Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

PART V

Themes in Japanese History

CHAPTER TWENTY

Women and Sexuality in Premodern

Japan

Hitomi Tonomura

Changing gender relations shaped the contours of a millennium and a half of

premodern Japanese history. The pattern of transformation was more gradual than

sudden, and was defined more by sustained processes than by notable events. For

organizational purposes, we nonetheless divide this history into thre e ‘‘moments,’’

each with its own thematic problems of long-lasting consequences. The first moment

is the so-called ritsuryo

period, the seventh and eighth centuries, during which the

centralizing elites adopted the Tang Chinese institutional model and adjusted it to

create Japan’s first bureaucratic government, headed by an emperor, with the full

force of ritsu (penal) and ryo

(civil) codes. The growth of military organizations and

values supporting the spread of raw violence in the mid fourteenth through sixteenth

centuries marks the second, albeit long, moment. Especially among warrior families,

gender differentiation sharpened in the areas of production, property-holding, and

family relations, as well as in the social perception of cultural and sexual authority. The

third focus is the seventeenth century, the time of the establishment of the centralized

regime supported by the status-specific, morally imbued discursive agenda of the new

warrior government that instituted undisputed peace and order. In this regime,

gender c onsiderations overrode the status-b ased prescriptio ns as often as they were

subsumed by them.

The Impact of the Ritsuryo

Code

Japan’s first set of codes (ritsuryo

) introduced what Sekiguchi Hiroko calls a ‘‘patri-

archal family paradigm’’ upon existing gender relations.

The codes imposed

Confucian-style institutional perquisites and responsibilities but their application also

highlighted the incongruence between the language of the law and the

persistent features of Japanese society that differed from China’s androcentric ideals.

Bureaucracy and the throne

The new bureaucracy at its center was fundamentally gendered male. Female officials

mostly belonged to the twelve offices in the inner palace that supported imperial

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

business. The men’s offices, titles, and ranks granted highly coveted perquisites and

concretely manifested the ideal paternalistic matrix of Confucian-style loyalty to the

emperor. Female officials, whose promotional track differed from that of men’s,

nonetheless performed significant functions, such as dispatching imperial announce-

ments (naishi sen) from within the inner palace, and personally assisting the emperor

in ceremoni al matters, for example by distributing special ceremonial compensations

to male officials. However, by the end of the eighth century, the term nyokan

(‘‘female officials’’) had replaced the term ‘‘officials’’ (or, ‘‘kingly service persons’’)

(kunin, miyahito) in the case of women. A century later, powerful male aristocrats

(kuro

do) who, according to Yoshikawa, had been eyeing the political weight of the

inner palace, began assuming certain duties of the female officials. By the end of the

tenth century, female officials commanded mostly household responsibilities, such as

cleaning and lamp-lighting, while the new category of ‘‘ladies-in-waiting’’ (nyo

)

emerged. Exemplified by Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Sho

nagon, authors of The Tale of

Genji and The Pillowbook of Sei Sho

nagon respectively, they exercised tremendous

cultural authority and power.

Above the bureaucratic offices presided the emperor whose gender was legally

unspecified. This condition lasted until 1889 when male reig n and direct patrili neal

succession became legally prescribed in the Meiji Imperial Law. Thus six women, all

imperial daughters, assumed eight out of the sixteen reigns beginning with Suiko (r.

592–628), believed to be the first to use the term tenno

(emperor), followed by

gyoku (642–45); Saimei (655–61, also known as Ko

gyoku); Jito

(690–97); Gem-

mei (707–15); Gensho

(715–24); Ko

ken (749–58); and Sho

toku (764–70, also

known as Ko

ken). Recent scholarship holds the eight female reigns as a logical

extension of Japan’s prehistoric pattern of frequent female rule. It argues against

the previously dominant views that deny female emperors full political authority by

characterizing them as either ‘‘shamans’’ or ‘‘intermediaries’’ situated between legit-

imate male rulers.

Himiko, a queen whose rule over the third-century kingdom of Yamatai is de-

scribed in the Chinese chronicle Wei zhi, exemplifies the prehistoric female r ule.

Assisted by her brother, Himiko conducted diplomacy with China, in addition to

communicating with deities and forces of nature; a large mound, a sign of power, was

built upon her death. Succession by a male king brought chaos until Himiko’s 13-

year-old female relative Iyo (or Toyo) replaced him and restored order.

