Dr. Cecilia Segawa Seigle (Tannenbaum)
CLASS OF ’71
Professor Emerita of Japanese Language and Literature, University of Pennsylvania
Retired Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Professor Cecilia Segawa Seigle recently began writing her own memoir.
Yoshiwara, The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan.
Seigle, Cecilia Segawa.
Yoshiwara, The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
Cecilia Segawa Seigle, as a native woman of Japan, provides an interesting perspective into the world of Japanese courtesans. As a teacher of classical and modern Japanese literature and language at the University of Pennsylvania, she uses her apparent knowledge of the literature surrounding this topic, as well as social and cultural analysis of the period to provide a rather full picture of ‘the glittering world’. Her historical and cultural analysis is detailed enough that one can read the book with little or no prior knowledge of the subject.
While there are only a small section of actual paintings and prints of the courtesans and the world that surrounded them, Seigle’s descriptions alone provide rather detailed pictures of the scenes. She portrays a complete picture of the Yoshiwara—the walled-in quarter in Edo where government-licensed prostitution thrived from 1618-1868. She recounts a complete history of the Yoshiwara, starting with the opening of Yoshiwara and its early days. Then, she offers detailed accounts of its years of prosperity. And finally, ends with Yoshiwara’s eventual decline. By tracing the history of the Yoshiwara, the author creates a complete picture of much of life in the pleasure quarters during this time, such as the change of the courtesan’s processions from provocative to more showy and ceremonious. Included are appendixes that document the processions of courtesans, classes of courtesans and prostitutes and bordellos, and the ratio of male to female geishas from 1770-1800. Including a selection of literary documents from this period—selections from instruction books for courtesans, standards for grading courtesans, government grants for the Yoshiwara, and accounts from the courtesans and patrons themselves—Seigle’s depiction of Japanese courtesans and the world that surrounded them is a varied and diversified one. Because she does not provide such a romanticized portrayal of this time, as seems common in many other interpretations of the floating world, and instead more of an historical and cultural analyze, the book appears to present a rather full picture of the world of Japanese courtesans.
Yoshiwara was an area on the outskirts of Tokyo (Edo), where prostitution was contained and regulated in a graduated hierarchy until 1957. This containment was literal, the district was fenced in by real walls and a moat as well as government regulation.
The "Yoshiwara" licensed quarters officially opened in the eleventh month of 1618.
The name "Yoshiwara" came from the area itself, it means "field of rushes", a marshy place - during the years that followed, "Yoshiwara" burned down several times because of the wooden houses.
On the left picture we see five "oiran" or high ranking courtesans attended by their "kamuro" (child attendants).
The courtesans wore luxurious kimono, their hair style was very elaborate and they walked on very high wooden clogs.
A Princess’s Diary
Dr. Cecilia Segawa Seigle Gr’71returned to her native Japan to research one book topic and came across an unexpected treasure —a 36-volume diary written by a 17th-century Japanese imperial princess. Though the document had been hand-copied from the original in 1902, and stored in the Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo, scholars had all but ignored it until now.
“I was excited and wanted to introduce this woman to the Japanese public because this was a very rare diary,” says Seigle, who is professor emerita of Japanese studies in the Asian and Middle Eastern studies department at Penn. Though there was a “golden age” for Japanese women writers around the 11th century, as time went on, women’s positions declined and they became more oppressed. “So it is rare that such a socially prominent woman [in the 17th century] left a diary.”
v Seigle’s new book, Kojo Shinanomiya no nichijo seikatsu: Mujohoin-dono gonikki wo yomu (The Everyday Life of Imperial Princess Shinanomiya: Reading the Mujohoin-dono Diary) has been published this year by one of the most distinguished publishers in Japan, Iwanami Shoten, under her Japanese name, Yoshiko Segawa.
Seigle previously had written a book about Japanese courtesans, who, though companions of socially prominent people, were considered “the lowest as far as society was concerned.” After finishing that project, she says, she got bored and began thinking about the opposite of these women and decided to research the Ooku, the walled-in area in Edo Castle where thousands of ladies-in-waiting lived, serving the wife of the shogun, the shogun’s concubines, and also the shogun when he visited his ladies. The Ooku, which also referred to the institutionalized body of women who occupied this space, had its own administration, customs, politics, and regulations. Its inhabitants “did not go out. The higher the position, the more secretive their lives were.” Those who left the service of Ooku were forbidden to talk about what went on behind those walls, leading to rampant rumors and the exaggerated material of kabuki plays and other fictionalized accounts.
Seigle went to the Historiographical Institute with a research grant to look for authentic documents, but found very little about Ooku. She did come across the diary of a 17th-century nobleman, Konoe Motohiro, who was invited to visit his daughter, wife of the sixth shogun, Tokugawa Ienobu.
Later she found out that the nobleman’s wife, Princess Shinanomiya Tsuneko, also wrote her own diary. The following summer Seigle began reading the document. (The original is in the Konoe family archives.)
It was difficult to understand at first, she says, because the princess used many “codes,” referring to family and friends by their positions in society. As people were promoted, their ranks kept changing, adding to the confusion.
Princess Shinanomiya “is not an analytical writer—she just describes what happened—but when you read the [diary], you find out so much about the people around her and the transition of her life and her thinking.”
While she comes across as a happy person, Seigle says, “The interesting thing is that she was in denial all the time. She would write only about happy events.” One of her favorite mantras was Medetashi. Medetashi. (How auspicious, how happy). “Even after something bad happened, she would repeat these words.” But over the course of her diary, in the face of a number of unhappy events, “she gradually changed from a very spoiled princess” to “an extremely good wife, good mother [to three children] and someone who was very pious in a secular way.”
Her daughter, Hiroko, left home with many servants at age 13 to marry the shogun’s nephew, who would unexpectedly be named the next shogun when he was 41. Unfortunately, Princess Shinanomiya’s diary divulges no secrets about Ooku. While Hiroko sent many letters to her mother, the princess reveals little of their content. “But we know that the letters came with presents after presents”: money, clothing, incense burners and beautiful folding screens.
According to Seigle, documents like this one haven’t found their way to the public in the past because of “chauvinism” among scholars typically obsessed with affairs of state rather than “women’s matters.” But this, she believes, is gradually changing. As Princess Shinanomiya would have said, Medetashi. Medetashi.
Translations
Kaiko, Takeshi. Darkness in Summer (translated from the Japanese by Cecilia Segawa Seigle). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973 (1st American edition, cloth cover, dust jacket).
Kaiko, Takeshi. Into A Black Sun. [translated by Cecilia Segawa Seigle] Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International, 1980 (1st edition, cloth cover, dust jacket--printed in Japan)
Kaiko, Takeshi. Into a Black Sun. (translated by Cecilia Segawa Seigle) Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International, 1980 (1st edition, cloth cover, dust jacket).
Kaiko, Takeshi. Into a Black Sun. (translated by Cecilia Segawa Seigle). New York: Kodansha International, 1983 (1st paperback edition, mass market paperback).
Written by a Japanese who had apparently been a correspondent in Vietnam.
An English translations of Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, and The Temple of Dawn are published (N.Y. : Pocket Books; trans. by Michael Gallagher; E.Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle).
An English translation of The Decay of the Angel is published (N.Y. : Knopf; trans. by E.Dale Saunders & Cecilia Segawa Seigle).
An English translations of The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel are published (London: Secker & Warburg; Tokyo: Tuttle; trans. by E.Dale Saunders & Cecilia Segawa Seigle).