between Kabuki and the quarter of town that was the center of prostitution illustrates how the theatre was a product of the social environment of Japanese cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.]

THE LIFE AND ART OF ACTORS

The life of the actor—his background, training, and professional and social relationships—was fascinating to the wider audience of theatergoers. The main focus of kabuki was less the play than the actor who attracted attention not only because of his dramatic talent but because of his lineage, his physical assets, and his private life. Boyish beauty, unusual acting ability, elaborate reputations for a luxurious lifestyle, and romantic entanglements titillated a public vulnerable to the glamor of the theater world.

Actors were instructed to live in the quarter or in its close vicinity. In Kyoto their homes were found especially in Gion-machi, Miyagawa-chō, and Kawara-machi north of Shijō. The great Genroku actors Sakata Tōjūrō and Miyuki Tatsunosuke lived at the latter address, a few blocks west of the theaters. Minor performers sometimes lived in their dressing rooms under rather wretched conditions, while the established actors and managers usually had fine residences.¹ According to the colorful version of the Ejima story, the home of the manager of the Yamamura-za must have been a large and comfortable building to permit the entourage from the castle to hold one phase of its party there, drinking with “many actors, young actors, and youths.”

The most popular actors lived in luxury, commanding high salaries and receiving lavish gifts from admirers and patrons. Some of the more prosperous, particularly in Kyoto and Osaka, became theater owners. Others owned or had a part interest in teahouses. Some kept a considerable number of beautiful youths in their homes whom they trained as actors. Customers of the teahouses could arrange for these boys to entertain and drink with them and serve as sexual partners. Daimyo and men of wealth summoned them to their mansions to entertain and to spend the night. Called iroko (sex youths) or butaiko (stage youths), they ranged in age from thirteen to about seventeen. Estimates claim that 80 or 90 percent of the onnagata during the first half of the Tokugawa period started as iroko. Segawa Kikunojō (1693?-1749) was a catamite in Dōtombori before becoming a famous actor. Onoe Kikugorō, Yamashita Kinsaku, Onoe Shōroku, Ichikawa Monnosuke III, Nakamura Riko II, Sawamura Kito, and Nakamura Kikuyo are among the many others who emerged from this background.²

Most of the youths were given no spoken lines, but merely lined up as extras on the stage with powdered faces and beautiful clothes or were brought on in dance numbers.³ Those who showed some ability in acting began with children's parts. The less talented were kept in their teacher's home to work as prostitutes, while continuing to be called actors to avoid difficulties with the authorities.⁴ During the 1670s and 1680s young catamites were extremely popular and, despite official disapproval, became increasingly numerous.⁵ Laws of 1689, 1694, and 1695 forbad actors or catamites to answer summons and specified that troupe managers alone could keep youths exclusively for dramatic training.⁶ These were limited to twenty young actors and ten apprentices.⁷ Nevertheless, there must have been some kind of understanding on this matter, as a law of 1709 required those on the stage to shave their forelocks while sparing the youths innocent of dramatic appearances. In 1723, “several tens of persons” were punished because of violations and the iroko held by troupe managers were freed, that is, contracts indenturing them were cancelled, and they were sent home to their parents.⁸

In time the number of such youths in Edo became so large that it was inconvenient to keep them all in the theater teahouses or other houses in that quarter. Therefore they were placed in establishments in Yoshi-chō. These houses were called kagema-jaya (catamite teahouses), and although it appears that in many instances the youths were indentured to the master of the teahouse, the fiction was maintained that they were employees of the theater or troupe manager. Their names appeared on the playbills (banzuke) of the three theaters, and in the twelfth month, at the time of the investigation and registration of the populace, a special fee of 100 silver hiki was paid to the officials to overlook the irregularity. This fee was paid by the masters of the catamite teahouses.⁹ When the youths were called to the stage to appear as extras or members of the chorus, their masters were pleased to have them perform without pay and to supply costumes because of the excellent publicity.¹⁰ As their forelocks were unshaven, the front hair was concealed by a purple crepe cap, slightly larger than the patch worn by the onnagata over his shaven pate.¹¹

Edo theater practice dictated that these youths be summoned only by customers in the lower level boxes on the west side. Further nicety of convention delicately prevented female geisha from attending the same parlor in a teahouse.¹² The youths who appeared on the stage held a higher status than the ordinary catamites, which was reflected in their different costume and precedence in seating. Their patrons were frequently women, sometimes ladies of the shōgun's castle or daimyo mansions, who were referred to by the argot “golden sliding doors” (kin-busuma). It was policy, however, that youths decline invitations from Buddhist nuns.¹³

Catamite teahouses which were not directly connected with the theaters also appeared in Edo. The first were probably the Yushima Tenjin houses of the 1740s.¹⁴ They were, however, part of the same social world. The actor Ichikawa Gennosuke became enamoured of a youth from one of these houses, bought him for fifty ryō, and later, when he became twenty-one, arranged (with some difficulty) to put him on the stage as an onnagata.¹⁵ In the 1760s there were ten quarters in Edo which had catamite teahouses, only three of which had direct connections with the theater quarters.¹⁶ Most were in front of shrines, suggesting the patronage of Shinto and Buddhist priests.

