Intrigue, Treachery and Betrayal at the Japanese Court - by Lesley Downer

The neglected wife - Lady Tsukiyama

In 1578 a scandal ripped through the princedom of Mikawa, domain of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ieyasu was 36 at the time and had recently snapped up the neighbouring domain of Totomi, so his power was growing - but it was as nothing compared to that of his neighbour, the fiery warlord Oda Nobunaga (whom I'll call Oda to keep things clear).

This is the story of the terrible fate of Ieyasu’s first wife.

The great lord - Lord Imagawa Yoshimoto

Wives of the Warlords III
Lady Tsukiyama’s Treachery 
Like all women of high class in those days Lady Tsukiyama had been married to Ieyasu in a political marriage to cement the alliance between the Houses of Imagawa and Tokugawa. She was just 15 and he was 14. At the time Ieyasu was a hostage in the House of Imagawa. She however was the niece of the great Lord Imagawa Yoshimoto himself. Perhaps she thought she’d been demeaned by being married off to a miserable hostage.

After Ieyasu was released they lived in Okazaki Castle, the capital of Mikawa. She bore him a son and heir, Nobuyasu, and a daughter. But after 13 years of marriage, when Ieyasu took over the neighbouring territory of Totomi in 1570 and moved to Hamamatsu Castle, he left her in Okazaki and surrounded himself with concubines (nineteen, to be precise).

Just three years had passed since Ieyasu and his powerful neighbour and ally, Oda, had inflicted a massive defeat on Lord Takeda Katsuyori at the Battle of Nagashino. Katsuyori retreated to his snowbound castle in the northern land of Kai and plotted to wrest back control of Japan.

Using a Chinese doctor as her conduit, so the story goes, Lady Tsukiyama smuggled a letter or letters - some say as many as twelve - to Katsuyori asking for help. She begged him to have her husband and Oda killed, take her son Nobuyasu under his protection, make him lord of the old Tokugawa territory, and find her a new husband from among his generals. In exchange she would betray her husband and Oda - perhaps send a signal to Katsuyori at a time when Ieyasu would be at his most vulnerable, when he was planning to be away from the castle.

The enemy: Takeda Katsuyori

Katsuyori, so the story goes, replied. He promised to give Nobuyasu one of Oda’s provinces (which by then he would have captured) and to marry Lady Tsukiyama to one of his generals who was a widower. Delighted with this answer, Lady Tsukiyama prepared to flee the castle for Katsuyori’s camp.

A case of fake news ...? 
Sharp eyes will have noticed some holes in this story.

For a start, why would Lady Tsukiyama want to take such an extraordinarily foolhardy course which risked punishment by death if it was discovered? Was she jealous of all those concubines, angry at being left behind in Okazaki Castle, or was it just general bad temper? And how precisely did she plan to betray her husband given that they lived in different castles, nearly 70 kilometres apart, a long day’s walk on foot (which was how people travelled in those days)? It’s said that Lady Tsukiyama wrote the letters in order to secure a future for her son. But he was Ieyasu’s recognised heir. He already had a future.

In fact the story only became widely known and accepted as fact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long after all the protagonists were dead and the truth could never be discovered.

So how did the story come to light?

The Daughter-in-Law’s Revenge

Lady Tsukiyama's son, Nobuyasu

Lady Tsukiyama doted on her son, Nobuyasu. He had been engaged to Oda’s daughter, Princess Toku, when they were both 4 years old. They were married 4 years later to seal the alliance between their fathers. But even though it was a political marriage they’d grown to love each other. All three - Lady Tsukiyama and her son and daughter-in-law - lived together in Okazaki Castle.

In due course Princess Toku had two daughters but no son. Lady Tsukiyama was clearly not fond of Princess Toku; maybe she thought she’d supplanted her in her son’s affections. She urged Nobuyasu to take a concubine so as to produce a son and ensure the succession. She even found one for him and presented her to him.

Princess Toku was incandescent.

Two Sisters
Oda had secretly installed two young sisters in Okazaki Castle to protect and spy for his daughter, Princess Toku. The older served as one of Lady Tsukiyama’s maids, the younger as one of Princess Toku’s. According to the story, the older maid was rifling through Lady Tsukiyama’s appurtenances when she found the incriminating letters to Katsuyori. It does seem a little odd, however, for her to have found them if they had already been sent.

The older maid told her sister who told Princess Toku. Princess Toku, no doubt bursting with glee, wrote to her father, Oda, revealing everything. According to one version of the story she forwarded the incriminating letters to him. One account says there were twelve, another that she added a list of twelve crimes committed by Nobuyasu and her mother-in-law against her.

