United States or Mauritania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"That is a little temple," explained her cousin, "for Inari Sama." At the top of the flight of steps Asako distinguished two stone foxes. Their expression was hungry and malign. They reminded her of what? She remembered the little temple outside the Yoshiwara on the day she had gone to see the procession. "Do you say prayers there?" she asked her companion.
"Where are these wretched women kept?" Reggie waved his hand in the direction of the three roads facing them. "Inside the iron gates, that is all the Yoshiwara, and those high houses and the low ones too. That is where the girls are. There are two or three thousand of them within sight, as it were, from here. But, of course, the night time is the time to see them."
He was rude to his father, and he was cruel to his wife. He thought only of geisha and bad women. No doubt, he became sick from touching a woman who was sick. Besides, it is the bad ingé of the Fujinami family. Did not the old woman of Akabo say so? It is the curse of the Yoshiwara women. It will be our turn next, yours and mine."
Again each combatant was pushed away by his companions into opposite byways. With these exceptions, all tramplings, squeezings, pushings and pokings were received with conventional grins or apathetic staring. Yet in the paper next day it was said that so great had been the crowd that six deaths had occurred, and numerous persons had fainted. "But where is the Yoshiwara?" Geoffrey asked at last.
A law had indeed been passed allowing such girls as might wish to abandon their awful calling to do so; but it was so administered as practically to remain a dead letter. "Why," thought our leaders, "should we not issue a special edition of our War Cry, explaining Christ's love and power to save the deepest sunken in sin, and our Rescue Work, and then go and sell it in the Yoshiwara?"
To-day the most prominent feature at night-time in Seoul, the capital, is the brilliantly lit Yoshiwara, officially created and run by Japanese, into which many Korean girls are dragged. Quarters of ill fame have been built up in many parts of the land, and Japanese panders take their gangs of diseased women on tours through smaller districts.
When our great-great-grandfather died he was a very rich man. His son was the second Fujinami. He bought more houses in the Yoshiwara and more girls. He was our great-grandfather. He had two sons. One was your father's father, who bought this land and first built a house here. The other was my grandfather, Fujinami Gennosuké, who still lives in the inkyo.
He considered his boots again for a moment, and then, raising his face to hers with that humorous challenging look which he assumes when on the verge of some indiscretion, he replied, "The Yoshiwara." "Yes," said her Ladyship, "I have heard of such a place. It is a kind of Vanity Fair, isn't it, for all the cocottes Of Tokyo?"
At Fukagawa there is another Flower District, built upon the same principle as the Yoshiwara; while at Shinagawa, Shinjiku, Itabashi, Senji, and Kadzukappara, the hotels contain women who, nominally only waitresses, are in reality prostitutes.
As the news soon spread abroad through the Yoshiwara that a duel was being fought upon the Mound, the people flocked out to see the sight; and among them came Tôken Gombei and Shirobei, Banzayémon's companions, who, when they saw that the combatants were their own friend and the strange Samurai, tried to interfere and stop the fight, but, being hindered by the thickness of the crowd, remained as spectators.
Word Of The Day