The examples

of Himiko and Iyo question the widely held co-rule paradigm that posits gender-

specific sharing of spiritual/shamanistic (female) and administrative/diplomatic

(male) authority by a pair of female and male chiefs.

Himiko and Iyo administered

both spiritual and secular matters. In diplomacy, they communicated with China’s

Wei dynasty in

AD 239 and Western Jin dynasty in AD 266. The Wei dynasty emperor

bestowed upon Himiko a golden seal and the title of ‘‘King of Wa, Friendly to Wei.’’

A gender-conscious reading of other sources also reveals the participation of male

rulers in spiritual endeavors as well as the involvement of female chiefs in adminis-

trative and military capacities.

Evidence of female rule includes skeletal burial remains with a pattern of regional

differentiation that favors females in the west and males in the northeast.

Entries

in Japan’s own earliest ‘‘histories’’ (Kojiki, comp.

AD 712, and Nihon shoki, comp.

AD 720) also depict powerful semi-legendary female figures among heroic male

352 HITOMI TONOMURA

rulers. Jingu

, after the death of her husband-emperor, Chu

ai (r. AD 192–200),

is recorded to have ruled for seventy years, during which she led expeditions

against Korea while pregnant. Female regional chiefs also appear in the Nihon shoki

entries.

The legendary Emperor Keiko

(r. AD 71–130), for example, encountered

in Suwo ‘‘a woman, by the name of Kamu-natsu-so-hime, whose followers

were exceedingly numerous. She was the chieftain of that whole country.’’

Finally, the assignment in the origin myth of Amaterasu (the Sun Goddess) as the

ancestral deity of the impe rial line forcefully upholds the early significance of female

authority.

If female rule had been unquestioned, why did it ‘‘end’’ in 770? A standard

explanation points to Sho

toku’s love affair with a priest, Do

kyo

, whom she sought

to elevate to the highest administrative position, a move that so threatened the

aristocrats that they moved the capital out of the Buddhist-entrenched city of Nara

and terminated the morally dangerous female r ule. The revised view first of all

complicates the question by pointing to the ongoing institutional possi bility of female

rule throughout the premodern period, indeed until 1889, as illustrated by the

proposed enthronement of Hachijo

-in, a daughter of Emperor Toba, in the late

twelfth century and the actual reigns of two female emperors in the Tokugawa

period.

The definitive institutional ‘‘end’’ of female rule came only with modernity.

Rather than dwelling on Sho

toku’s putative feminine moral flaw, more recent

scholarship considers the pattern of broader social transformation that elevated male

authority. Evidence shows that women of the imperial line who had earlier lived in an

independent residential quarter with an equally independent economic base began to

assume the role of ‘‘wife,’’ as illustrated by the move into her husband’s residential

palace of the wife of Emperor Ko

nin, who succeeded Sho

toku.

Yoshie Akiko asserts

that this change signaled the loss of women’s independent political identity that had

sustained the title of the head of the state.

This development, as it turns out, created a

combination of factors used by the non-imperial Fujiwara family to optimally control

the throne: the established practice of raising children at the maternal parent’s home,

the male gender of the emperor, and the flexibility in the ranking and number of

imperial wives. The Fujiwara women produced crown princes who were then raised in

the Fujiwara home where they acquire d an appropriate sense of lineage loyalty. The so-

called ritsuryo

society initially endorsed women’s established political authority as chiefs

and emperors, especially royal daughters. But in time, wives and mothers of emperors,

who were mostly of the Fujiwara lineage, gained the historical spotlight, as imperial

daughters receded into the shadow of political insignificance.

Household, family, and taxation

In the area of broad social organization that involved all commoners, the code’s

normative language and its principle were extensive bu t far remove d from Japan’s

native conditions.

The Law of Households in the Yo

ritsuryo

advanced provisions

for a comprehensive taxation and landowning system.

The country’s arable

land theoretically was the throne’s and was redistributed to the people according

to the composi tion of each residence unit (ko) that was recorded in the newly

compiled registry (koseki). For creating an orderly registry, the code assumed a

WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN PREMODERN JAPAN 353

Chinese-style family system organized by patrilineal descent and patrilocal marriage

practices within a definable ‘‘household’’ that was headed by a ‘‘household head.’’ In

this Chinese system, specific ceremonies (li) formalized marriage; all sexual relations

unsanctioned by li were regarded as adultery; premarital sex was disallowed

for women; the statuses of wife and mistress were clearly distinguished; surname

endogamy was prohibited; and a woman’s natal family was insignificant after her

marriage.

