This dissertation examines the social and political context of prostitution in Tokugawa Japan, focusing on the sex trade in provincial ports, post towns, pilgrimage sites, and marketplaces. The project asks how provincial authorities regulated prostitution, how their decisions were supported and contested by commoners, and how the resulting accommodations affected the lives of women working in the sex trade. The first three chapters explore the challenges and limits of regulation. Chapter One opens in the early seventeenth-century mining town of Innai Ginzan, where the mine administration treated brothels as legitimate businesses. Chapter Two discusses a different administrative approach in the castle town of Fukuoka, where officials limited brothels to a walled-in quarter. In contrast, Chapter Three describes how authorities in the port town of Niigata declined to regulate prostitution, prioritizing prosperity over social control. The last two chapters focus on the attempts of commoners to impose order on the sex trade when samurai officials did not take action. Chapter Four concentrates on the Inland Sea region, discussing the social consequences of a largely unregulated market in women.
When samurai authorities failed to control the regional sex trade, commoners pursued their own strategies of resolving conflicts related to prostitution. Often, they turned to gangsters, who had the regional connections necessary to stabilize the market. Chapter Five, on a series of post stations in Musashi Province, describes how peasants living near the stations tried to turn the bakufu's moral reforms to their advantage, using official rhetoric in their petitions to eliminate prostitution. The conclusion emphasizes the diversity of approaches to prostitution during the Tokugawa period, while also suggesting that commoners and administrators in provincial towns considered similar issues when formulating policies toward the sex trade. In each location, the regulation of prostitution was inextricably tied to questions about the role of government, the classification of a city or town as central or peripheral, and the imposition of distinctions between prostitutes and other women. Finally, this dissertation suggests that the "floating world" should be understood in the context of everyday life.
