Oiran
Oiran (花魁) is a collective term for the highest-ranking courtesans in Japanese history, who were considered to be above common prostitutes (known as yūjo (遊女, lit.
Divided into a number of ranks within this category, the highest rank of oiran were the tayū, who were considered to be set apart from other oiran due to their intensive training in the traditional arts and the fact that they lived and worked in Kyoto, the political capital of Japan, which remained the cultural heart of the country when the seat of political power moved to Tokyo.
[2] The term oiran originated in Yoshiwara, the red light district of Edo in the 1750s, and is applied to all ranks of high level courtesans in historical Japan.
Many oiran became celebrities both inside and outside of the pleasure quarters, and were commonly depicted in ukiyo-e woodblock prints and in kabuki theatre plays.
Though regarded as trend setting and fashionable women at the historic height of their profession, this reputation was later usurped in the late 18th through 19th centuries by geisha, who became popular among the merchant classes for their simplified clothing, ability to play short, modern songs known as kouta on the shamisen, and their more fashionable expressions of contemporary womanhood and companionship for men,[4] which mirrored the tastes of the extremely wealthy, but for lower class merchants, who constituted the majority of their patronage.
However, the tayū remaining in Kyoto's Shimabara district were allowed to continue practising the cultural and performing arts traditions of their profession, and were declared a "special variety" of geisha.
In order to become an oiran, a woman first had to be educated in a range of skills from a relatively young age, including sadō (Japanese tea ceremony), ikebana (flower arranging) and calligraphy.
These uchikake featured elaborate, traditional and auspicious designs, such as dragons, butterflies, arabesque rondels, pine, plum and bamboo, woven and embroidered in heavy gold and silver thread.
[20] The profession of oiran arose in the early Edo period (1600–1868), following the introduction of laws restricting brothels to bounded pleasure quarters known as yūkaku (遊廓/遊郭, lit.
The three best-known districts historically were Shimabara in Kyoto (which also housed geisha until the 1970s),[21] Shinmachi in Osaka and Yoshiwara in Edo (present day Tokyo).
"[22] As a larger than life figure, historical accounts of the oiran recall the transferral of respectable house names as tangible products for potential clients, as well as signifiers of rank for established providers.
Specialized products, such as kasa hats, medicinal intervention,[vague] and the newly developed medium of kabuki encompassed the centricity of the red-light district economy, while also supporting anonymity of its patrons.
"[23] Because of their isolation, the rigidity of their contracts as courtesans – which often ran for 10–15 years before ending their involvement with the profession – and their inability to leave the pleasure districts,[4]: 59 oiran became steadily more traditional, outdated and ritualised, further and further removed from popular society and bound by their strict rules of etiquette, behaviour and speech.
[24] The preservation of the appearance of oiran had also not reflected changes in fashion – as the profession of geisha had evolved and become increasingly popular, the authorities had sought to clamp down on the profligate and wealthy tastes of the merchant classes, leading to a number of dress edicts that changed popular aesthetics and led to the rise of subdued and cultivated aesthetics such as iki, which oiran categorically did not reflect or resemble.
As the merchant classes throughout Edo-period society grew in wealth and profligacy, they became the main source of income for geisha, who represented social and financial accessibility in a way that oiran did not.
Geisha were cheap to patronise, informal to converse with, required few introductions before entertaining a customer and both played and sang the most popular songs of the time.
This, over time, ironically led to exaggerate and exacerbate the differences between geisha and oiran, heightening the popularity of the former and leading to the eventual destruction of the latter.
By the beginning of the Meiji period, official attitudes towards legalized prostitution within Japan had changed owing to the country's increasing international presence.
Oiran continued to see clients within the old pleasure quarters, but were no longer at the cutting edge of fashion, and during the years of World War II, when any show of luxury was heavily clamped down upon, the culture surrounding oiran suffered even further, being dealt the final blow in 1957 by the Anti-Prostitution Law – after which the profession of courtesan (excluding the performance arts of tayū) became illegal.
Thousands of spectators crowd the shopping streets on these days to get close enough to photograph the oiran and their retinue of male bodyguards and entourage of apprentices (young girls in distinctive red kimono, wearing oshiroi (white face paint) and loose, long black hair).
