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Description
In the pleasure district of Eguchi, a half moon shone brightly above the waters of the Yodo River. Merchants and pilgrims, noblemen and fishermen - they all wound their way here to indulge in earthly pleasures. Eguchi was a small island port where the Yodo River, the main artery of trade into the capital, met the Inland Sea. It was here, where men rich and poor travelled, that the asobi set up their business. The asobi were prostitutes who specialized in singing imayō, folk songs with an earthy and flirtatious style that became all the rage at the Heian court. Originally, they had been itinerant entertainers, approaching wealthy travellers along the roads. But in the late 10th century, the asobi who lived nearest the capital started settling into a more permanent lifestyle, establishing the first pleasure districts in Japan along the Yodo River. Their choice of location was an astute one: Not only was the Yodo River the source of all trade into the capital, but it was also along the new pilgrimage routes that aristocrats took. Ostentatious pilgrims on their way back from a shrine visit were looking to indulge their pleasures and show off their wealth, and so the asobi saw an opportunity to shift their business model to take advantage of this new revenue stream.

Although the origins of the asobi are a matter of some debate, a good deal is known about their lives in the Heian period when aristocrats from the capital started patronizing them. The women were organized into matrilineal clans headed by a chōja, the standard word used to refer to the head of an occupational group. No men worked as procurers in the sex industry at Eguchi - the women themselves handled all of their own affairs. The payment from a patron was distributed equally among all of the asobi in a clan, except for the chōja who received an extra share. While we don't know how many women one clan typically consisted of, the evidence suggests that there may have been a lot of them since sometimes there was hardly enough to go around. Unlike court women, who were known by nicknames based on the titles of their male relatives, asobi took on stage names with playfully lofty titles.

One of these women was Kokannon, whose name meant "the little Kannon" - a reference to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. Her name was one borne by several later asobi of Eguchi, and it's possible that stage names were passed down from mother to daughter, or from chōja to chōja, in the clans. Nothing is known of Kokannon's background. Asobi were considered to be of the lowest social class, grouped with beggars and thieves in one 10th century text. And yet, some chōja came from more exalted backgrounds, such as the daughters of families who had lost out in imperial political disputes. Kokannon may have been born into the sex trade, or she may have entered it through other means - chōja are thought to have "adopted" women into their clans as well as passing on the trade to their biological daughters.

However Kokannon entered the sex trade, she soon became a skilled asobi. Trained in the arts of music and poetry as well as sexual techniques, the asobi were known for their unique method of attracting customers. They would row small skiffs out onto the water and sing imayō from their boats. One Heian writer, Ōe Masafusa, described it thus:

There, female entertainers have banded together; they pole their skiffs out to meet incoming boats and solicit men to share their beds. Their voices halt the clouds floating through the valleys, and their tones drift with the wind blowing over the water. Passerby cannot help but forget their families. The ripples spray like flowers among the reeds along the shore, and the boats of old fishermen and peddlers line up stern to stern, almost as if there's no water in between. From the highest nobility down to the hoi polloi, the women invite all to their bamboo-matted chambers and bestow favours upon them. Some men make these women their wives and mistresses and love them until death. Even wise men and princes are not exempt.

Masafusa goes on to name some of the most famous encounters between men and asobi in recent history - including one involving Kokannon. For in the year 1000, Kokannon rowed out to meet the most powerful man in Japan as his boat drifted along the Yodo River: Fujiwara Michinaga. Michinaga was both the uncle and father-in-law of the current emperor Ichijō, and after the recent deaths of his older brothers, he was now in the coveted position of Regent. This gave him control over the Emperor in all but name, and his rule saw the height of Fujiwara family's domination over the imperial family. Michinaga and his sister, the Empress Dowager Higashi Sanjō-in, were on their way back from a pilgrimage to the Sumiyoshi Shrine, a popular destination for both aristocrats. The Sumiyoshi Shrine was also a centre of worship for Hyaku Dayū, a phallic deity who the asobi prayed to for customers. While men were discouraged from patronizing asobi on the way to the shrine to avoid ritual pollution, on the way back there were no such restrictions.

With one asobi rowing the skiff and another holding her parasol, Kokannon sang out sweetly to Michinaga, enticing him to come closer. The other asobi joined in as Kokannon beat her little drum, their voices drifting across the water. Everyone in Michinaga's party was enchanted by the singing of the asobi, but it was the Regent who would spend the night with Kokannon. He is said to have become infatuated with her during their brief acquaintance. The asobi would sometimes bring men back to their houses on the shore, but other times they would make love in the boat, an experience that Heian men spilled plenty of ink in praise of. When it was time for Michinaga and Kokannon to part, he, his sister, and the other noblewomen in her entourage paid Kokannon with incredible amounts of rice and other gifts. For a community who sometimes struggled to make ends meet, Kokannon's effort in securing the imperial family's patronage would have kept her asobi fed for a long time to come.

