Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan (review)

Janet R. Goodwin has written a history of "professional sexual interaction" in Japan from about the mid-tenth to the mid-fourteenth centuries. She chronicles the changes in sexual entertainment occupations and the shift in definitions of sexual transgression and female sexuality as they affected the sex trade. An expansion of an earlier article, this is the first full-length study in English of the sex trade in Japan before the early modern age. It takes its place beside works on women in early Japanese history by Hitomi Tonomura and Terry Kawashima in English, and by many scholars in Japan. As in her earlier book on contribution campaigns of medieval temples, Goodwin situates her topic in the broader social, legal, religious, and to some extent economic context of its times. She mines a range of primary sources and also gives the secondary literature a full, critical airing. The book is never about individual women, however, for the sources do not make them visible.

Goodwin begins with a discussion of three main categories of early sexual entertainers: asobi or yu¯kun, songstresses especially active on the Yodo River near Kyoto; kugutsu, puppeteers described by contemporary poet O¯e Masafusa as an exotic, nomadic tribe; and shirabyo¯shi, singers also famed for sword dancing in male attire. Goodwin acknowledges that some of the aristocratic writings about these entertainers may have been "imaginings" on their part; one indeed gets the sense of an idealized world. Then Goodwin turns from this dreamy idyll to the complicated process of defining the sexually transgressive from the late Heian period. She does this through an analysis of tale literature and legal decrees, acknowledging ambiguity and at times contradiction, but ultimately demonstrating harshening attitudes toward women offering sex for pay. Changes in (warrior) marriage and family succession, religious attitudes, and the legal treatment of rape and adultery are given full exposition. One might also note that Heian and Kamakura sources differed in kind; this may account for the perceived attitude shift.

The scholarly debate over sex as a sacred versus defiling act is explored and challenged in chapter 3. (This dichotomy strikes me as a limited way of looking at a human phenomenon. Why the scholarly fixation on these opposing choices? Were sexual entertainers not a feature of other early societies as well? Would a comparative treatment not be more useful?) Goodwin subjects these academic hypotheses to careful analysis in the light of primary sources, displaying a high yet fair evidentiary standard: she rejects unwarranted assumptions, speculation, and the milking of sources, and she rarely indulges in these herself. While not wholly dismissive, she concludes that drawing a connection between shamans and sexual professionals is unwarranted. (This particular academic debate might have been treated with more dispatch, but to her credit Goodwin is not dismissive toward other scholars.) She then considers more broadly the issue of pollution or defilement in a purity-obsessed society. Scouring literary and other sources, she charts the Kamakura emergence of a definition of sexual entertainers as transgressive, although she sees this as occurring less on a pollution-purity axis than a Buddhist illusion-enlightenment one. The final chapter argues that, by the early fourteenth century, a negative image of sexual entertainers as prostitutes meant that women in the sex trade, though not abusively treated by the authorities, were firmly lodged in a debased status.

Goodwin's study demonstrates a gradual shift from what she considers the relatively tolerant, even idealized Heian values regarding the sex trade to a more restrictive Kamakura atmosphere in which such behavior was negatively evaluated and degraded as transgressive of social norms. She attributes this shift to several factors, including changes in (warrior) marriage practices and property rights amid concerns over inheritance in patrilineal families, an increase in the number of women in the sex trade, a concern for the maintenance of order by warrior rulers...