Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600-1900

The Beggar's Gift

Gerald Groemer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138924024
• eBook ISBN: 9781317409892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study of the emergence, development, and demise of music, theatre, recitation, and dance witnessed by the populace on thoroughfares, plazas, and makeshift outdoor performance spaces in Edo/Tokyo. For some three hundred years this city was the centre of such arts, both sacred and secular. This study outlines the nature of the performances, explores the social relations which lay behind them, and reveals vast complexity: an obligation of gift-giving on the part of observers; performers who were often economic migrants fallen on hard times; relations of performance to social class; a class system much more finely gradated than the official four caste system; and institutions of professional organization and registration, enforced by government, with penalties for unregistered performers. The book discusses how performing, witnessing, and rewarding performance were closely bound up with economy, society and government, how the interaction between various groups related to socio-economic advancement, how the system of street performance reinforced social control, and how the balance between different groups shifted over time.

1 Conditions of possibility

Economic, political, and ideological

Shūen, Shige, and the economic conditions of street performing

A bakufu-sponsored catalogue raisonné of paragons of virtue explains that on the last day of 1801+/12 a woman named Shige was recognized by Edo city authorities as a shining example of how commoners were to satisfy their filial obligations.¹ Shige was the daughter of Shūen, age 93 and a member of a motley association of indigents known as “fellows in spirit” (dōshinja or dōshin-mono). According to a clearly not entirely accurate description offered by Edo city administrators, dōshinja were “feeble or ill and bereft of any caregivers or relatives.” They shaved their heads, engaged in religious begging (takuhatsu), and were “not registered with any approved temple or accredited sacred house (shike).”² In 1842 the magistrate of temples and shrines opined that dōshinja had often hazarded long voyages from the countryside to get to Edo because “they yearned for the splendor and prosperity of the city,” but once there they often ended up as beggar outcastes because they had nobody to turn to and found it difficult to get by.³ In any case, several years earlier, Shige had married a man whose paltry income did not suffice to support the aging dōshinja Shūen. Since nobody else extended a helping hand either, the couple agreed to a divorce and Shige returned to her father’s home with her daughter in tow. Soon thereafter Shūen found himself unable to walk, thus effectively terminating his career as a holy supplicant.

At this dire juncture Shige recalled that as a little girl she had learned to play the shamisen. Her long dormant musical accomplishments, she suspected, might be brought out of hibernation for the purpose of begging (sodegoi). Knowing that her straitlaced father would oppose such a shameful ploy, she secretly tucked away her shamisen at a friend’s house, retrieving the instrument only when she worked the city’s avenues and alleys. Even though her earnings remained so meager she had to accept aid from her sister’s husband, she nursed her father day and night without offending his moral sensibilities. Eventually her selfless behavior came to the attention of bakufu officials, who munificently awarded her three pieces of silver and granted Shūen a daily sinecure of five gō of rice (900 cc) until he was called to heaven.

The family’s hardship, Shige’s countermeasures, Shūen’s attitude, and the uncommon government response reveal a good deal about Edo society and the position of street performers within it. Shūen’s begging drew what little legitimacy it could muster through vague ties to religion. Even though the magistrates of temples and shrines never endorsed a league of dōshinja, solicitation covered by a cloak of spirituality helped stave off arrest or harassment. Shige, for her part, was burdened with the limitations imposed on her sex by the patriarchal norms structuring Edo-period economic, sociopolitical, and cultural life. Shūen no doubt opposed his daughter’s desperate gambit to earn a living on the streets in part because he knew that secular door-to-door engagements demanded registration with Yamamoto Nidayū, the head of Edo street performers (gōmune). Such an enlistment would have signaled Shige’s temporary demotion to the status of a hinin (literally “nonhuman” outcaste), albeit only in regards to occupation.⁴ If Shige was remiss in registering herself while singing before entranceways and collecting coins, she became a lawbreaker who risked apprehension and punishment.

The sort of poverty experienced by Shige and Shūen was in fact rampant and had accompanied the city from its birth.⁵ An investigation into prices in 1733 determined that little short of a quarter of the townspeople (chōnin) could not even afford to purchase medicine when ill, though unbeknownst to the victims such a purchase was anyhow rarely money well spent.⁶ As one writer commented, in Edo “some people make money and become rich overnight” – something gleefully welcomed – while “others,” surely the majority, “remain poor.”⁷ Even productively employed men and women generally counted themselves blessed if they grossed enough to eat and pay their rent. A census from 1832 disclosed that 56 percent of the Edo commoner population lived in straitened circumstances, no doubt defined in ways most contemporaries would have found unacceptably narrow and today’s typical Tokyoite would regard as fantastic. A head count staged some ten years later again revealed what most already knew from personal experience: half of the townspeople eked out a hand-to-mouth existence.⁸ In 1841, when a bowl of insipid noodles cost between 10 and 20 coppers and a trip to a bath house 8 more, a flourishing 30-year-old confectioner supporting one dependent earned at most 200 coppers a day.⁹ In flush times he and his charge might hazard a trip to a penny show house or a temple fair – even the cheapest tickets at the major kabuki theaters normally cost over 100 coppers and thus remained tantalizingly out of reach – but calamities of the kind besetting Shige and Shūen put an end to even trifling luxuries. In 1866, when surging inflation had reduced many middle and lower-class Edoites to abject poverty, the regime was forced to order rice to be released from “township agencies” (machi-gaisho) established some eighty years earlier as a means for supporting the hungry in periods of crisis.¹⁰ No fewer than 370,387 “needy people,” 73,849 of whom were assessed as “extremely poor,” responded to the offer.¹¹ On 1866/9/8 indigents were granted even more grain, but this gesture did not prevent them from taking to the streets to vent their rage, which had of course been building up for decades.¹² For five days from 1866/9/20 boiled rice from ration stations set up at Ekōin and three other temple grounds was ladled out to 132,612 ravenous takers. This gesture of benevolence did not stop one irate observer, tired of being treated like a beggar, weary of endless shortages, exasperated with the inability of either the samurai’s command over agricultural production or the market’s magic to solve the problem, to post a notice outside an Edo castle gate reading “The government is sold out!”¹³