The application of the code highlighted the incongruity between the legal provi-

sions and the social organization under the emergent state that attached no estab-

lished definition for descent, marriage, or household. Japan’s ancient marriage and

sexual practices generally required no formal, official, or contractual agreements. No

prescribed ceremony or ritual defined marriage which often was preceded by sex,

probably continuing the pre-ritsuryo

practices illustrated in Japan’s oldest extant

writings such as local gazetteers, fudoki, and the Kojiki. Fudoki illustrate youthful

engagement in songfests, which occasioned a festive exchange of poems between girls

and b oys for the purpose of community-based sexual unions.

The cr eation stories

featured in the Kojiki show no moral censur e toward sex per se, which is fundamental

to cosmic ‘‘becoming,’’ and there was no vocabulary for virginity. The process of

‘‘household registration’’ found ‘‘family units’’ typically composed of the mother and

her children, with a husband whose attachment to the household likely was deter-

mined through sexual relations that began and ended flexibly. Consequently, regis-

tration created on paper a large number of single-parent households which put

daughters with the mother and sons with the father.

The fluidity of ‘‘family’’

contradicted the codal goal predicated on the stability of self-perpetuating ‘‘house-

holds.’’

Land came to be allotted based on the newly created registry. Unlike the Tang

Chinese law which allotted land to no women except widows, Japanese ritsuryo

reflected the custom and provided: ‘‘man: two tan [of paddy]; for woman, reduce

this by one-third.’’ This was unequal to be sure, but for receiving two-thirds of

the men’s portion, women had fewer obligations. Able-bodied men were levied

with a labor service (yo

, zo

), including a military and a head tax (cho

), which was

usually paid in kind, that is, cloth typically woven by women. Wakita Haruko explains

that the apparent tax advantage given to females prompted many men to register as

women.

Conversely, the law that exempted women from military service officially

barred them from it. The military, the profession that, in historical hindsight, would

evolve into the most powerful and influential occupation, was codified as male, both

in conscription and official posts, whether or not women were in combat. Other

gender-based dispensations included different forms of punishment for the same

crime, and a delay in execution of a pregnant convict till twenty days after the birth

of the child who ‘‘should be taken care of by close relatives, neighbors, or others who

desire him/her despite differences in name (sei).’’

These provisions reflec ted the

law’s paternalistic principle that likened the state to a family headed by a benevolent

emperor.

The founding law’s affirmation of an individual woman’s rights to land both

reflected and perpetuated the existing social and economic str ucture. As the allotment

system deteriorated, in 723 and 743 the government permitted private possession of

newly reclaimed land. Such laws were gender-neutral; documents and wooden tablets

354 HITOMI TONOMURA

(mokkan) of the sale and commendation of private land show, in addition to male

names, female names in the format that proves separation of ownership from their

husbands.

The ritsuryo

code had a limited impact on the ways of sex and marriage despite

the principle of androcentric heterosexual union upon which the imperial bureau-

cratic institution had been built. Some provisions, such as the one for naming

adultery, ‘‘had no actual function’’ according to Inoue Mitsusada, who wonders if

the codifiers ‘‘sought to educate the people in the ways of C hinese family morality

and propriety in order to bring order.’’

The code also includes the Confucian

notion of women’s ‘‘Seven Outs and Three Not-Outs’’: a husband may divorce a

wife for being childless, adulterous, disobedient to her parents-in-law, and talkative,

as well as for stealing, being jealous, and suffering from an incurable disease; he may

not divorce her if she kept the household during mourning fo r her parents-in-law,

if the household has risen in status, and if she has nobody to whom to return.

As Inoue states, ‘‘It is questionable how these provisions actually functioned

in Japan where divorc e was relatively freely practiced.’’

Indeed, the letter of

the law would be ignored and the gap between it and social practices would remain

wide for many centuries to come. Writings from the Heian period (710–1185),

long after the demise of the household registration system, confirm the ongoing

absence of official, social, or religious concerns over the flexible mating arrange-

ments. In reality, among aristocrats, pragmatic concerns, such as the lineage,

rank, and title of partners’ parents, probably guided the direction of most long-

term relationships, possibly more than the desires and passions depicted in The

Tale of Genji that so exquisitely colored the court.

