I think in the future I will make it a habit to ask a Japanese person working at a museum one random question, the answer to which, if they know it at all, they will barely be able to convey to me, what with my limited Japanese. Case in point:
I wandered into the Akita Commerce Building shortly after consuming the fugu burger. It was a pretty old building, it was on my way to the park, and it was free of charge. Naturally there was no English signage and the man inside spoke no English, but I managed to get the gist of what made this building so special: it was the first building in Japan to have a rooftop garden, and perhaps the first such building in the world.
Visitors weren’t allowed onto the roof, unfortunately, but I did get to wander through all three stories. On the second floor, in one of the rooms, there was a case with two Japanese dolls wearing kimonos. What was odd about the dolls was that their obi—the large flat belt—was on backwards. The bow was tied in the front. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen such a style in Shimonoseki. A woman wearing a backwards-obi kimono was featured on the front of one of the tourist maps, and pictures of these same kind of women were featured in the Akama Shrine.
Way back when I was living in Nagoya, I learned that, if you wear a kimono, you must never wear the bow in the front. Why? In the Edo era, this was how prostitutes wore their kimonos. As Rachelle said, “easy access.” Not that I thought the women in the pictures were prostitutes—the Edo era was long gone—but still, it surprised me. Why wear clothing that symbolized it?
I tried to ask this question to the man. Needless to say, he didn’t quite understand what I wanted to say. I managed to covey the fact that I wanted to know why the dolls upstairs and the women on my map wore their obis backwards, but since I didn’t know the word for prostitute, that was as far as I got. The man himself didn’t seem to know, and so he went into his room to call for help.
While I was waiting by myself downstairs, two women came in, a foreigner and a Japanese woman. They both spoke English. I explained my question to them, and they brought out their theories. The Japanese woman explained that though these women were prostitutes, they were the highest level of prostitutes, called Oiran, almost like geisha. Well that was all very well, but why were they a symbol of the town? The foreign woman suggested that because Shimonoseki was a port city, there was more trade, more sailors, and prostitution thrived in an environment like that.
Just then, the man came and explained what he learned. At Akama Shrine, a little boy Emperor drowned during a battle a thousand years ago. I had learned about this in my guidebook. Well, fast forward a few hundred years to the Edo era, and the local Oiran were so touched by this incident that they decided to perform dances at the shrine every year on the anniversary of the Emperor’s death. This soon evolved into a full-fledged festival, which continues to this day.
Isn’t that bizarre? The town celebrates prostitutes from three hundred years ago showing their reverence for an emperor who died a thousand years ago by dancing at a shrine. This is just the sort of thing that can only happen in Japan.
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