Citizens devastated by poverty bunked down in backstreet hovels at locations such as Hashimoto-chō, a center for religious beggar-performers called gannin or gannin-bōzu (literally “petitioned monks” or “petitioning monks”); at Yamazaki-chō, a haunt of gōmune; at Shiba Shin-zeniza, Akasaka, Samegahashi; or at one of the other uncounted overcrowded pits of human misery scattered throughout the city. Men and women who occupied such hovels and wandered around the city to hunt and gather were sometimes called yado-ari kado-mawari: “people with lodging who circulate from door to door.”¹⁴ Such figures were seen everywhere. During the first years of the eighteenth century, for example, an Edo ward headman casually reported that “this morning, before Zen’emon’s house, a beggar apparently age 14 or 15 arrived; he collapsed and died almost immediately thereafter.” Again, a short while later, “after five o’clock in the morning today a beggar, perhaps 44 or 45 years old, fell down and expired; he was shown to the local hinin who identified him as a beggar of recent times.” And once more, “at five o’clock this morning, before Zen’emon’s house, a male hinin about 40 years old passed out. Efforts to aid him came to naught, and by six o’clock in the evening he breathed his last.”¹⁵ On the streets mendicants born and bred in Edo were joined by vagabonds drifting in from elsewhere. Perspicacious intellectuals had long noticed that in rural areas major land owners prospered while those left behind “sell their fields and houses to the big farmers and become beggars or vagrants.”¹⁶ It did not require much expertise in rural economics to grasp that a combination of heavy taxation, high rents, usurious loans, crop failures, and human or natural disasters drove people off the land in much the same way that enclosures and other depredations of the rich and high-born ensured the same would occur at roughly the identical historical period in England.

The economy on which Shūen and Shige relied when they sought to earn a few pennies on the streets was not directly related to the forms of production and circulation on which economic historians dwell when they analyze agricultural productivity, rate of exploitation or taxation of the peasantry, ground rents, the growth of industrialization, the function of rice markets, the role of the monetary system, the development of labor markets, and the like.¹⁷ Such economic forces did of course play the largest role in shaping the Edo-period economic whole. Yet Shige, Shūen, and thousands of others in similar positions grew hardly any crops, produced few marketable commodities, could not engage in financial speculation, and found it difficult to hire themselves out to warrior or merchant houses. Fortunately the Edo economy was so heterogeneous that it was not difficult to discover nooks and crannies of production and exchange that allowed even the poorest city residents to gain a slight advantage or earn a tiny income. Such sectors of the economy were not necessarily illegal, atavistic, unsystematic, antihegemonic, or of importance only to the lowest social classes.¹⁸ Without them even the dominant economic forms would hardly have been reproducible over time.

One of the most significant forms of exchange not reducible to the presentation of tribute, the offering of labor services, or the trade of commodities resembled the giving and receiving of gifts. Even among the social elite the bestowal of gifts known as go-shūgi (literally “celebratory article”), go-kōden (“incense offering”), or go-shinken (“presentation”), was entirely mandatory. Indeed, regulations regarding the granting of gifts takes up more space than any other subject in some of the most important collections of Edo-period laws.¹⁹ As the rampant culture of bribery during the years of the bakufu’s Grand Chamberlain Tanuma Okitsugu (1719–88) most flamboyantly demonstrated, warrior-class administrators vastly enriched themselves by exchanging gifts for influence, probably without feeling the slightest pang of conscience. Commoners and outcastes too looked to gift exchange to spread wealth more evenly, and hardship more thinly. Men and women showered each other with money and goods at felicitous and unhappy occasions, granted and accepted charitable donations, and, as Shige and Shūen happily discovered, were sometimes rewarded by the government. In such exchanges, which were rarely entirely symmetrical, the realm of the economic was almost impossible to disentangle from that of the political. In fact, in a society in which exploiters and exploited often stood in a relation of direct domination, the imagined discovery of territory inhabited by purely economic forces usually turns out to be little more than an anachronistic retrojection of the ideologies of free market capitalism.

Other important though often overlooked forms of redistribution of wealth in Edo-period Japan included inheritances, grants of land and money within families, credit from moneylenders or the guild of blind men (tōdō), and handouts to the poor f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Conventions
• Historical eras or periods
• Modern Japanese prefectures
• Introduction
• 1 Conditions of possibility: economic, political, and ideological
• 2 Outcast(e) street performers
• 3 Gods and spirits in the streets
• 4 Gōmune and their arts
• 5 Yashi: performance as advertisement
• 6 The aftermath of Meiji: conditions of impossibility
• References
• Index