The situation in Kyoto appears to have been much the same. One of the first critical booklets on actors, Yarō mushi (Fellow [or Actor] Bugs) (1660), describes the kabuki youths who were sought after by Buddhist monks:

In these times in the capital there is a great number of what are called “fellow bugs” who eat away the bamboo and wood of the five Zen monasteries and ten abbeys, the books of the learned priests, and even the purses of fathers and grandfathers. … “Fellow bugs” are about the size of a human being fifteen or sixteen years old; they are equipped with arms, legs, mouth, nose, ears, and eyes, wear a black cap on the head, fly around Gion, Maruyama, and Ryōzen, and have eyes on people's purses. When I asked someone: “Are those not the young kabuki actors of Shijō riverside?” he clapped his hands, laughed, and said: “You are right.” These young kabuki actors have multiplied in number especially in the past year and this year. The handsome among the children of lowly outcastes and beggars are selected; their faces never without powder, and dressed in clothes of silk gauze and damask, they are put on the stage to dance and sing, and the old and the young, men and women, become weak-kneed and call out: “Gosaku! Good! Good! I'll die!” Not only do they call to them, but seduced by their alluring eyes, they go with them after the performance to Higashiyama; borne away in woven litters and palanquins, they proceed in high spirits, calling: “Here, here! A palanquin, a palanquin.” Ah! What grateful affection! Bilked of a large amount of gold and silver for one night's troth, the droll priests of the temples, their bodies wasting away day by day, desire only to engage the fellows. Having no money, they sell the treasure of paintings and tea ceremony utensils that have been handed down generation after generation in the temples, and if these do not suffice, they cut bamboo and timber grove trees, and with that money, engage fellows.¹⁷

Saikaku devotes the second half of his Great Mirror of Homosexuality (Nanshoku ōkagami, 1687), to the kabuki youths of Kyoto and Osaka. He states that there were thirty-one of these youths in Kyoto at the time.¹⁸ Catamite teahouses also became numerous; a book of 1766 lists 85 in Miyagawa-chō in Kyoto and 47 in Dōtombori in Osaka.¹⁹

Apart from the kabuki youths who at best were apprentices or bit players, there were some young actors of ability and beauty known as wakashu-gata, usually fourteen to seventeen years of age.²⁰ They played the roles of boys or handsome young men, gentle and somewhat effeminate. Their slightly plump faces and bodies were said to have a neutral quality intermediate between male and female, and they were likened to statues of Buddhist deities of the style sculpted by Annami Kaikei in the early Kamakura period. Some also played girls' parts, and most turned to onnagata roles when they became older. The best of the wakashu-gata were given star billing along with the leading players of men's roles (tachiyaku) and the mature onnagata. This is evidence that despite the abolition of youth kabuki in 1652 and its replacement by yarō kabuki, the audiences continued to admire beautiful young actors. This is further attested by the first extant playbill of 1675 which listed them after the tachiyaku, but before the onnagata.²¹

Most of the onnagata had, of course, been kabuki youths. Yet as they grew older, they relied increasingly on a more subtle skill in playing women's roles. They could not merely mimic for, aging and wrinkled, their lantern chins and heavy noses more pronounced, their voices more gravelly, they could hardly be mistaken in appearance for women. A more abstract method of interpretation was required. Thus they singled out the most essential traits of a woman's gestures and speech and gave to these a special emphasis in much the same way that puppets exaggerate human gestures to appear alive. The stylized manner of the onnagata, together with the interplay between the onnagata and tachiyaku, became the essence of kabuki acting to the extent that attempts by women in modern times to play the female roles have not been satisfactory. A number of factors contribute to this situation. The beauty of onnagata acting lies in its formalized grace. Women in these roles appear too natural, too realistic. Furthermore, since male roles are played in a strong, sometimes exaggerated manner, women lack the physical strength to project an equal stage presence. And again, women do not exude the peculiar eroticism with its homosexual overtones which has become an inherent characteristic of kabuki. Actresses become plausible only when they play their parts, not by miming women, but by imitating onnagata.

The lack of realism in the acting style of the onnagata was not a deficiency in the eyes of a Tokugawa audience. One of the more popular styles of male acting, aragoto (rough business), which was characterized by the exaggerated movement and bombastic language appropriate to the superhuman prowess of warrior heroes, was equally unnatural. In the earliest kabuki, not only did women play men and men women, but plots were steeped in the fantastic. In later plays as well, action is often illogical and fantastic elements frequently intrude. the art of the theater makes such action plausible, not real. Realistic representation is not an objective in other forms of traditional Japanese drama. This is well illustrated by the puppet theater, a major art which rivalled kabuki in popularity during some decades of the Tokugawa period. As part of the kabuki repertoire was drawn from the puppet theater, the movements of the puppets actually influenced the human acting styles. Earlier dramatic forms, bugaku, nō, and kōwakamai, are even less concerned with realism of conception and detail.

The actors of women's roles portrayed in an idealized manner chastity, virtue, patience, and tact—embodying the ideals of Tokugawa women prepared to sacrifice their lives for their children or husband or parents, or give themselves solely to enhance the honor of the family. They were also models of etiquette in their bows, their deferential movements, their modesty. They were retiring in the presence of men, often keeping to the back of the stage (upstage), which also served the purpose of making them appear smaller in stature than those playing men's parts. Onnagata did not step out in front of an actor in a male role, but sat slightly behind him. They sat on a lower level on the stage more commonly than on a raised set, and never on the stools which were used on occasion by men of high rank. In short, they played women's place in society to an extreme degree.

Some players of women's roles, even after they reached onnagata status and were no longer indentured, continued to have homosexual relationships. If they were prominent actors, they would of course be selective. Inasmuch as they were trained and experienced homosexual partners and since their stage roles as onnagata depended on assumed femininity, it was their practice to lead rather feminine lives, to live their art. The many stories concerning the practices of onnagata in the Tokugawa period include accounts that they dressed like women when off the stage. The younger onnagata wore long-sleeved kimono (furisode) and flowery patterns appropriate to young girls. They dressed their hair in a unique style resembling a woman's coiffure. Some are said to have entered the women's side of public bath-houses, and “no one thought this strange.”²² They developed the motor habits of women in hand gestures, walking, and sitting, and it has been said that some squatted to urinate. They used women's language—vocabulary, verb endings, honorifics—not to mention female pitch and intonation. The famous early onnagata, Yoshizawa Ayame (1673-1729) said that an onnagata should continue to experience the feelings of an onnagata even in the dressing room, eating only the kind of food appropriate to women, and modestly turning away from the leading man when eating.²³

