The Dog Shogun

3. When a Child's Nurse Ought to Be Male

21 3 When a Child’s Nurse Ought to Be Male He [the ¤fth shogun] was a model of ¤lial piety in his conduct towards her ladyship, the nun of the ¤rst rank [his mother]. Every day he would send a messenger to inquire after her well-being, and on occasion he would go himself to ask after her health. He would send her utensils, patterned materials , and a variety of other things in her preferred colors, attempting to meet her taste. Or he would personally draw pictures or dance [nô] for her, and would do everything to make her happy. When her ladyship the nun visited the main enceinte [the residence of the shogun], he would always offer her a tray of food in person. He would also personally serve her tea and so forth.”1 The woman thus honored by the shogun, his mother, was born as the daughter of a Kyoto greengrocer, a mere commoner. Tokugawa society was of¤cially divided into four classes: samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants.2 In this system the barrier between samurai, as the ruling elite, and the remaining classes, the commoners, was the strongest, with many laws—most noticeably that of permitting only samurai to wear two swords—enforcing the difference between them.3 In this strictly strati¤ed society women, however, were permitted extraordinary mobility. Many of the laws did not apply to them.4 More important , women of humble status not uncommonly bore the children of men belonging to the upper military aristocracy. The of¤cial wives or consorts oftheupper class were usually of equally high, if not of higher standing, and were generally chosen to cement connections betweenfamilies . Yet these arranged marriages often produced nooffspring, and the lord’s children were born to one or several of the many other women who resided in the oku, literally, the back of the manor. While some of these had been of¤cially chosen as secondary wives, it was not uncommon that a woman bearing the lord’s child was a mere servant. Stories abound about the other women jealously trying to prevent the birth of such a child or even to kill the infant. The reason was that, unlike in the West, the children of such lowly women were not regarded as “bastards ” but were considered the legitimate offspring of the man who fathered them, with the right to succeed to the position of head of the household.5 22 When a Child’s Nurse Ought to Be Male The rationale behind permitting the children of lowly women to take their place among nobles was the conviction that the bloodline went from father to son and that women were no more than carriers of the womb that made this transmission possible.6 How little importance was attributed to the biological mother amazed the seventeenth-century Dutch traders at Nagasaki. They were permitted entry into Japan on the condition that as Protestants their faith was different from and they had no sympathy for the much-feared Catholics. When questioned by of¤cials on the Dutch ruling family to ensure that there was no connection with a Catholic nation, the fact that the royal prince was of French descent on his mother’s side was considered so unimportant as to not require translation into Japanese. The Dutch record states, “The interpreter did not consider it necessary to answer this, for it concerned a woman, who is not regarded highly in Japan.”7 While the genetic inheritance from the mother was largely discounted, the emotional in¶uence a mother could exert over her children was well known. The acceptance of lower-class women as the mothers of future heirs and the demands of the purely male power structure of samurai society therefore made the early separation of mother and child mandatory. Only in this way could women be prevented from becoming power brokers by establishing emotional bonds with a male child destined to occupy a leading position. Consequently upperclass children were generally taken away from their mothers as soon as they were born. An early-eighteenth-century encyclopedia states very ¤rmly that a mother was not to nurse her own child.8 The early Europeans in Japan were amazed at the rough treatment small children born into samurai families received in order to harden them early in life. As soon as they had stopped nursing, one report states, they were toughened by being taken out into the wild on the hunt, far from...