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Updated: June 20, 2025
"Very well," Geoffrey blundered on, "every penny you have is made out of prostitution, out of the sale of women to men. You saw the Yoshiwara, you saw the poor women imprisoned there, you know that any drunken beast can come and pay his money down and say, 'I want that girl, and she has to give herself up to be kissed and pulled about by him, even if she hates him and loathes him.
Of the girls who enter the profession later in life, some are orphans, who have no other means of earning a livelihood; others sell their bodies out of filial piety, that they may succour their sick or needy parents; others are married women, who enter the Yoshiwara to supply the wants of their husbands; and a very small proportion is recruited from girls who have been seduced and abandoned, perhaps sold, by faithless lovers.
He reads the criticisms of Europe upon the Yoshiwara and the Japanese attitude generally towards prostitution, while he has ample evidence of the fact that many of the patrons of the Yoshiwara are to be found among the European community in Japan. And so of religion. The various Christian denominations of the Western world aspire to convert Japan, and send missionaries there for that purpose.
We must arrange to go down there." "Miss Smith tells me," said Asako, "that all these lovely gay creatures are Yoshiwara girls; and that you can see them there now." "Not that identical lady of course," said Reggie, who had joined the group by the fireside, "she died a hundred years ago; but her professional great-granddaughters are still there." "And I can see them!" Asako clapped her hands.
Not beautiful these damsels, if judged by our standard, but the charm of Japanese women lies in their manner and dainty little ways, and the tea-house girl, being a professional decoy-duck, is an adept in the art of flirting, en tout bien tout honneur, be it remembered; for she is not to be confounded with the frail beauties of the Yoshiwara, nor even with her sisterhood near the ports open to foreigners, and to their corrupting influence.
We Japanese, we now become more hypocritical, because this is necessary law of civilisation. The two swords of the samurai have gone; but honour and hatred and revenge will never go. "But that is a low trade," objected the Yoshiwara magnate. "It is very secret; your name need never be spoken." "And it is too scattered, too disorganised, it would be impossible to control."
These figures do not, however, represent the whole of the prostitution of Yedo; the Yoshiwara is the chief, but not the only, abiding-place of the public women.
"Oh, those are the hikité chaya" said Yaé glibly, "the Yoshiwara tea-houses." "Do they live there?" asked Asako. "Oh, no; rich men who come to the Yoshiwara do not go to the big houses where the oiran live. They go to the tea-houses; and they order food and geisha to sing, and the oiran to be brought from the big house. It is more private.
However, he was no match for so skilful a swordsman as Gompachi, who, after a sharp struggle, dispatched him, and carried off his purse, which contained two hundred riyos. Overjoyed at having found so rich a prize, Gompachi was making off for the Yoshiwara, when Seibei, who, horror-stricken, had seen both murders, came up and began to upbraid him for his wickedness.
Formerly an active volcano, Fuji even now emits steam from sundry crevices near the summit, and will some day probably fill the good people at Yoshiwara and adjacent villages with a lively sense of its power. Fuji is the special pride of the Japs, its loveliness appealing strongly to the national sense of landscape beauty. Of it their poet sings: "Great Fusiyama, tow'ring to the sky.
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