The Messenger 

Warlord of warlords:
Oda Nobunaga by Giovanni Nicolao

The messenger who carried the letter to Oda was one of Ieyasu’s most trusted vassals, Sakai Tadatsugu. When Oda read the letter he could hardly believe it. He interrogated the messenger, asking him if he knew anything about these crimes. Sakai said the letters were genuine and confirmed ten out of the twelve crimes listed. Oda, Princess Toku's father, had to conclude that the accusations must be true if Sakai confirmed them. And that meant that Ieyasu’s son Nobuyasu really had been plotting against him.

It seems Nobuyasu had a terrible temper and had fallen out with Sakai over a woman, so Sakai bore him a grudge. Perhaps Sakai didn’t realise what the full implication of confirming Princess Toku’s allegations would be - and perhaps Princess Toku didn’t either.

The Terrible Consequences
On the 4th day of the 8th month of 1578 Oda sent Sakai Tadatsugu with a message for Ieyasu that his son Nobuyasu was not fit to be the governor of any province. If he was not eliminated now, Oda warned, he would do great harm in the future. He ordered Ieyasu to execute his own son forthwith.

Ieyasu was devastated. But he couldn’t afford to go against Oda's orders. Their alliance was all-important. Poor Nobuyasu, who was only 20, vehemently denied all the allegations. But Oda insisted. In the end Ieyasu had to order Nobuyasu to commit seppuku - to kill himself by cutting open his own belly.

Ieyasu said, ‘I have been looking forward to having him succeed me. It is a disgrace and a pity to let him die so young. But having this formidable enemy, Katsuyori, we cannot do without Oda’s help.’

Okazaki Castle

Nobuyasu’s retainers were devastated. Several offered to die in the young man’s place. But Oda  would not be mollified.

The only thing we know for sure, that is preserved in the historical record, is that Oda commanded Nobuyasu’s death and Ieyasu had to obey. It’s said that Ieyasu loved and trusted his son and ordered his death with the greatest of grief and remorse. But at this point ensuring the survival of the Tokugawa clan was more important than saving his son’s life.

Nobuyasu committed suicide on the 15th day of the 10th month of 1579 at the age of twenty. Ieyasu often spoke of his grief over his son’s death.

As for Lady Tsukiyama, in the end she was just collateral damage. Oda did not order her death and neither did Ieyasu. After all, she was just a woman. But Ieyasu’s retainers understood what they had to do. On the 29th day of the 8th month of 1579, a month before her beloved son’s death, she was killed by either one or two retainers, according to one account. Another version is that she drowned herself, yet another that she committed suicide by slashing her own throat.

It seems totally obvious that Lady Tsukiyama didn’t write any letters. Princess Toku made the whole thing up in order to spite her mother-in-law. But the consequence was that she accidentally brought about her own husband’s death and robbed Ieyasu of his first son and heir.

As for Ieyasu, he fathered another heir and went on to found a dynasty of shoguns that was to last for the next 250 years.


Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale of love, death, plots and subterfuge in nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

East Side Story by Lesley Downer

Until 1954 most immigrants arriving in the United States went through the immigration inspection station on Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay. Having travelled across Europe, often on foot, carrying your few precious belongings in a small wicker suitcase, you’d board a ship to cross the rough waters of the Atlantic. After weeks at sea you’d see the Statue of Liberty and weep with joy, thinking you’d arrived. But first you had to get past the immigration officials at Ellis Island.

Ellis Island Immigrant
Landing Station 1905

Those who travelled in first and second class were given a cursory check on board. It was assumed that they had the wherewithal to support themselves and were in relatively good health and would not be a burden on their new country. But those in third class were transported by ferry to the immigration station. There you left your wicker suitcase in a giant pile downstairs - where it was often stolen, so you ended up with nothing, not even your few small belongings - while you lined up for hours upstairs.

First you had to undergo a medical inspection. If you were found to have ‘mental defects’ or be carrying a contagious disease like TB you had a cross chalked on your forehead and were put on the next ship back. Then came interrogation, to find out who you were and check that you had no criminal record and enough money or relatives or a trade to support yourself. 

Ellis Island pens, main hall, 1902-1913
by Edwin Levick

With five thousand immigrants filing through each day, the inspectors had a bare two minutes with each person which meant they often got the immigrant’s name and sometimes even their country of origin wrong. It was a chance to reinvent yourself, give yourself a name like ‘Smith’ instead of a name that gave away your East European roots.

Of the immigrants who made it through, the vast majority of those who stayed in New York ended up in the cramped, poorly lit, unsanitary tenements of the Lower East Side. First to arrive were Germans and East European Jews in the late 19th Century, followed by Italians in the early 20th century, together with Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, Russians and Ukrainians, each of whom settled in separate enclaves, crammed into tall skinny Dickensian buildings with fire escapes zigzagging up the fronts. It was a sort of Babel, a pot pourri of people all speaking different languages. The Marx Brothers grew up in the neighbourhood and so did Al Johnson, Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and as for the East Village, the northern part of the Lower East Side, it later became a hub for artists.