Sexual relationships which

received no official or moral censure included male–male bonding, especially

among aristocrats and monks. Fujiwara Yorinaga’s (1120–56) journal, Taiki,

famously describes his escapades and satisfaction with men he courts, not to the

exclusion of relationships with women, whom he omits from his writing as his object

of courting.

The combination of the clearly ranked system of prestige embedded in the imperial

bureaucracy, the prevailing mode of sexuality, the absence of external foes and major

wars, and the income that flowed into the capital from the provinces, all contributed

to the making of the Heian aristocratic culture and the emergence of now world

renowned classic female authors. The pattern of heterosexual union, that is, ‘‘mar-

riage,’’ would be transf ormed during the medieval period and attain a form somewhat

closer to the ritsuryo

ideal.

Gender Relations in Times of Raw Violence

At the end of the Genpei War (1180–85), Minamoto Yoritomo established the first

warrior government (bakufu, 1190–1333) alongside the imperial government. Yor-

itomo was supported by provincial warriors whose land rights he guaranteed or

augmented through jito

-shiki (stewardship), a title he dispensed to a large portion

of the country’s estates (sho

en). Estates had evolved gradually, paralleling the disin-

tegration of the ritsuryo

allotment system. Each represented nested land interests

WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN PREMODERN JAPAN 355

(shiki) held at once by people and institutions of different social statuses, such as

princesses, monks, warriors, peasant s, and temples and shrines. Importantly, these

interests were gender-neutral and also inheritable, divisible, and transferable. Jito

shiki was a new layer in the existing hierarchy of rights initially granted most often for

meritorious service in the Genpei War. Women were among its recipients, especially as

war widows, and later as beneficiaries of inheritance.

Property with rights and obligations

Warrior society was more ‘‘advanced’’ in gender relations than was the aristocratic

society, at least in practicing patrilocal marriage and patrilineal descent. ‘‘Marriage’’

and ‘‘divorce,’’ however, were equally unceremonial, with no contractual agreement

or official registration. Women in the warrior class held firm economic rights deriving

from inheritance, most frequently as a daughter and less often as a wife. Upon

marriage women maintained their natal family name and their property independent

of their husbands. The bakufu law (Jo

ei Shikimoku, 1232) and its active judicial

system upheld legitimate property rights, including those of women. Despite the

prevalence of patrilineal descent, the law ensured the customary rights of a woman to

adopt a daughter or son, regardless of her marital status.

Land rights pertaining to jito

-shiki were unique in Japan’s gender history:

for women or men, the righ ts entailed the bakufu-generated guard and other military

duties in proportion to the size of the shiki portion. Guaranteed by the prevailing

custom of divided inheritance, daughters, along with sons , frequently received a jito

shiki portion and thus were a link in the bakufu’s lord–vassal (gokenin) structure,

even without the formal and coveted designation of gokenin . Women maintained

the associat ed rights and obligations independent of their husbands upon

marriage, who occasionally also willed a portion to their wives. Female and male

holders of land rights left copious documentation not only of their rights but also

of trial records produced as defendants or plaintiffs. However, by the end of

the thirteenth century, a combination of factors began to threaten women’s land

rights.

First, repeated land division negatively affected the economic foundation of the

family. In this context, women’s property rights in particular became an issue. The

inevitable consequence of the combination of patrilineal descent and the daughter’s

inheritance rights was that a daughter’s holdings typically went to her children, who

carried her husband’s lineage. Unl ess the daughter was married endogamously, or she

bequeathed the land to members of her natal family (probably causing conflict with

her children), her portion would be lost to her natal family in the subsequent

generation.

Second, the ability of women to fulfill military duties became suspect during the

Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281. These unprecedented attacks from outside

required actual combat, for the first time in Kamakura history. Although many men

also dispatched proxy fighters, the absence of women in particular led to the bakufu’s

injunction against ‘‘daughters’ portions.’’ The legal provision itself had little imme-

diate impact on the direction of land division in each family, but it foreshadowed the

demise of property rights for warrior-class women, a trend that was clear by the mid

fourteenth century.

356 HITOMI TONOMURA

Third, the increasing financial insolvency amon g the war riors and escalation of

intra-class violence caused each family to invest all resources in one ‘‘primary’’ son

(chakushi) by consolidating previo usly divided land as a way to strengthen its eco-

nomic and military base. Daughters and widows began receiving a lifetime portion

that ‘‘returned’’ to the heir upon their death, or simply received sustenance land.

Secondary sons also became dependants or else vassals of other warrior groups.