The extent to which onnagata lived their art is illustrated by an anecdote about the Edo onnagata Segawa Kikunojō. A man from Osaka went to call on him at his home, but when he arrived Kikunojō was in the kitchen talking to the fishmonger. The visitor, mistaking Kikunojō for his wife, asked to meet the actor.²⁴

The appeal of onnagata was not merely to the men of the audience. They were admired by the ladies for the elegance of their gestures and the gentleness of their dispositions—since they played women in an idealized manner. Occasionally they became involved in love affairs with ladies of higher status. In 1706 the onnagata Ikushima Daikichi (1671-1706) hid himself in a clothing chest and was smuggled into the Edo mansion of the Tokugawa daimyo of Kii.²⁵

The leading players of male roles were also admired for their sexuality and were more openly idolized than the onnagata. Sakata Tōjūrō (1647-1709) specialized in playing the part of the great lover and big spender in the prostitute quarters. He was called the “original master of love scenes” and “the first in the line of the engagers of prostitutes.” His skill in these scenes, we are told, was due to a great deal of practice off the stage, although, in fact, this may well not have been true in his case. When he died, the women of the entire city of Kyoto wept “crimson tears.”²⁶

His contemporary, the Osaka actor Arashi San'emon (1635-1690), held a similar title: “pioneer of lovemaking in the West.” His biographical sketch in a critical booklet states: “There is not a prostitute with whom he is not intimate.”²⁷ Reputations as free-spending lovers of courtesans were important publicity for actors. Ikushima Shingorō was much admired by the ladies for the way he played love scenes. A description in a critical booklet written many years before his affair with Ejima, seems to foreshadow the danger ahead: “He quickly came to be gossiped about for his amours. It is due to the large-heartedness with which he was born that the cord he uses to tie up his hair becomes undone. The god of Izumo sends a shower which causes him to enjoy love scenes on the stage, pleasing the ladies of the audience.”²⁸

Actors set fashion in some sectors of society. The new patterns used in their robes, their hair ornaments, their styles of speech were aped even by wives and daughters of prominent merchants. The many examples of popular styles copied from actors include the Kikuchi knot, inspired by the manner in which Uemura Kikuchi tied his sash, the Miyuki hat, adapted from Miyuki Tatsunosuke, and Rokō brown, a color sported by Segawa Kikunojō (Rokō).²⁹

Some actors opened shops which sold products carrying their endorsement. Shops specializing in cosmetics were the most common, but there were also shops selling fans and clothing material. One of the best known, dating from the 1680s, was established by the actor Uemura Kichiya at the end of Takasegawa Bridge on Shijō to sell cosmetics.³⁰ The actor in his shop is occasionally the subject of a woodblock print. Sanogawa Ichimatsu is shown in his establishment where incense and toothpowder were sold, wearing a robe of checkered pattern which he made popular (Ichimatsu-zome). In another print, an actor, perhaps Matsumoto Kōshirō IV is seated in his shop which offered a special wafer, writing a poem on a fan for a young woman.³¹ The yago or “shop names,” which are still associated with the names of famous actors, probably had their origins in the actors' shops, for example, Takashimaya for Ichikawa Sadanji and his disciples.

The craze for actors was extreme among the Edo fans, a reflection of the ebullience and rashness of the Edokko temperament. Their first great actor, Ichikawa Danjūrō, a hero to the plebs in the pit, was referred to as “The Flower of Edo.”³² Excitement shot up to a high pitch when a great star made his entrance on the hanamichi, paused, and slowly turned his face toward the audience: “One glance, a thousand ryō—Kikunojō on the hanamichi.”³³ The obsession with actors in Edo is distastefully borne out by a tale of Ichikawa Yaozō II, a great favorite in the role of Sukeroku, chivalrous commoner. At the conclusion of the play he makes his escape by concealing himself in a water barrel. After the performance the water was bottled and sold to his female admirers, some of whom drank it.³⁴

From the last decade of the seventeenth century, when the first actors with prodigious reputations began to appear, the salaries paid the leading players rose to large sums. It is not known for certain how much was actually received as figures were sometimes inflated to enhance the fame of the actor. Ichikawa Danjūrō is said to have received 500 ryō a year in 1694, but his own record indicates payment of 320 ryō. Yet this was a time when ordinary actors might expect about 25 or 30 ryō. The highest figure reported for Sakata Tōjūrō, 800 ryō, is certainly an exaggeration; a critical booklet of 1701 quotes his salary at 500 ryō and that of Ikushima Shingorō at 250 ryō.³⁵ In any case, this was the beginning of very substantial payments. A few decades later various actors are listed at 1,000 ryō, but in fact some received little more than half the publicized figure.³⁶ The three Edo managers were hard pressed to restrain demands for higher and higher salaries. In order to check the ruinous competition among themselves, they agreed in 1794 not to pay more than 500 ryō. This agreement was soon broken, but the government ordered them to observe this ceiling in 1827 and again in 1842. Actors were expected to provide their own costumes, but when the wage ceiling came into effect, they demanded a supplement for costumes.³⁷

The leading actors did live luxuriously with large homes, expensive delicacies, and gorgeous clothing. Attended by many apprentices and disciples, they adopted the style of a wealthy merchant or minor daimyo. Sakata Tōjūrō was renowned for extravagance. He would not wear clothes once they had been washed, would use candles alone rather than the more economical oil lamps, and had his sake heated over a fire of aloes wood, or so we are told. When he went to Osaka to perform, he had drinking water brought in barrels from Kyoto. His rice was checked grain by grain before cooking to insure that there were no pebbles which might damage his teeth. When a member of his household suggested that he refrain from such extravagance, he laughed: “The reason I am receiving a salary now of close to 1,000 ryō is because I am not frugal. As I am well known and am called a celebrated man of the theater in the three great cities, I must be large spirited and nothing should be heard or seen concerning me that could be considered small.”³⁸ The publicity value of such stories is undoubted.