Orchard Street 1933
by J. Blightman

I identify very much with this story. Nowadays ‘multiculturalism’ is a term much bandied about and it’s fashionable to discuss one’s roots and to be proud of being of mixed racial heritage. But in the 1950s and 60s, the suburb of London were I grew up was entirely Anglo-Saxon and most families had been there for generations. Mine was the only immigrant, mixed race, nuclear family. My parents were Canadian and my mother was Chinese - an immigrant twice over. When my father’s student friends saw a photograph of her on his mantelpiece before she came over, they told him in no uncertain terms to find a nice English girl to marry. I always felt a little different from everyone else.

In 1991, when I first went to New York, I found myself in a place where everyone had a story. Everyone’s family had come from somewhere else not that many generations back and everyone was interested in my story whereas back in England even in those days it was still unusual, even weird, to have a family story to tell. I felt immediately at home.

East Village tenements

I stayed with my friend Kim in Brooklyn. In 1991 New York was still considered a rough place. Kim gave me a map and marked the areas to avoid, prime among them being the Lower East Side and the mean streets of Alphabet City. In the 1980s she and her boyfriend had lived in the East Village. There’d been only one toilet, shared with the other apartments on her floor, and they’d had to heat up water to bathe in a tub in the kitchen. Once they were at home when they heard a loud bang which seemed to be right inside the room. They looked around, wondering what had happened. Then they spotted dust seeping from a hole in the wall just above Kim’s head. There was a bullet embedded in the wall opposite. It had come through from the next apartment.

For me it was the beginning of a love affair. I’ve been back pretty much every year since then and lived there for two years at the end of the nineties in a sublet near Washington Square. Nowadays I go once or twice a year with my American husband. We quickly discovered that the East Village and the Lower East Side were the most interesting places to stay.

Five or six few years ago we took a sublet in the East Village, on 7th Street between Avenues A and B, opposite Tomkins Park, where as late as the 1980s and 90s there was an ongoing turf war between heroin dealers, gangs and police. The homeless lined up outside the park every day waiting for the trucks that brought them meals and at night we’d hear people going through the dustbins outside our apartment.

Orchard Street today

We went to a gallery opening in Orchard Street deep in the Lower East Side. The area still looked forbidding, dark and grimy, with a few galleries and the occasional restaurant tucked among shops offering cheap leather goods and suitcases.

Since then the area has changed in leaps and bounds. It feels like a privilege to have the chance to see it while it’s still in the process of transformation, before it becomes set and - perish the thought - full of expensive boutiques like SoHo or staid and middle aged like the Upper West Side, both of which were in their time edgy places.

This year we stayed at the bottom rim of the Lower East Side, where it meets Chinatown. Much of the area retains its old character. It’s still edgy, still being formed. It still feels rough. The tenements are still there with their iconic fire escapes.

What makes the place so wonderful is the contrasts. There are still old men spitting on the sidewalks, women pushing carts of vegetables and groups of youths hanging around looking threatening. There are leather goods shops, Chinese laundries, corner grocery stores, flower shops, Chinese vegetable shops with no English translations on the store front, fish shops, a fish market, suitcase shops, clothes shops. But right alongside are restaurants, galleries, nail spas, massage parlours, shops offering Ayurvedic massage and a pharmacy advertising matcha smoothies directly across the road from a Chinese laundry. Even the trendy restaurant Forgtmenot (sic) has scaffolding outside with a sign saying it’s a hardware store. At first sight it looks like a building site.

And now hotels are arriving with a vengeance. First came the Hotel on Rivington. This year there are several new hotels, such as the Blue Moon, a four star hotel on Orchard Street (which still seems like an oxymoron), and the glossy Orchard Street Hotel. The latest big opening was for Ian Schrager’s Public, a shiny new building at the top of Chrystie Street where non-hotel guests have to wait in a dark tunnel to be vetted before they can take the lift to the bar on the 18th floor.

The anonymous front of Metrograph

There’s even a movie theatre. You walk down Ludlow Street past several Chinese laundries and a ramshackle Chinese grocery and suddenly come to a blank facade. Push open the door and you find yourself in Metrograph, a sleek cinema complex styled after 1940s Hollywood, showing old films, with an excellent restaurant upstairs. Appropriately it was having a Chinatown season when we were there. One minute you’re in quite a rough grimy street, the next in this very sleek restaurant.

Catch it while you can. For a lover of history it’s an amazing place to be. You can actually track the process of change, see history in the making.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com/.

