Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes Book 21)

This book traces the social history of early modern Japan's sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of "selling women" transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes' economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large. Frontmatter List of Illustrations (page ix) Foreword (Matthew H. Sommer, page xi) Acknowledgments (page xvii) A Note on Currency and Prices (page xxi) Introduction (page 1) PART ONE. REGULATION AND THE LOGIC OF THE HOUSEHOLD 1. Adulterous Prostitutes, Pawned Wives, and Purchased Women: Female Bodies as Currency (page 23) 2. Creating "Prostitutes": Benevolence, Profit, and the Construction of a Gendered Order (page 45) 3. Negotiating the Gendered Order: Prostitutes as Daughters, Wives, and Mothers (page 72) PART TWO. EXPANSION AND THE LOGIC OF THE MARKET (page 103) 4. From Household to Market: Child Sellers, "Widows," and Other Shameless People (page 111) 5. Glittering Hair Ornaments and Barren Fields: Prostitution and the Crisis of the Countryside (page 134) 6. Tora and the "Rules of the Pleasure Quarter" (page 163) Conclusion (page 189) Notes (page 199) Bibliography (page 225) Index (page 243)