Despite the prohibition, some leading actors had residences in the suburbs of Edo: Danjūrō II in Meguro, Danjūrō IV in Kiba, Danjūrō V in Ushijima, and Nakamura Nakayo in Ukechi. The Edo onnagata, Segawa Kikunojō II, had three homes, three mistresses, and supported fifty-three people. Over thirty persons lived in Nakamura Utaemon III's residence in Dōtombori, Osaka. He had three additional houses, inflating his living expenses to 3,000 ryō a year. During the Tempo Reform of 1842, however, the government strictly enforced laws for the control of actors, confining them to the new quarter at Saruwaka-chō, and investigating those who mixed with commoners. Sawamura Sōjūrō and Onoe Baikō were manacled for appearing without sedge hats, and Nakamura Utaemon was jailed for going to a bout of sumō wrestling. Danjūrō VII (1791-1859) was punished for his opulent style. His residence at Kiba and its expensive furnishings were confiscated, he himself was banished from Edo.³⁹

Some actors, men of education and character, were occasionally entertained by daimyo, or at least, by retired daimyo. Danjūrō II tells in his diary of an invitation to the residence of the retired lord of Matsuura where he drank so much that he was forced to stay the night. Nakamura Chūzō frequently went to the Mōri residence for tea with the retired lord, and was presented with an inkstone from Chōshū. The retired lord of Izumo, a Matsudaira and a patron of Segawa Kikunojō II, went to the theater for Kikunojō's final rehearsal and returned for the opening performance.⁴⁰

An account of the 1840s laments the improper behavior of actors of its day who sat in the teahouses with their high-born patrons and behaved as intimates. It contrasts their conduct with earlier times when Onoe Baikō I and Sōjūrō were performing. Retired daimyo came incognito to the theater to watch them and invited them to a teahouse. The actors came dressed in formal clothes, took their seats in a humble position at a distance from the lords, and when they had received cups of sake, they took leave.⁴¹

THE DEPICTION OF ACTOR AND PROSTITUTE IN UKIYOE

Second only to the principal actors in notoriety and public curiosity were the leading courtesans of the pleasure quarter. The fame of the leaders of both professions was spread by woodblock prints and critical booklets. Indeed, the prints and booklets developed in competence, sophistication, and circulation largely in the effort to cope ever more imaginatively with subjects so voraciously consumed by the public. There are numerous parallels in the manner in which actors and courtesans were treated in these two types of publication.

The art of ukiyo paintings and prints dealt largely with prostitutes and actors from its beginnings throughout a century and a half of development. Even in the nineteenth century when landscape and bird and flower themes became common, portraits of prostitutes and actors continued to dominate ukiyoe. The popularity of these prints and books has given Japan a larger illustrated record of actors and prostitutes than is found in any contemporary culture.

Hishikawa Moronobu who, more than any other artist, shaped the early development of ukiyo painting and prints, divided his work largely between these two worlds. This is neatly demonstrated by two handscrolls made up of a series of scenes from both Edo kabuki and the Yoshiwara.⁴²

In 1690 Torii Kiyomoto did the first poster for the Ichimura-za, thus originating a professional kabuki style, perfected by his son, which remained popular for several decades. From the middle of the eighteenth century, prints which displayed actors posed in their roles were regularly issued with changes of the Edo programs. Many of the actor prints depict a single, strong figure in a dramatic moment of the play. The dramatic climax is not necessarily at the end, for the kabuki play is more a series of striking climactic images as the actor holds a pose to show an intense emotion, rolling his head, crossing one eye, grimacing, flinging out his arms and legs. The most dramatic of these conventional postures, mie, are the discrete high points recorded in prints. These are the moments the audience applauds by shouts of praise.

While the word “dance” suggests in the West a fluid, continuous movement, Japanese kabuki dance leads from one dramatic posture to another, and these moments are also recorded in prints. In fact the kabuki scene contains a series of tableaux in which the arrangement and spacing of figures on the stage—the patterns formed by the lines and colors—observe the same principles of composition as an ukiyo print or painting.

This commitment to the depiction of highly conventionalized, tableaulike scenes instead of more natural or unstudied postures is sustained in the courtesan prints. The leading beauty accompanied by an attendant en route to a rendezvous is endlessly repeated. Triptychs of characteristic beauties of the three great cities become familiar exercises. And portraits of courtesans before their shops often occur. All sense of motion is eroded as the static figure is caught in a standardized gesture.

The presentation of a single, bold, voluptuous figure against a plain ground is perfected in the courtesan paintings and prints of the Kaigetsudō during the early eighteenth century. Again there is a close parallel to the artistic treatment of the actor who is most frequently featured alone, poised commandingly before the viewer with little peripheral distraction. The three leading actors of a play frequently appear in a triptych, but as each actor occupies an individual panel, the figures are essentially independent prints as in the case of courtesan triptychs.

Actors are usually identified in the prints, the majority of them by 1700, although prostitutes remain largely anonymous until after the middle of the eighteenth century. Yet both subjects are represented in a style which gives little attention to individual personality. Most ukiyoe lack the concern for facial detail of true portraits. Costume is recorded more painstakingly than the face, as though both types of print were more fashion plate than portrait. The public preoccupation with clothing and ornament is documented by the loving concentration devoted to fabric and design in these prints.

Women of the pleasure quarter are depicted in much the same unreal style which governs their portrayal by onnagata on the stage: as idealized girls of the Yoshiwara, they represent the romance, the fidelity, and half-real, half-fantasy world epitomized in the anonymous portraits by Okumura Masanobu. The courtesans of the domestic plays are simply fictionalized figures from the real pleasure quarter and, indeed, are occasionally biographical versions of a real life (though deceased) figure. The idealization and lack of unflattering comment that characterize the playwright's interpretation of his heroine is paralleled by the treatment of the courtesan prints and is reflected again in the actor print of the courtesan role. The role itself, the representation of the actor in the role, and the basic courtesan study are alike in their fascination not so much with the details of the Yoshiwara but with its appeal to the imagination. That the actor-courtesan so often appears in a conventionalized pose without background, boldly detached from the content of the play, seems to divorce the print from the world of kabuki and return it directly to the Yoshiwara.