‘Algernon and Ernest’s Excellent Adventure’ by Lesley Downer

In October 1866 a young man called Algernon Mitford arrived in Japan. ‘I found myself in a world younger by six centuries than that which I had left behind,’ he recalled. Like the eponymous heroes of the 1989 film ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’, he had stepped into a time machine, but in his case, his experiences were real.

The extraordinary world that Mitford found himself in is the setting for The Shogun’s Queen as well as the other Shogun Quartet novels. One of the most exciting parts of my research was reading Mitford’s Memories. His writing is so vivid, fresh and full of life that he brings alive that Japan of a century and a half ago that was even then on the brink of disappearing.

Algernon Freeman Mitford

portrait by 

Samuel Lawrence, 1865

Japan had been largely closed to outsiders for 250 years, until 1853 when the American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived to force open its doors. Just eight years had passed since 1858 when a treaty was negotiated permitting westerners to visit, trade and settle in a few specific ports.

Ernest Satow 1869

Algernon - the grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters - was 29 years old and had been posted to Japan to join the newly established British Legation under Sir Harry Parkes. He had paid his own way. In those days you had to have private means to be a diplomat.

Another of the officials at the legation was the 23 year old Ernest Satow, from Clapton. He’d arrived in Japan in 1862 and was fluent in written and spoken Japanese. The two became firm friends. Satow, too, later wrote his memoirs, a gripping account entitled A Diplomat in Japan.

At the time there were few westerners in Japan and most were confined to the heaving port of Yokohama. In those days Yokohama was like a wild west gold rush town, populated largely by unscrupulous adventurers who’d gravitated there, pretending to be merchants or traders, out to make a quick buck by fair means or foul. The only westerners allowed to live and travel outside the port were diplomats attached to the legation - like Mitford and Satow.

'younger by six centuries' pic from Rutherford Alcock
The Capital of the Tykoon 1863

After several of their small wooden houses had burnt down in the regular fires that took place, the two set up house in Edo, now Tokyo, in a little temple in Shinagawa, near the Legation, in the south east of the city, as far as possible from Edo Castle where the shogun lived. It was the roughest part of town, a ‘sinister and ill-famed quarter’. On a morning ride they sometimes passed a headless body lying at the side of the road, the aftermath of a vendetta execution.

'Like hobgoblins of a nightmare'
Samurai by Felice Beato

‘Edo,’ Mitford writes in his stirring prose, ‘was like the Edinburgh of the olden days with the cries of the clans and the clash of arms ringing in its wynds and alleys, and a Walter Scott is needed to tell the tale.’

Shinagawa was where the execution ground was. The standard mode of execution was crucifixion on a X shaped cross and Mitford writes of seeing the executioners, who were of the outcaste class, sitting peacefully smoking their spindly pipes, having finished their work for the day, with the corpse still hanging on the cross.

In Japan this was a time of enormous and dramatic change with the empire-building British doing their best to interfere in every means possible so as to advance Britain’s influence and power. Mitford and Satow hobnobbed with all the major players on both sides of what was rapidly developing into full scale civil war. They dined with the last shogun, Tokugawa Keiki, who features in The Shogun’s Queen. Mitford describes him as ‘the handsomest man that I saw during all the years that I was in Japan. ... He was a great noble if ever there was one.’ 

Tokugawa Keiki, the Last Shogun, 1867

Mitford also witnessed some of the fighting that brought about the fall of the shogunate and saw troops of samurai in full armour ‘with crested helms and fiercely moustachioed visors’ and streamers of horsehair floating to their waists, ‘like hobgoblins out of a nightmare.’

But the biggest adventure was a trip which the two took overland through territory which no westerner had ever passed through before. They travelled by palanquin with a guard of twenty men. Crowds gathered to see what to their eyes were ‘strange wild beasts.’ 

Whenever the two were out of sight of people they walked though in order to preserve their dignity they had to squeeze back into their cramped and uncomfortable palanquins whenever they passed through a populated area.

They were nearing the end of their journey when they came to a hurdle. Impatient to reach their destination, Osaka, they had decided to take a short cut. But the officials they met up with that night argued incessantly that they should take the regular route, which was longer. The officials dreamt up all sorts of arguments but Mitford and Satow were well aware of the real reason - to keep them away from the sacred city of Kyoto which no westerner had ever been allowed to visit and which would be defiled even by their proximity.

'cramped and uncomfortable' - palanquin

Eventually Mitford, exasperated, demanded that the officials put their arguments in writing and said that if they did so they would comply with their demands. The officials did so and the two men reluctantly took the longer route. 