Devoid of jito

-shiki, ‘‘feudal’’ rights that demanded service, women as a gender lost

the government-sanctioned ‘‘public’’ role. The erosion in formal property rights

significantly diminished women’s presence in the historical records. Changing prop-

erty-holding patterns signaled the evolution in the structure of the military that

prepared itself for the thorou ghly decentralized sengoku (country-at-war) age of the

late fifteenth to sixteenth centuries.

Women of fame

Two women of exceptional political influence, situated three centuries apart, marked

the pages of governance that are otherwise dominated by male activities. Ho

Masako (1157–1225), the wife of the first Kamakura sho

gun, Minamoto Yoritomo

(1147–99), supervised their sons, Yoriie and Sanetomo, who succeeded Yoritomo as

the second and third sho

gun, respectively. As a wom an, Masako could not hold the

official title of sho

gun (more fully, Sei’i taisho

gun or ‘‘Barbarian-Conquering Gen-

eralissimo’’), which the emperor conferred as a military post within the male-gen-

dered imperial bureauc racy. In reality, Masako partook in actual governance along

with the male members of the Ho

, her natal family, that controlled Kamakura

politics as regents to the sho

gun who, subsequent to Masako ’s ‘‘rule,’’ were defense-

less aristocrats and imperial princes. The youthful Masako’s midnight escapade in the

rain to see Yoritomo, whom she chose as her lover-husband against parental wishes,

and her outrage at his affair during her pregnancy are well-known incidents that attest

to her willfulness and an environment that allowed such public expressions of what

would later be considered female moral failure.

Hino Tomiko (1440–96), the wife of the eighth Ashikaga sho

gun, Yoshimasa

(1436–90), was also involve d in practical details of administration. Tomiko comes

down in history as the archetypal female villain. She gave birth to a son after

Yoshimasa’s younger brother, Yoshimi, had already been selected to be the next

sho

gun. She soug ht the support of vassals to elevate her son, Yoshihisa (1465–89),

instead, and caused a division among those who sided with one or other candidate.

This led in part to the O

nin War (1467–77), premodern Japan’s biggest civil war,

which devastated Kyoto and precipitated Japan’s descent into the period of perpetual

wars. Tomiko’s son succeeded her husband in 1473 at the age of 8, but later died in

battle. Tomiko then took charge of determining his successors. Typically, it is as a

widow that a woman in a patrilocal and patrilineal marriage structure gains authority

as a representative of the deceased husband’s family. But Tomiko had been actively

engaged in politics first as the wife of one and then as the mothe r of another sho

gun

while they were still alive. Tomiko also exerted influence in the commercialized world

of Kyoto by amassing enormous personal profits, especially through loan house

operations. Less well known is her treatment of the defeated troops in the aftermath

of that war. She arranged to have land awarded to the O

uchi, on the losing side, to

WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN PREMODERN JAPAN 357

remove the stain of shame, and to have the daughter of the defeated Yoshimi

(Tomiko’s niece) appropriately placed in a nunnery.

Violence and women

In the Muromachi period (1336–1572), the centripetal force of allegiance that tied

the country’s warriors to the bakufu weakened significantly. The estate sys tem which

had accommodated the landed interests of all classes was breaking down as warriors

seized the incom e allotted to aristocrats by legal and illegal means. Provincial war-

riors, without formal attachment to the bakufu, advanced independent power based

on full control of land, resources, transportation, and inhabitants. Rivalry over

resources led to actua l and potential armed conflicts. Battles damaged both the

natural and human-built environment . Non-combatants, perhaps the fighters’ rela-

tives and friends, were often victimized. Some were simply killed, some were maimed,

some were raped, and some were abducted as slaves. The victims were not just

women, although young wome n and young boys were particularly vulnerable.

For warrior-class women, the reality of violence negatively affected their social

standing in a number of ways, as it sharpened the gendered division of labor and

created a hierarchy of values that tended to constrain them. Although the Kamakura

bakufu cited women’s failure actually to fight the Mongol forces as a reason for

sanctions against their property rights, women in fact participated in some war

efforts. Hangaku was praised for her superior shooting skills in the Azuma kagami.

Shot in her thigh by a bakufu man, she was captured and taken as a wife by one of the

bakufu vassals who wanted a brave son.

The story of Tomoe, a legendary beauty

and a superb fighter featured in the Tale of the Heike, which describes the Genpei War,

also suggests female participation in battles. Tomoe became an icon in later art forms,

such as literature, noh, and pictorial scrolls.