The portrayal of actors in stage roles, which significantly dominates more personal, offstage studies, suggests that they too were expressive vehicles for the imagination of artist and audience much like the prostitutes. The basic repertoire of courtesan poses and the studied manner of depiction reduces the idiosyncratic importance of the individual and inflates her value as a symbol of a lifestyle. So too the depersonalization of actor and absorption in the beauty of theatrical pose preserves his identification with a glamorous world, wide enough to accommodate the most flamboyant imagination.

The kabuki prints commonly carry the name of the actor and his role. In the Torii school, identification often depends upon depiction of the actor's crest on his costume. Occasional inclusion of a crest may also offer a clue to identity in the more typically anonymous courtesan prints. Yet the actors are known, not by personal names, but by hereditary stage names which invoke the reputation of a great forebear. Among the courtesans it was also common practice to repeat noted professional names, not to establish any legitimate affiliation, but to borrow the reputation for skill or beauty of a romantic predecessor. This use of traditional names by both actors and prostitutes adds an additional factor of impersonality and anonymity to the prints. As it is the idealized Hanaōgi who is important, so it is the idealized Ichikawa Danjūrō as Benkei who is important. No matter what generation of Hanaōgi or Danjūrō-Benkei the artist portrays, an imaginative ideal replaces reality.

This emphasis on the symbolic importance of the actor and the courtesan prints is not to deny the personality feature altogether. The print did, to some extent, serve the personality cults of actors so ardently sustained by fan clubs. Prints of courtesans were also made in expectation of satisfying an audience which, by dint of the mechanics of her art, was necessarily more limited than that of the actor. However, for the wider audience of both actor and prostitute prints, the idealized treatment of the subject in colorful and stylish costume provided easier entry to the fantasy world of the pleasure quarter.

The faces in the earlier prints are so lacking in individual traits that actors could rarely be identified if their name or crest were not provided. The courtesans' features are feminine and graceful, but they are impassive, and there is no hint of temperament and little sensuality. During the latter half of the eighteenth century, both the actor and courtesan prints undergo a change, more or less simultaneously, due in part to improved techniques in multicolor printing. Close-up facial treatment is given preference by some artists over full-length studies and more personal characteristics are stressed. In some instances an actor might be recognized by face alone in the work of different artists. In the large heads (ōkubi), beginning in the 1770s, and shortly in the large faces (ōgao) of Bunchō, Shunshō, and Shukō, which lead to the faces of Sharaku, the change lies more heavily on the side of caricature than portraiture. Nonetheless it signifies a transition from fascination with the symbolic to fascination with the idiosyncratic. A parallel development takes place in the increased attention to individual personality in the depiction of women, but possibly because this subject lends itself less to caricature than the grimacing of actors, the way was opened for the more interesting psychological studies of Utamaro. Unlike the impassive faces of the earlier courtesan prints, sensual beauty now emerges in a variety of physiognomical studies of vanity, fickleness, passion, and so forth. This change toward portraiture was accompanied by the identification of the individual beauty, frequently her name and house, and sometimes the address, written in a cartouche in a corner of the composition.

The intimate connection between the two worlds in the public mind is best illustrated by prints which posed actor with prostitute, geisha, or kamuro.⁴³ The consummate works on this theme are those erotic prints, delicately called “spring pictures” (shunga), which show in breathtaking detail a popular actor and a prostitute in the act of love. Considered neither libelous nor invasive of privacy, they simply depicted leaders of the two professions performing as the public expected.

CRITICAL BOOKLETS ON ACTORS AND PROSTITUTES

Critical booklets (hyōbanki), quoted earlier, also publicized the leading actors and courtesans. The conception and the design format of these books were very similar for both groups. They developed from the kanazōshi tradition of guidebooks to cities and famous places which appeared during the early decades of the seventeenth century. The first booklet on prostitutes (yūjo hyōbanki) was probably the Tōgenshū, a 1655 guide to the Shimabara quarter and its inmates, followed directly by guides to the quarters in Osaka and Edo. The Naniwa monogatari on the Shimmachi quarter of Osaka rated twelve girls of tayū rank and thirty of tenjin rank. In the next years the first of the guides to actors (yarō hyōbanki) appeared, the Yakusha no uwasa in 1656 and the Yarō mushi in 1660. The latter describes forty-one boys of the theater. These illustrated books extol the physical attractiveness of the young actor-prostitutes but overlook their ability on the stage. The Muki tokoro of 1662 shows an advance by making some reference to acting, but not until the end of the century is the main concern of the booklets turned to dramatic talent.

From this time, when not only the youths but the more serious actors are listed, the booklets are known as yakusha hyōbanki. In the 1690s the onnagata were listed first, followed by youths, and finally by the varieties of masculine roles: tachiyaku, villain, and comic character. However, beginning with the Yakusha kuchi jamisen, published in 1699, the books increasingly listed the three masculine roles first.⁴⁴ This work, like many to follow, devotes one volume to each of the three cities. The usual format is first to give the actor a rating, list the roles he has played, followed by stories about him, and a critique of his skills. Occasionally information on salaries was included. The books came to be published in the first month, focused on the kaomise performance of the preceding eleventh month. A second book was published to deal with the program of the first month, and sometimes one was issued concerning the seventh-month performance.