They reached Osaka two days later, having been on the road for 15 days. Only then did they learn by chance that there had been four hundred samurai lying in wait along the shorter route to ambush them, intending to cut them down to punish them for defiling the neighbourhood of the sacred city. ‘Had we taken the route which we proposed we should have been dead men,’ Mitford wrote.

Unknowingly the Japanese officials had saved their lives.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, set in the world of Mitford’s Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com

Breaking through a wall of silence: Researching the Women’s Palace in old Tokyo by Lesley Downer

The dimensions of the Seraglio and the extent to which it exerted a malign influence upon the conduct of public affairs may be measured by the number of its inhabitants. 

A History of Japan, 1615 - 1867, by Sir George Bailey Sansom (1963)

Only existing photograph of
a lady of the shogun's court
(Life in the Women's Palace
 at Edo Castle)

In a couple of weeks my new novel, THE SHOGUN’S QUEEN, will be published in paperback. It’s set in the Women’s Palace in old Tokyo, a place surrounded by secrecy and about which until recently almost nothing was known. In fact it was treated rather like a shameful secret.

I’m not sure when I first stumbled upon the fact that the shogun - the de facto ruler of Japan for several hundred years - had had a harem or something very akin. I’d lived in Japan for years, absorbed myself in the history, literature and lore, had written books, even lived with geisha, yet never heard a word of any harem. 

It seems three thousand women lived in the O-oku, the ‘Great Interior’ of Edo Castle, in the city we now call Tokyo. They all swore an oath of secrecy, never to speak or write of anything they heard, witnessed or experienced. In 1868 the castle was handed over to the enemy after a bitter civil war. The occupants were expelled and everything that had gone on was expunged from the history books. Most of the women had come from families on the losing side and many found themselves homeless. Most kept silent till their deaths. 

Shogun being served by his ladies - tableau, Nijo Castle, Kyoto

A search of the library at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, revealed a single book on the palace, entitled Life in the Women's Palace at Edo Castle. In old age one of the ex-ladies-in-waiting had broken her silence and spoken to her son and a couple had agreed to be interviewed. 

I could almost hear the croaking voices of the old ladies as they explained the etiquette and protocol, the hairstyles, clothing and duties of each rank of lady, ruminated over which classes were high enough in rank to enter the presence of the shogun and his wife and which were not. They described the recruitment process, the three daily audiences, the annual festivities, the parties. 

Nun with shogun (Life in the Women's Palace at Edo Castle)

Very few of the three thousand women, they explained, ever became concubines. Concubines were chosen usually by rank but sometimes when the shogun happened to spot a particularly lovely girl in the gardens or even out on the street. Ienari, the thirteenth shogun, set a record with fifty three children born to twenty seven concubines - though only the concubines who bore children are listed in the records and he probably enjoyed the company of many more.

Whether you were a concubine or the shogun’s wife, sexual activity ended at the age of thirty. There were tales of frustrated ladies-in-waiting, condemned to a life of celibacy, who sneaked out to sleep with handsome monks, carpenters or kabuki actors and were harshly punished with exile or even execution. 

Himeji Castle women's quarters

I was struck by the fact that unlike the harems of the Topkapi in Istanbul and the Forbidden City in Peking, there were no eunuchs in the women’s palace or anywhere in Japan. Four nuns - shaven-headed and officially desexualised - acted as intermediaries between the men’s and women’s palaces but the O-oku was run not by them but by seven hard-smoking elders who had once been concubines. In Japan the women ran their own affairs. 

I would have given anything to have seen the palace. But not only had the castle been taken over by the enemy, it had burnt down many times. There was nothing left. 

I started off by visiting Himeji Castle in Japan. Every lord, I discovered, had had a harem, and the buildings that housed the harem of the lord of Himeji are still there, though they are empty now, just bare wooden walls and tatami-matted floors with nothing left to imagine of the life. 

Then I went to Nijo Castle in Kyoto. Magnificent though it is, this was just the shogun’s pied a terre, a mere shadow of the splendour of Edo Castle. The painted transepts and gold encrusted screens, designed to impress visitors, are still in place in the grand audience halls. 

Bridge and Great Gate, Women's Palace,
Edo, late 19th century

The women’s quarters, conversely, are much quieter and calmer, domestic in mood, walled with screens painted with ink-brushed scenes of country life and peopled with mannequins of the shogun and his women in lavish kimonos. I spent a long time there, imagining the jealousy and back biting, picturing the women tiptoeing around fearful of putting a foot wrong while all the while hoping they would be spotted by the shogun and elevated to concubine. 

And finally I went to Edo Castle, now the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Where the women’s palace once stood - with its white walls and ranks of dove grey roofs, its thousands of women in exquisite kimonos rustling through the corridors and across the walkways - is now the East Gardens. I crossed the bridge that spans the moat to the Great Gate where merchants used to wait. 

