Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer Read Free Book Online Page B

lounged on red felt rugs or low platforms, tucking into picnics.
    Kyoto was the official capital of the country and, along with the bustling mercantile city of Osaka, the center of commerce and culture. Artists of the time painted people in festive robes dancing through the streets between red-painted temples and tile-roofed wooden houses, and crowding to see performances of dance, music, and drumming. Outside the wattle fencing surrounding the stages were stalls selling food. Inside, women in rich kimonos, men with wicker hats or samurai swords, even a couple of Portuguese with big collars, bulbous noses, and tall hats, stood watching the shows.
    You could gawk at puppets, wrestling, jugglers, or sword swallowers, laugh at the clowns and jesters, admire the rare animals in cages, try your skill at target practice, shoot darts in the blowpipe parlor, or while away the day in singing and dancing. There you would have felt sorely tempted to fritter away the rest of your life in fun. There was everything a person could want, enough to distract and delight him for the rest of his days. It was an entertainment mecca, a nonstop medieval carnival such as Chaucer might have enjoyed.
    On the other side of the world, a century had passed since the heyday of the Italian Renaissance and the glorious rule of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, in Britain. In Japan, after more than four hundred years of warfare and upheaval, there was peace again such as had not been seen since the halcyon days of the pleasure-loving Heian aristocrats. The country had changed beyond all recognition. As the medieval knights—the samurai—fought their bloody civil wars, Kyoto had been burned to ashes time and time again. Now all that was over. The different warring states that made up Japan had been unified, leaving the people free to turn their attention to becoming prosperous and developing the arts of peace. It was the beginning of an extraordinary Japanese Renaissance.
    The man who brought all this about was the great general Ieyasu Tokugawa, who defeated the last of his rival warlords in the Battle of Sekigahara in October 1600 and declared himself shogun and ruler of all Japan. The emperor had always been merely the titular ruler of the country. He spent most of his time isolated in his splendid palace in Kyoto, performing religious rituals, and had no real power. It was Shogun Ieyasu who was the true ruler. He chose as the seat of his military administration the little fishing village of Edo, an area of marshland and rivers a few days’ walk to the east of Kyoto, where he had established his castle a decade earlier. Edo gradually grew in size and importance. Eventually it was to become the great city of Tokyo.
    Determined that the country would never again descend into civil war, the shoguns—Ieyasu and his successors—set about fencing in the population with rigid systems of control. Among other measures, they sealed off the country from the outside world to ensure that no subversive ideas entered to disturb the delicate balance. Foreigners and in particular Catholics were not allowed in and Japanese were not allowed to leave. Anyone breaking these rules was liable to execution. Only one small window was left open—the remote southern port of Nagasaki, where Chinese junks brought their goods and a few Protestant Dutch merchants were allowed to trade.
    For the next two and a half centuries the Japanese were to develop a unique culture and lifestyle, largely free from outside influences. Western explorers were extending the bounds of the world they knew; in 1610 Henry Hudson discovered Hudson Bay, in 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers reached New England and millions of slaves were being shipped from Africa to the Old and the New Worlds. The Dutch were a power all over the globe and had laid claim to an area which they called New Amsterdam, later to be known as New York. But the doors of Japan remained firmly closed.
    To create a well-ordered society in which