The system of rating performers was modeled on the prostitute booklets. The earliest extant booklet to rate actors, dating from 1687, employed only three ranks, but by 1702 six were in use, from “superior-superior-excellent” (jōjōkichi) down to “medium” (chū). The Yakusha nichō jamisen of that year listed 302 actors in the three cities, placing 26 in the highest category and 135 in the lowest.⁴⁵ Variations on this scheme were used for some years, but in time the schedule of ratings was devalued by overuse of the higher grades. By the middle of the eighteenth century one book used eleven grades, with “superior-superior-excellent,” originally the highest rank, now third from the bottom.⁴⁶

There is also great concern in these professions themselves for a system of hierarchical rank. This is quite clear among the prostitutes of the official quarters. Although the names varied from city to city and changed over time, there was never any doubt about the order. In Shimabara and Shimmachi during the Genroku period, for example, four ranks were recognized.⁴⁷ There were also semiofficial quarters and unlicensed brothels, such as bathhouses, which used different names and their own ranking systems. In the case of actors, an order of precedence was acknowledged between the different roles. But further, within each role category, there were levels ranging from master-actor to bit players and apprentices. These are set forth with care in playbills (banzuke) which appeared from the 1660s on, initially as handbills for distribution, and later also for posting at cross-roads and in bathhouses and barbershops.

Playbills recorded a rank list for the year for all actors in a troupe. Others listed the actors of all three cities—Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. The rating system used for prostitutes was copied in banzuke as it was in booklets on actors. In format, however, the playbills came to resemble increasingly the banzuke of sumō wrestlers.

INTERRELATION OF THE KABUKI AND PROSTITUTE QUARTERS

The close relationship between the two social centers of the Tokugawa city also becomes apparent in the fluid exchange of fashion, language, and other cultural innovations which characterized these groups. The current mode and the latest slang of the prostitutes' quarters were introduced in plays and passed on to a wider public. Styles in weaving and dyeing, in color and pattern of dress, in cosmetics, hairstyles, combs and bodkins, constantly passed between them.

The music, the popular songs, the styles of recitation, were shared. The standard instrument of both quarters was the samisen, introduced into Japan in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The samisen of the kabuki and pleasure quarter was higher pitched than that of the puppet theater and had a plaintive, sensuous quality scandalous to Confucian scholars who considered it the most harmful of “licentious music.” The numerous schools of recitation used in the kabuki theater were drawn from a variety of sources, but most were shared with the prostitutes' quarters. Some were developed as teahouse music and transported to kabuki, such as Katō-bushi and Shinnai,⁴⁸ but by and large, the recitation of teahouse entertainment was adapted from styles found in kabuki. The two worlds were also linked by styles of dance. Female dancers from the courtesan establishments adopted stage movements and kabuki performers promptly assimilated new material developed in the brothel.

The interconnection between the two worlds appears most fully in those acts of kabuki plays set in houses of assignation. The glamorous but mysterious life of a fine establishment is revealed for an audience thus able to taste vicariously what only a rich man can devour. The personnel of the pleasure quarter, proprietor, madame, courtesan, attendant, maid, and jester, could be amply purveyed. The manner of speaking of these inhabitants of the quarter—the jargon of their trade, the unique honorific verb endings, the peculiar intonation—all attracted great interest. The cultural accomplishments of the tayū, focus of so many improbable claims, could be proven on the stage as the courtesan answered the challenge of a guest to perform virtuoso pieces on the koto or samisen and compose a poem in a skillful hand. The presentation of a customer's first meeting with a courtesan, its protocol and characteristic banter, is indeed an ultimate refinement of the prostitute-accosting skits popular in primitive kabuki.

These immensely popular scenes in the licensed houses began as insertions in historical plays. Hence the astonishing anachronism of Minamoto or Taira warriors encountering virtuous wives and beautiful mistresses of both kin and foe in up-to-date brothels. Plays were soon written, however, which centered on the life of the quarter. A piece dating from 1698 is an exuberant tour de force, for it includes scenes in the pleasure districts of each of the three cities.⁴⁹ These were early steps toward the full-blown domestic play which dealt entirely with the common people of the day. Among the first were those concerning the double suicides (shinjū) of thwarted lovers, the girl usually a prostitute, the man a young clerk or shopkeeper who could not afford to buy her out. The sensational and romantic treatment of these suicides by playwrights such as Chikamatsu seems to have tempted frustrated lovers to rash death covenants, anticipating the publication, if not immortalization, of their passion. To check the popularity of this practice, plays about love suicides were banned in 1722. But the prohibition was effective for only a short time. Each theater tried to scoop the others by getting on the boards first a play concerning a recent suicide or scandal. With the domestic play, theater and society finally met. Real life tragedies were enshrined in a make-believe world.

The best and most challenging role in kabuki is that of the courtesan. The role combines beauty of person and character with attraction as a sexual object. Inasmuch as the prostitute was sold into bondage to relieve her father of debt, her submission to the contract is an act of filial devotion. The courtesan is characteristically portrayed as a person of noble feelings, of dignity and pride. She is courageous and faithful in the midst of feudal intrigue, ready to die rather than betray a samurai lover. This is the tayū of the history play. In the domestic play the girl is not of this expensive rank which is meant for the high-born or wealthy but a lower-ranking prostitute, approachable by the commoner, a more girlish and vulnerable lover. But she too is willing to forsake love and sacrifice freedom rather than allow her paramour to fail a family obligation. Her role is a subtle one as her true feelings are rarely revealed before the denouement. This complicated psychology, the tension between honor and passion, considerably enriches the dramatic possibilities open to the onnagata.

The life of the quarter revealed in kabuki was glamorized by idealizing the prostitute and romantically depicting the brothel. This was yet another dimension of the sexual fantasy of theatergoing. The content of the plays and the presence of actors with scandalous reputations provided a far more sensual atmosphere than one would suspect from the perspective of kabuki today.