'Site of Oh-oku'

Inside there is nothing but an endless expanse of lawn marked at one end with the granite foundation stones of what was once a five-storeyed tower. I paced out the area, awed at the vast size of the place. Then I walked down Tide-Viewing Slope up which the women were carried in painted palanquins before entering the palace, never to leave again. 

Finally I discovered a small sign, half-hidden inside a hedge. It read ‘Site of Oh-oku,’ final confirmation that thousands of woman had once whiled away their lives here, on what is now an empty expanse of lawn.

Lesley Downer's latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, is set in the Women’s Palace. It comes out in paperback on July 27th. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Love, Sex and Romance in Old Japan - Valentine’s Day Special by Lesley Downer

Until the late nineteenth century, there was no word for ‘love’ in Japanese, no equivalent to the western concept of pure, ennobling, platonic love, the courtly love of chivalry. Love was the forbidden fruit. 

Tayu courtesan in Shimabara, Kyoto.

The Japanese acknowledged the strength of love, its power to subvert the existing order, and did all they could to tamp it down. Falling in love was seen as a madness that swept you off your feet, made you go off with someone totally unsuitable. Such folly could only lead to tragedy. Far from expecting to fall in love, as we do, men and women had marriages arranged by their families.

One of Japan’s most emblematic love stories is that of Tokubei and Ohatsu. Tokubei was a clerk, Ohatsu a famous and beautiful courtesan. Tokubei was far too poor to be able to spend a night with Ohatsu, let alone buy her out of servitude. And, as a courtesan, it was Ohatsu’s job to make men fall in love with her but never, never to fall in love herself.

Nevertheless Ohatsu fell for this poor clerk.

Somehow Tokubei managed to beg, borrow or steal the money to pay her ransom. But then he was swindled out of his savings. Realising they could never be together the two decided to run away to Sonezaki Shrine in the wood of Tenjin and kill themselves so they could be together in death. There he stabbed first her, then himself, in the throat.

Cherry blossom time in the
Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.
Utagawa Hiroshige. Los Angeles County Fund

The event caused a sensation. Their story was immortalised by the great playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724). The play was first performed in the bunraku puppet theatre in 1703, the year of their deaths. The lines that the chorus sings as they walk into the forest are some of the most famous and moving in all of Japanese literature:

‘Farewell to this world and to the night farewell.
We who walk the road to death, to what should we be likened?
To the frost by the road that leads to the graveyard,
Vanishing with each step we take ahead:
How sad is this dream of a dream!’

Gravestone of Ohatsu and Tokubei.

The play inspired a spate of copycat suicides and to this day ‘love suicide’ a la Romeo and Juliet is still considered the ultimate romantic act.  

But this was not courtly love. Tokubei was in love with a real woman, not some distant idealised figure, and Ohatsu was equally in love with him.

Geisha, Pontocho, Kyoto

As I said, at the time there was no word in Japanese for pure idealised ‘love’ which has nothing to do with sex. The word koshoku meant both love and lust and everything in between. There was no distinction between the two. Love was not something you felt for your wife. That would have been disrespectful. Respectable married women were taught not to make themselves attractive - not to ‘tart themselves up’, if you like.

Then in the late nineteenth century western literature entered Japan. Translators came across the word and the concept of ‘love’ and realised that it referred to something different from ‘lust’, some pure, noble emotion which didn’t require physical gratification. To begin with they used the English word ‘love’, phonetically transliterated as rabu, and eventually coined a new word - ren’ai.

The Kiss by Auguste Rodin
 at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen, photographer 
Yair Haklai 2010.

There was also no word for ‘kiss’. When Oda Jun’ichiro translated Edward Bowler Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers into Japanese in 1878, he was stumped by the phrase, ‘I should sleep well if I could get one kiss from those coral lips.’ He finally came up with, ‘if I could get one lick of your red lips’, which Japanese of the time found extremely amusing.

A woman named Sugimoto Inagaki Etsu records in her 1926 memoir, A Daughter of the Samurai, that when she set off for America in 1898, her mother warned her, “I have heard, my daughter, that it is the custom of foreign people to lick each other as dogs do.”

But all this does not mean that love and kissing did not exist in old Japan. They did; but as we have seen they had a different place in the order of things.

Geisha provided an outlet for romantic feelings - though, while a man might have strong feelings for a geisha, he was well aware that she was being paid. Kissing was part of a geisha’s repertoire of exotic sexual techniques. It was not something that decent women did.

Eventually the word ‘kiss’ was transliterated as kissu, the only Japanese word for ‘kiss’ used to this day. When Rodin’s statue The Kiss was erected in Tokyo in the 1930s, it caused a sensation. The kissing heads had to be wrapped in a scarf. There was no problem with the naked bodies.

