Japan’s court ladies, warrior women and courtesans

Lesley Downer, the author of The Shortest History of Japan, looks at different roles taken by women during that country’s long history: court ladies, warrior women and courtesans. She shows how, through the ages, they have found ways to use their skills to make their voices heard.

Court ladies

More than a thousand years ago, in distant Japan, a court lady ground some ink, dipped her brush in it and began to write a story. Like Scheherazade, she wrote it episode by episode to entertain her mistress, one of the two empresses.

It was 1006. In England the Anglo-Saxons were fighting the Vikings, bards were celebrating the exploits of Beowulf and the Norman Conquest was still to come. Meanwhile Japan was enjoying a 400-year golden age of courtly culture, largely created by women.

Murasaki Shikibu composing Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji)

This court lady, who has gone down in history as Murasaki Shikibu, the name of her chief character, set her story in the world she knew, in the city of Heian, now known as Kyoto, where noblewomen had raven black hair that swept the ground and swished around in multi-layered exquisitely-coloured kimonos.

They lived hidden from the sight of men, deigning only to receive those who satisfied their criteria as to their poetry and calligraphic skills and then only at dead of night.

Here Murasaki imagined the ideal man, Prince Genji – handsome, kind-hearted, delightful company and hopelessly prone to falling in love. She wrote of his relationships and feelings, his travails and adventures and the tragedy of his final years in an extraordinarily sophisticated narrative more akin to Proust or Jane Austen than to Anglo-Saxon epics. Her story, The Tale of Genji, is universally acclaimed as the world’s first novel.

But inevitably rougher times came that swept away this culture of delicacy and beauty. Peasants, invisible to courtly eyes, had to labour to provide rice to feed them and warriors, equally disdained, fought to defend their borders.

Eventually the warriors overwhelmed the effete courtiers, who’d entirely lost the arts of war and governance. The glorious city fell into decay and the military — the samurai — took over. The age that followed was the age of warriors.

Warrior women

Tomoe Gozen wields a naginata on horseback

This was a time of wars, clan against clan, when samurai strode into battle, declaiming their name and lineage before challenging each other to single combat.

It was a time of heroic exploits and tragic deaths, of fathers unknowingly killing sons and brother pursuing brother, recorded in tales of chivalry and of the frailty of human glory sung by blind minstrels twanging their lutes.

In this age, too, women played a part. The most celebrated was Tomoe Gozen – Lady Tomoe – the companion, lover and chief lieutenant of the charismatic warlord Kiso no Yoshinaka.

Epic tales recount that she was a fair-skinned beauty, with long black hair. A fearless horsewoman, she wielded her huge sword, bow and sheaves of arrows so skilfully that she easily laid low a thousand warriors.

In 1182, a force of 300 samurai with Tomoe at the head drove the 2,000-strong army of a rival clan out of Kyoto.

Tomoe Gozen Killing Uchida Saburo Ieyoshi at the Battle of Awazu no Hara

Two years later Yoshinaka’s troops met a far more formidable army at the Battle of Awazu. The odds were hopeless and eventually only five of Yoshinaka’s men were left. Yoshinaka ordered Tomoe to flee. Indignantly she refused.

Determined to show Yoshinaka “how fine a death I can die,” she attacked the chieftain of an enemy clan, dragged him off his horse, jammed his head against her pommel and sliced it off with a single blow of her sword.

But Yoshinaka’s horse had sunk up to its withers in a flooded paddy field and he was struck by an arrow and killed. With her lover dead, Tomoe fled to the eastern provinces where she ended her days as a nun.

Courtesans

In 1603, after centuries of warfare, the great shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu united the country and ushered in a second golden age of peace. This continued for a quarter of a millennium, from 1603 to 1853, while Europe was torn apart by wars and revolutions.

As the country grew prosperous, the merchants who provided goods for people to spend their money on grew richer and richer.

According to Confucian thinking, merchants were the lowest of the low because they soiled their hands with money. But eventually it was they, not courtiers or warriors, who created the new culture.

The shoguns did their best to keep the merchants in their place, at the bottom of the heap. They were forbidden to engage in politics or flaunt their wealth by spending ostentatiously. If they did they were liable to have all their wealth and belongings confiscated.

There were other unruly groups such as courtesans and prostitutes, whom the shoguns also struggled to keep under their thumb.

In 1603 a courtesan and shrine maiden called Izumo no Okuni set up stage in the dry bed of the River Kamo in Kyoto. There she performed wild and provocative dances and comic skits, including one on which she cross-dressed as a samurai, in a bid to attract customers. Huge audiences gathered.

After the show men queued up to enjoy her sexual favours backstage and soon other prostitutes and courtesans began singing and dancing too.

Unable to quell such anti-social behaviour, the shogunate decided the best thing was to keep it within walls, where it was less likely to pollute respectable society. And so the pleasure quarters developed, a sort of never-never land where the shogun’s police kept their distance and the strict rules controlling Tokugawa society no longer applied.

This was the domain of the courtesans, who became famous for their music, singing, dance and witty conversation.

It was a whole alternative society where merchants could live the lives of princes and imagine that the courtesans whom they loved were court ladies.

Some courtesans presided over literary and artistic salons and conducted tea ceremonies. They also might, if they felt like it, provide sex to men who were prepared to bankrupt themselves to woo them — and even then, the highest-ranking courtesans had the right of refusal.

Eventually some women chose to specialise in music and dance and leave the sex to the courtesans. They called themselves geisha – ‘arts people’, ‘artistes’.

In their time Japanese women have occupied many different positions in society. But they have never been submissive. Even when they are relegated to what appears to be minor roles, they are expert at finding ways to ensure their voices are heard.