If kabuki was unexpectedly erotic, the brothel could be described as a theater of love, where country girls masqueraded as sophisticated beauties and lowly merchants assumed the airs of men of affairs. Here merchants, to whom the ruling class allowed little dignity, could act out a fantasy of influence and power and be accorded gracious admiration. Here the daughters of impoverished peasants were transformed, their dark skins painted white and rustic dialect replaced by the elaborate polite language of Kyoto. Trained in at least one artistic accomplishment, dressed in sumptuous robes, they were tutored in every technique of the love goddess. A courtesan of tayū rank was addressed by her maids in language of formal deference accorded a daimyō's wife by her ladies-in-waiting. The latter-day tayū (the oiran of the Yoshiwara) was overdressed, overpainted, overloaded by a coiffure bristling with dozens of bodkins. Her entrance into the parlor was staged. She might keep a suitor waiting, his anticipation whetted by the preliminary byplay and solicitous visits of maids and madame while, surrounded by two kamuro, one or two maids, and lantern and parasol bearer, she began her deliberate parade from her residence to the house where her guest waited. At last the sliding doors of the parlor were flung open, revealing the tayū poised at the threshold with her attendants like an ukiyo print. At first she was cool and reserved, fencing verbally with her admirer, now flattering him, now putting him down, besting him in repartee.

The parlor had its subtle rules of sophisticated speech and deportment. There was a dread of blundering in this exchange, of revealing too deeply one's feelings. It was bad form to fall in love. Some common prostitutes and their lovers fell into hopeless infatuations which ended in double suicides; they misunderstood the game. The art, as in kabuki, was to make fiction seem plausible.

Deception was the business of the theater as well. Social outcastes masqueraded as heroes of the past—brave warriors, loyal ministers, even military overlords, analagous to the Tokugawa shogun himself. The chivalrous gallants who defied those of higher status to right injustices were the embodied fantasies of the underprivileged. But the most cherished charade, and that which best portrays the social environment of the theatrical world, was the tender, threatened union of the courtesan and her lover.

CONCLUSION

The interconnections between kabuki and the pleasure quarter illustrate how specifically the theater was a product of the social environment of Tokugawa cities. The physical presence of attractive youths acting out the roles of glamorous courtesans had more immediacy for an audience which was curious about or knew firsthand the sensual world of prostitute and catamite which was to be found in the cities. But the excitement of kabuki was not limited to such gross features. Kabuki was a stage on which to display many of the accomplishments of the new urban society. These were not limited to the immediate ingredients of drama, such as the elaboration of more subtle plots and variety in acting styles. Kabuki called for new musical forms, recitative styles, composition of songs, and especially choreography. It inspired innovation in fabric and costume design, hairstyles and personal ornamentation. Whatever was new and striking found its way quickly to the stage.

With kabuki as the most exciting form of entertainment, it is not surprising that fashions seen on the stage were copied and that the speech and mannerisms of the popular actors were emulated. Kabuki also provided subjects for painters and printmakers and inspired a new boldness in composition. The traditions and tales on which kabuki drew for its material were returned into the stream of literature to make stories with intricate plots and more dramatic structure. This continuous interchange between the theater and its social environment wove kabuki into the fabric of urban culture.

Notes

1. Dōmoto, p. 262.

2. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” p. 16; Sekine Shisei, Tōto gekijō enkaku shi (Tokyo: Chinsho Kankōkai, 1916), I:73a.

3. Sekine, I:72b.

4. Sekine, I:73a.

5. Sekine, I:72a, cites the Chinjidan (1692) which claims that catamites surpassed female prostitutes (in popularity or in numbers?), and that there were over five hundred male prostitutes of various types in Edo.

6. Sekine, 63b, 72a; Ishii Ryōsuke, ed., Tokugawa kinreikō (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1959-1961), V, no. 3396.

7. Sekine, I:57a, 64a.

8. Sekine, I:72a.

9. Sekine, I:73c.

10. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” p. 16; Sekine, I:72b.

11. Sekine, I:72b.

12. Sekine, I:73a. The institution of female geisha did not begin until the 1750s. It was possible for youths and geisha to attend the same box in the little theaters (miyachi shibai), Sekine, I:73a.

13. Sekine, I:73ab.

14. Sekine, I:72b.

15. Sekine, I:72b.

16. Sekine, I:73b, citing the Nanshoku shina sadame (1764).

17. Kabuki hyōbanki shūsei (1972), II:27; Takano, II:57-58.

18. Dōmoto, p. 264.

19. Dōmoto, p. 264.

20. For a portrait of a wakashu-gata of the Genroku period, see Shuzui, plate 105.

21. Shuzui, plates 29-30. Although most wakashu-gata were in their teens, this was not always the case by the eighteenth century. Sanogawa Ichimatsu (1722-1762) was a popular wakashu at sixteen, and although he did not change to onnagata roles until he was thirty-two, he played wakashu parts occasionally until he was forty.

22. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” p. 17.

23. In Ayame gusa, cited in The Actors' Analects, pp. 61-62.

24. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” p. 17.

25. The affair came to light, Daikichi was imprisoned, and the theater, the Nakamura-za, was closed for a time. Takano, II:331.

26. Takano, II:433, 440, 460. An anecdote which casts doubt on Tōjūrō's experience as a lover is cited in The Actor's Analects, p. 130. He is also quoted as having said that he did not go to teahouses in the prostitutes' quarters, in Iizuka, p. 254.

27. Takano, II:396, quoting the Naniwa tachigiki mukashi banashi (1686).

28. Yarō nigiri kobushi (1696), see note 63.

29. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” p. 53.

30. Dōmoto, p. 262.

31. Helen C. Gunsaulus, The Clarence Buckingham Collection of Japanese Prints: The Primitives (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1955), pp. 207 and 269. I follow Stern, Master Prints of Japan, p. 111, in identifying the latter as Koshirō IV, rather than as Sanogawa Ichimatsu, as Gunsaulus does. Stern also suggests that Gunsaulus' “young woman” may be the actor Osagawa Tsuneyo II.