So, as we have seen, in old Japan love and marriage did not go together ‘like a horse and carriage’. They had very little to do with each other.

Love belonged on the wrong side of the tracks - which made it all the more alluring. The system which the Tokugawa shoguns established and which lasted for more than 250 years, from 1603 to 1868, put a premium on order above all. There was a place for everything and everything in its place. The place for love was the pleasure quarters, where it would not pollute the decent world of work, wife and children.

The most famous of these was the Yoshiwara, a good way outside Edo (now Tokyo), across the marshes. It was a city devoted to pleasure - the pleasure of men. There was every human emotion there - pain and tragedy, romance and love - and everything was heightened and intense. It was a place reserved for all the emotional side of life, so that outside it people could get on with the serious business like having a family and working. It was Las Vegas, it was Hollywood - a glamorous world of fun and fantasy, where whatever a man did had no consequences.

There, if he could afford it, a man might spend night after night with a beautiful courtesan. She no doubt told him she loved and desired him - as she told plenty of other men - and he might well be completely in love with her. It would suit her purposes if he was. In the morning as he left the pleasure quarters he would turn at the Looking Back Willow to take a long last look as she stood waving, wiping away a tear if she was a particularly consummate actress.

But it would be the pinnacle of folly for her to fall in love with him or anyone else - unless she too wanted to walk the road of death along with Tokubei and Ohatsu.

Lesley Downer's new novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is published by Bantam. Find more information on her website, http://www.lesleydowner.com/

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"As a woman, in what period of history would you have most liked to live in Japan and why?"

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The Shogun's Harem by Lesley Downer

Our November Guest is Lesley Downer, who will become a regular History Girl next year.

Photo credit: Jill Shaw

Lesley Downer lived in Japan for many years. She tramped around Basho’s Narrow Road the Deep North, lived among geisha, interviewed sumo wrestlers and enjoyed the glitzy life of Tokyo. She is the author of many books on Japan, including Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West and The Last Concubine, short listed for Romantic Novel of the Year. Her new novel, The Shogun’s Queen, takes place largely in the Women’s Palace.
Lesey is currently  a visiting lecturer, teaching on the MA programme in Creative Writing (non-fiction ) at City University in London and lives in London with her husband, the author Arthur I. Miller.

www.lesleydowner.com

Unravelling the web of secrecy around The Shogun’s ‘Harem’

The shogun celebrating New Year's Day with his women (from the Chiyoda No Ooku triptych by Toyohara Chikanobu, 1838 - 1912)

The heroine of The Shogun’s Queen really lived. In a way she was a bit like Princess Diana. She started life as a commoner, in fact very minor nobility, much like Diana, and grew up in relative freedom. Then, when she was 17, like Diana she was chosen to marry the ruler of the country - not the ruler-in-waiting, like Prince Charles, but the actual ruler, the shogun. Like Charles, this ruler didn’t actually wield much power at all. He had a whole government that did the ruling.

Traditionally the shogun would have been married to an imperial princess, a member of the emperor's family. (The emperor was a Pope-like figure who lived in seclusion in Kyoto while the shogun, who lived in Edo, now Tokyo, was the temporal ruler.) Imperial princesses were used to a life within walls. They were born and grew up in their palaces and never left, in the same way that our queen can’t just go to the shops like an ordinary person. It’s said that one emperor once climbed to the top of the topmost tower in his palace to take a look at the world outside.

When she married the shogun the imperial princess would have stepped into a palanquin and left her palace for the first time. She would have had her only glimpse of the big wide world through the slats of her window as she was carried the 450 kilometres to Edo.

Gate that led to the Women's Palace in Edo Castle, now the Imperial Palace Tokyo

 But for commoners like my heroine, Atsu, life was quite different. In Japan in those days the lower you were on the social scale the freer you were. In the mid nineteenth century a peasant woman named Matsue Taseko, who happened to be a poet, informed her husband she was off to Kyoto and walked through the mountains alone. There she hung out with lords, ladies, poets and even the women of the Emperor’s court and wrote poetry. Later she went to Edo. Sometimes her husband went with her, sometimes not. He raised no objections to her independent lifestyle.

For Atsu it must have been thrilling beyond imagination to be taken to live in Edo Castle - but she would also have soon discovered that there was no way out. Once you were in, you didn’t come out.
Edo Castle was Japan’s Versailles. It was as magnificent and lavish as Kublai Khan’s fabled Xanadu. A vast complex of palaces and gardens a mile across and four miles in circumference, it was where the shogun lived and, with the help of an army of government officials, ruled the country. On maps its exact location was never marked. It was always hidden behind the coat of arms of the shoguns, the ruling Tokugawa family - three hollyhock leaves in a circle. It was a place of spectacular wealth and power and glitz and glory.

