Forty-Seven Samurai: A Tale of Vengeance and Suicide in Haiku and Letters

Women themselves couldn’t help thinking their life depended on their face and figure, let alone their getup, “in a world where men spent half a year to learn to scrutinize their own clothes, hair styles, and swords, but also the way they walked,

Women themselves couldn’t help thinking their life depended on their face and figure, let alone their getup, “in a world where men spent half a year to learn to scrutinize their own clothes, hair styles, and swords, but also the way they walked, just to go to pleasure quarters,” or so observed the historian Kodama Kōta in The Genroku Age (Genroku jidai). For that matter, what is given as “young boy” above is wakashu, a catamite, the object of male love; a great deal of care and money was spent on such young men to make them prettier, more enchanting. There were, in addition, kabukimono, date-otoko, yakko, yarō, etc.—many among them rowdy, tough men who galivanted while outlandishly decked out, often provoking quarrels and fights. Some of these figures later became the subjects of kabuki plays and one-man storytelling (kōdan). Among them, for example, was Banzui-in Chōbē, said to have beat up Mizuno Jūrōzaemon, a hatamoto with a stipend of 3,000 koku, who, in retaliation, entrapped Chōbē and killed him. The point of the story is that Chōbē, knowing what was up, went to Jūrōzaemon’s house as invited.

What won Tsunayoshi notoriety was a series of prohibitions that he started introducing not long after he became shogun, the “Pitying the Sentient Edicts” (Shōrui awaremi no rei). Dazai Shundai, who famously asserted that shogun were Japan’s “kings” (ō), wrote in An Unofficial Record on Three Kings (San’nō gaiki): After the King [Tsunayoshi] lost his Crown Prince, his harem did not produce any other child, so he tried many other ways seeking an heir, to no avail.

Then the monk Ryūkō stepped forward and said, Sire, you have few heirs as a retribution for having killed living things in your previous life. If you want an heir, the best thing to do would be to love creatures and not to kill them. If Your Majesty truly wants an heir, I think you must forbid the killing of living things. At the same time, because you were born in the year of hi-no-e inu, and inu belongs to dogs, you had best love dogs. The King agreed to this, and the Queen Dowager also heard Ryūkō. The King approved of this and forbad the killing of living things.

One thing that may startle, and amuse, the modern reader is the certificate of receipt given at the Nakano kennel ground. Used in each reference to each dog—mother and puppies—is the honorific prefix o, in addition to the sex and the color of each: e.g., “white-black-mottled boy, the honored dog” (shirokuro-shibori-danshi-o-inu).

As the accounts cited above, especially Asakichi’s Report, may suggest, Asano Naganori did not really “cut his stomach,” the literal meaning of seppuku. In fact, years before the Genroku era seppuku had become ritualized. Instead of a man ripping his own belly with a short sword, then stabbing his own neck to hasten death, the condemned would be provided with a kaishaku, “second,” ready to strike with his sword drawn, who, the moment he picked up the short sword on the ceremonial sanbō placed before him, would behead him and show the head to the kenshi, witness, marshal, or censor.

As A. B. Mitford put it: “The assistant second brings a dirk upon a tray, and, having placed it in front of the principal, withdraws to one side: when the principal leans his head forward, his chief second strikes off his head, which is immediately shown to the censor, who identifies it, and tells the master of the palace that he is satisfied, and thanks him for all his trouble.”

Homosexual love, called shudō, “the way of young men,” nanshoku, “male amour,” to give a few terms for the similar propensity, was prevalent. “The shogun and daimyo loved maegami no koshō, ‘pages with forelocks,’ hatamoto kept ko-zōritori, ‘little slipper carriers’; in the inner gardens of the Buddhist law were chigo koshō, ‘young acolytes,’ there were yarō in Miyakawa-chō of Kyoto, Negi-chō of Edo, and Dōtonbori of Osaka,” wrote the historian Kodama. And, of course, open homosexual love did not start or end in the Genroku era. Jesuits who went to Japan and stayed there to observe the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marveled at it; so did Shin Yu-han, a Korean who accompanied his country’s large-scale embassy to Japan in 1719.