During the sengoku period, some

women are said to have formed a cavalry force and others fought near their fort-

resses.

The wives of Nikaido

Moriyoshi, Narita Ujinaga, and Okumura Eifuku are

known for having refused to surrender but instead defended their castles while their

husbands we re away or negotiated a settlement with the opponent.

But overall,

Japan’s medieval battlefields were a masculine space. Men’s injured bodies abound in

war tales, paralleling the practice of recording the actual injuries for submission to

their lord as a proof of their loyal service that, ideally, led to rewards. The lord

promoted the concep t and vocabulary of loyalty in order to solicit service, and

injuries became equated with glory and rewards. This mutually reinforcing ideology

of loyalty and reward, whether or not it was acted upon, boosted the masculine values

that dominated late medieval Japan. Women were excluded from the structure of

reward, and thus what bravery and loyalty they exhibited necessarily had a different

shape.

The condition of perpetual war in sengoku Japan reshaped the meanings of conjugal

relationships. As before, no restrictions were articulated for forms of sexual acts per se.

Sodomy and masturbation wer e unnamed and entirely uncensured. Virginity also

remained unnamed and unobserved. However, in order to pre-empt internal conflicts

among vassals, adulterous relationships between a man and a married (or engaged)

woman were now punished with severity. While in the Kamakura period, both the

woman and the man each lost half of their property, in the sengoku period, the

358 HITOMI TONOMURA

wronged man was to cut down the adulterous male. Jinkaishu

, the Date House Laws

from 1536, demanded killing the woman as well, unless the husband caught the man

in the bedroom. If the killing of the interloper took place outside, the wife also had to

be killed, in order to prov e to society that this was execution for adultery, not

common revenge, an act strictly forbidde n by the House Laws. These laws also saw

no distinction between adultery and rape.

At the same time, the independent

warlords sometimes exercised pragmatic flexibility in property transmission by in-

cluding a provision in the Law: ‘‘As for the daughter’s portions, leave it up to the

parents,’’ and even designated a daughter as the main heir in the absence of a son

born to the main wife.

In sengoku Japan, both women and men were sent to other houses to serve as a

‘‘security’’ link, producing more heroes and heroines than in any previous time in

Japanese history. A niece of Mo

ri Motonari, daimyo

of Aki province, was married four

times, first to Yamanouchi, next to Kobayakawa, then to Sugihara, and finally to

another Sugihara. These were all powerful warrior houses of Aki province and she

must have playe d a crucial role in connecting their interests. Tragic and sometimes

self-sacrificing female paragons were forced to choose their path when their hus-

band’s house was destroyed. The daughter of Ho

Ujimasa was married to Takeda

Katsuyori (1546–82) and committed suicide at the age of 19 when the Takeda were

destroyed by Oda Nobunaga. Oichi no kata (1548–83), Oda Nobunaga’s younger

sister, was first married by Nobunaga to Azai Nagamasa. After Nobunaga destroyed

Azai, he married Oichi to another war rior, Shibata Katsuie. When Nobunaga

destroyed Shibata, Oichi allowed her three daughters from her fir st marriage to

escape and committed suicide with Shibata.

These famous examples tend to overshadow the work of other women who lived

and died less dramatically. The condition of war demanded a gendered division of

labor that charged wives with crucial domestic tasks. They oversaw the calendar of

complicated and frequent ceremonial matters, supervised weapons storage, and, of

course, created offspring. The education of children and organization of visits by

relatives, vassals, traveling salesmen, religious personnel, a nd entertainers all were

highly important tasks that demanded precision in speech, manners, and movements,

so as to pre-empt any potential for interpersonal conflict or suspicion-arousing

inappropriate gesture. Even the incorrect placement of a ceremonial item could be

read as treason. Because the wife was an outsider serving as a fragile link between two

houses, she needed to take extreme care in observing the proprieties, including

differentiated forms of address for her husband’s relatives and her own family mem-

bers. Breach of ceremonial etiquette would not only be bad manners but might even

start a war.

Economy and society

This period of war saw a rise in the production of goods and the creation of a money

economy. Commoners began to write and actively to preserve documents. These

records, kept in villages, indicate that a not insignificant portion of the peasants’ land

was held in the name of women. In contrast to their productive role, however,

women had lit tle formal authority in community administration, which was typically

based in the area’s shrine and its organization. Quite contrary to the female spiritual

WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN PREMODERN JAPAN 359