Gardens at Katsura Rikyu - akin to what the gardens in the Women’s Palace must have looked like

The holy of holies, the innermost sanctum within that complex, was the Women’s Palace, the ooku - Great Interior.

The white-walled buildings with their dove-grey tiled roofs were surrounded by landscaped pleasure gardens, threaded with streams and lakes where women glided in red-lacquered barges. There were moon-viewing pavilions, stages for Noh plays, tea ceremony huts and artificial hills, of which Momijiyama - Maple Mountain - was most renowned for its beauty.

Inside there was a labyrinth of chambers with sliding painted screens for walls, coffered ceilings glimmering with gold leaf and floors of fragrant rice straw tatami mats. The women had an endless supply of tasteful yet hugely expensive kimonos. The shogun’s wife changed five times a day. They were surrounded by gorgeous artefacts, perfumes and incense, lacquered chests and shelves, priceless tea ceremony ware and exquisite vases. They were constantly given gifts by petitioners hoping they might intercede with the shogun on their behalf. They were surrounded by beauty; and these treasures have been preserved and are in the Tokugawa museums so we can glimpse their lives from these.
In museum catalogues they are always presented solely as works of art, treasures, and sometimes it’s mentioned that they belonged to ‘the shogun’s household’.

Gilded screens at Nagoya Castle - akin to what the Women’s Palace must have looked like

 What is not mentioned is that that household consisted entirely of women and that the shogun was the only man who could ever enter. In the Forbidden City in Peking and in the Topkapi Palace, the sultan’s harem in Istanbul, there were eunuchs. But the Japanese never had the custom of castration. Maybe they didn’t like the idea of doing something so traumatic to a man. In the Women’s Palace shaven-headed ‘companion priests’ - effectively nuns - took the place of eunuchs and were the only women allowed to cross between the men’s and the women’s palaces.

So the treasures remain. But as for the life that went on around them, there is very little information. For the palace was shrouded in secrecy. No westerner ever visited or heard the tiniest whisper of it or even knew it existed. The women took an oath never to tell of anything that went on there and even after the palace closed down for good in 1868 and they were thrown out into the cold very few ever revealed anything about their lives.

In the 1890s the son of one ex-lady-in-waiting published a book called Mother’s Stories of the Castle and scholars at Tokyo University interviewed two women who had served there. Recently a couple of scholarly works have been published in English, unearthing as much as can be found on life in the palace.

From their information the interviewers put together plans of the palace. There were the shogun’s apartments (known as the Little Sitting Room, though they were far from small), the wing where the shogun’s wife lived and another wing in a different part of the palace where his mother lived. Then there were offices where women officials carried out day-to-day administration, and - by far the largest area - the private chambers of the ladies and their maids. In all there were well over four hundred rooms. Only the highest-ranking ladies and the mothers of the shogun’s children had their own rooms. The rest shared. All the ladies slept surrounded by maids, ready to serve them when required. Only people of no consequence slept alone.

Ladies of the Women’s Palace (from the Chiyoda No Ooku triptych by Toyohara Chikanobu, 1838 - 1912)

There were also great halls, reception rooms, shrine rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, and huge baths with areas for reclining. On the opposite side of the palace from the shogun’s entrance was a heavily-guarded gate which led to a bridge across the moat. Here the women came and went on the few occasions when they were allowed to go out and merchants brought silks, make up and other goods to sell.

It was a place of unimaginable luxury but also a place of great unhappiness. There was plotting, intrigue, jealousy, whispers behind hands, women ganging up on each other, even murders and - it was said - hauntings. Bodies were found down wells, boy babies were smothered at birth on the orders of women who wanted to ensure that their son, not someone else’s, became the next shogun. A striking number of boy children - most, in fact - died at birth or in infancy.

The shogun only chose a few girls as his concubines - Ienari had 53 children by 27 concubines - but all the rest had to remain virgins. Once in the 1840s the finance minister was trying to enforce austerity measures and asked the women to cut back on buying expensive kimonos. He was told in no uncertain terms by the formidable chief elder that the women suffered enough from their enforced celibacy and were entitled to as many gorgeous kimonos as they wanted in compensation.

All these women assumed life in the Castle would continue just the same for ever. Like us today, no one imagined that their world would come to an end. But in the 1860s the country erupted into civil war and in 1868 the palace was closed down and the women thrown out onto the streets. In the upheaval that followed people completely forgot that the Women’s Palace with all its luxury and beauty and backbiting and tragedy had ever existed. Edo Castle became the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and all that remains of the Women’s Palace is the vast lawn of the East Gardens there.