32. Gunji (1956), p. 65.

33. Gunji (1956), p. 66.

34. Gunji (1956), p. 68.

35. Takano, II:457; Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” pp. 53-54.

36. In 1741 Danjūrō II demanded 2,000 ryō to go from Edo to the Sadoshima-za in Osaka.

37. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” pp. 55-61.

38. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” pp. 51-52.

39. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” pp. 49-52.

40. Ihara, “Kabuki no fūzoku,” pp. 47-48. It is significant that in each instance the lord was retired, past the age of responsibility, and he could therefore indulge himself without being reprimanded by the Bakufu.

41. Iizuka, p. 255.

42. The two handscrolls in the Atami Bijutsukan and the Tokyo National Museum, referred to in notes 52 and 61. I am indebted to Mary Elizabeth Berry for contributions to the interpretation developed in the balance of this section.

43. An example is the first plate in Gunji (1956): Kikukawa Eisan's portrait of Iwai Hanshirō V (1776-1847) with a Yoshiwara oiran. Among other examples are: Kiyonaga's print of Matsumoto Kōshirō IV with a geisha, Michener, plate 157; Onoe Shōroku with a tayu and kamuro, Ukiyoe zenshi (1955), vol. 5, figs. 53, 54; Sanogawa Ichimatsu with two kamuro looking at a guidebook, probably to the Yoshiwara, Gunsaulus, p. 222. On the importance of prostitutes as subject in the development of ukiyoe, see Richard Lane, Masters of the Japanese Print (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1962).

44. Kabuki hyōbanki shūsei, II:173-289; Takano, II:304.

45. Yarō tachiyaku butai ōkagami (1687) is found in Kabuki hyōbanki shūsei, I:229-268; Yakusha nichō jamisen in Kabuki yakusha shūsei, III:175-292.

46. Sangatsu gei gashira, cited in Iizuka, p. 238.

47. Keisei iro jamisen (1702), cited by Gunji, p. 135.

48. Iizuka, pp. 628, 637.

49. Keisei Edo zakura, a Sakata Tōjūrō play, probably written by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, appears in Takano Tatsuyuki, ed., Chikamatsu kabuki kyōgen shū (Tokyo: Rikugōkan, 1927), pp. 305-357.

Selected Bibliography

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———. Tokugawa jikki, Kokushi taikei. Vols. 38-47. Tokyo: Kokushi Taikei Kankōkai, 1929-1935.

Dōmoto Kansei (Yatarō). Kamigata engeki shi. Tokyo: Shun'yōdō, 1934.

Dunn, C. J. and Torigoe Bunzō, trans. and eds. The Actors' Analects [Yakusha rongo]. Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1969.

Gunji Masakatsu. Kabuki to Yoshiwara. Tokyo: Asaji Shobō, 1956.

———. Kabuki: yōshiki to denshō. Tokyo: Nara Shobō, 1954.

Gunji Masakatsu, ed. Temae miso. Tokyo: Seiabō, 1969.

Gunsaulus, Helen C. The Clarence Buckingham Collection of Japanese Prints: The Primitives. Chicago, Ill.: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1955.

Ihara Toshirō. Kabuki nempyō. 8 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1956-1961.

———. “Kabuki no fūzoku.” Nihon fūzokushi kōza. Vol. 9. Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1929.

———. Nihon engeki shi. 1902; reprint, Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1924.

Iizuka Tomoichirō. Kabuki gairon. Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1928.

Ishii Ryōsuke, ed. Tokugawa kinreikō. 12 vols. Tokyo: Sōbunsha 1959-1961.

Kabuki hyōbanki shūsei. 6 + vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1972-.

Kikuchi Sadao et al., eds. Kinsei fūzoku zukan. 3 vols. Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1974.

Kondō Ichitarō. Japanese Genre Painting: The Lively Art of Renaissance Japan, trans., R. A. Miller. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1961.

Kyoto Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, comp. Rakuchū rakugai zu. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1966.

Lane, Richard. Masters of the Japanese Print. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1962.

Michener, James A. Japanese Prints: From the Early Masters to the Modern, with notes by Richard Lane. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1959.

Nagashima Imashirō and Ōta Yoshio. Chiyoda-jō ōoku in Meiji hyakunen-shi sōsho, No. 168. 1892; reprint, Tokyo: Hara Shoten, 1971.

Ortolani, Benito. Das Kabukitheater: Kulturgeschichte der Anfänge. Monumenta Nipponica Monographs No. 19. Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1964.

Sekine Shisei. Tōto gekijō enkaku shi. Tokyo: Chinsho Kankōkai, 1916.

Shively, Donald H. “Bakufu versus Kabuki.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 18 (1955): 326-356. Reprinted in John W. Hall and Marius B. Jansen, eds. Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 231-261.

———. “Chikamatsu's Satire on the Dog Shogun.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 18 (1955): 159-180.

———. “Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, the Genroku Shogun,” in A. M. Craig and D. H. Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970, pp. 85-126.

Shuzui Kenji and Akiba Yoshimi. Kabuki zusetsu. Tokyo: Man'yōkaku, 1931.

Stern, Harold P. Master Prints of Japan: Ukiyo-e Manga. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1969.

Suda Atsuo. Nihon gekijō shi no kenkyū. Tokyo: Sagami Shobō, 1957.

Suwa Haruo. Kabuki kaika. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1970.

Takano Tatsuyuki. Nihon engeki shi. 3 vols. Tokyo: Tōkyō-dō, 1946-1949.

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Yoshida Teruji. Kabuki-e no kenkyū. Tokyo: Ryokuen Shobō, 1963.

Yoshida Teruji, ed. Kabuki-za. Tokyo: Kabuki-za Shuppanbu, 1951.

Zushi Yoshihiko. Nihon no gekijō kaiko. Tokyo: Sagami Shobō, 1947.