There were two akusho (bad places) in Edo Japan (1603-1867). Sometimes “bad” means “good.” Edo culture without its theaters and yūkaku (erotic pleasure quarters) is scarcely thinkable. “The lowest and most ignorant class of men and women,” wrote Confucian scholar Nakai Chikuzan (1730-1804), “find it the greatest pleasure in the world to frequent the theaters in their free time. If the theaters were suddenly closed, it would leave them crestfallen, making them feel as if the heavens had crumbled and the earth had split.”
Who’s to say who or what is high or low — or good or bad, or good or evil? Three hundred years later it’s the great dramas of that vanished time that survive, while Confucian scholarship and the austere samurai code it buttressed are dust and ashes — perhaps to revive; who knows? The past is never as dead as it seems.
Theater remains to this day a vibrant art form, and the sternest moralists have nothing to say against it. Pleasure quarters are another matter. When Occupied Japan, under American pressure, put an end to licensed prostitution in January 1946, a whole world came to an end, a world in which courtesans reigned as queens and yet were slaves, chattel bought and sold, often as children by their parents.
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