Crossing the Demarcations: How Tourism Reinforced the Wife-Prostitute Hierarchy in Tokugawa Japan
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.211220.101How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Edo travel boom; women’s status; Madonna-whore complex (wife-prostitute dichotomy); travel diaries
- Abstract
In the 18th century, prosperous commercial development and national infrastructure projects contributed to an unprecedented travel boom in Japan [1]. As demonstrated by previous research, since travel nurtured an inclusive environment in which people of all social ranks were meeting each other, it helped loosen the status system established by the shogunate. Nonetheless, travel also took a negative yet often neglected role in reinforcing the female hierarchy that divided virtuous “wives” and promiscuous “prostitutes.” This paper will argue that, as a form of social activity that allowed men and women alike to cross many social parameters and to therefore recreate their perception of the world, travel successfully reinforced the wife-prostitute hierarchy, or dichotomy, in Tokugawa Japan, which can also be seen as an embodiment of Sigmund Freud’s Madonna-whore complex theory. The paper will start by introducing the origins of this hierarchy and will then employ published works of the 18th century to discuss how tourism encouraged men to embrace the concept. It will then use ukiyo-e paintings and women’s travel diaries to analyse how voyaging on the road helped elite women accept the female hierarchy and finally put themselves into the higher rank by taking a condescending standpoint.
- Copyright
- © 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Yunran Wang PY - 2021 DA - 2021/12/24 TI - Crossing the Demarcations: How Tourism Reinforced the Wife-Prostitute Hierarchy in Tokugawa Japan BT - Proceedings of the 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 597 EP - 601 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211220.101 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.211220.101 ID - Wang2021 ER -