While aristocratic men wrote plenty about the pleasures of consorting with asobi, incredibly, we also have texts surviving from the women's own perspectives. In the 12th century, the eccentric emperor Go-Shirakawa invited an elderly asobi to court. The 70-year-old Otamae spent the next fourteen years transmitting her repertoire to the emperor and teaching him to sing in her family's style. The emperor compiled these songs into a text known as Ryōjin Hishō, some of which survives to this day. In this collection of imayō, we see a range of perspectives from asobi. Some sing frankly of the pleasures of sex, and these no doubt were some of the songs they used to attract customers; but others provide a more sobering look into the women's lives. A rare few asobi would be chosen as wives or concubines for wealthy men, and some of the women sing of their bitterness when a man they hoped would take them in abandons them to a life of instability. Unlike the more refined court poems of the time which rarely spoke of parental love, asobi sang frequently of their love of their children, sometimes condemning the rich who took their sons to work as servants or lamenting that their daughters followed in their footsteps in the sex trade.

These imayō songs have their origins in the lives of commoners but permeated the high culture of the Heian elite, who took up singing songs in what they called the "modern style" as a form of entertainment. The asobi thus served as a bridge between the "low" and "high" cultures of the Heian period, exerting a significant musical and poetic influence on the culture of the time. The cultural achievements of the Heian period are not the exclusive property of the elite, but influenced by women on the lowest rungs of society's ladder who made their living entertaining rich men.

Michinaga and Kokannon met again, many years after their brief tryst, when he had retired and become a lay priest. He was on his way back from another pilgrimage when she came up to him on the road. Such a privilege was the special reserve of asobi, who earned the right to approach the powerful without the usual restrictions commoners faced. He is said to have blushed when she greeted him, and then he took off the robe he was wearing and offered it to her as a gift. For a commoner to have such sway over one of the most powerful men in Japan that she could stop him on the street and make him blush shows us the lasting effect that encounters with asobi could have on noblemen - and the power of the asobi to make the most of their station in life by using their appeal to rich men to their own advantage.

Michinaga was a man with a high opinion of himself. He once wrote the following poem while gazing on a full moon:

This world, I think
Is indeed my world.
Like the full moon I shine,
Uncovered by any cloud.

But in this illustration, when he first meets the asobi Kokannon, the moon is only half full. Half moons were one of the symbols of the asobi. And tonight, at least, the world is not solely Michinaga's: There are entrepreneurial women who will take advantage of his carnal lusts and extravagant wealth to feed themselves and their community. The asobi occupied a unique place in Heian society, women of the lowest class mingling with men and women of the highest. The words of their songs, so enchanting in the moonlight on the Yodo River, come to us through the centuries, giving us glimpses into their lives, so different from those of the aristocrats who usually dominate our narratives about the past.

Here's what an asobi favours:
Her skills, her drums, her little boat,
The woman who holds her parasol,
The woman who poles her boat -
And Hyaku Dayū:
She prays to him for the love of men.

It was so much fun researching the asobi. I first came across a reference to them in the diary of Lady Sarashina, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, who recalls encountering a group of asobi on the road below a mountain in eastern Japan when she was a child. Originally I was going to draw some of the women from that encounter, but when I found out that we actually knew the name of an asobi who entertained a man in the year 1000, I couldn't pass that up! Once again, I'm stunned at how well-documented the lives of women of Japan are compared to other places in this period.

I took a lot of artistic inspiration from a 13th century painting of asobi as well as Japanese woodblock prints. Hiroshige is my favourite artist so it was really fun looking through his work for inspiration. The asobi are dressed in the same clothes as noblewomen would wear, since clothing was one of the main gifts that aristocrats gave them in payment for their services. Kokannon's teeth are even blackened in the court style. However, the giveaway that these are not women of the court is that they show their faces with no reserve, whereas the Empress Dowager shields her face modestly behind the blinds of her boat.

I hope you enjoyed learning about the asobi as much as I did!

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/kokan…

Others in the series include...
The Reader of Ancash
The Skiier of Sápmi
Mahendradatta
Martha Mother of Kings
Miss Zeng
The Singer and Dancer of Calos
The Devotee of Žemyna
The Little Family of Guayaquil

High Priestess Senshi

Sophia and Adelheid

Description
In the pleasure district of Eguchi, a half moon shone brightly above the waters of the Yodo River. Merchants and pilgrims, noblemen and fishermen - they all wound their way here to indulge in earthly pleasures. Eguchi was a small island port where the Yodo River, the main artery of trade into the capital, met the Inland Sea. It was here, where men rich and poor travelled, that the asobi set up their business. The asobi were prostitutes who specialized in singing imayō, folk songs with an earthy and flirtatious style that became all the rage at the Heian court. Originally, they had been itinerant entertainers, approaching wealthy travellers along the roads. But in the late 10th century, the asobi who lived nearest the capital started settling into a more permanent lifestyle, establishing the first pleasure districts in Japan along the Yodo River. Their choice of location was an astute one: Not only was the Yodo River the source of all trade into the capital, but it was also along the new pilgrimage routes that aristocrats took. Ostentatious pilgrims on their way back from a shrine visit were looking to indulge their pleasures and show off their wealth, and so the asobi saw an opportunity to shift their business model to take advantage of this new revenue stream.

Although the origins of the asobi are a matter of some debate, a good deal is known about their lives in the Heian period when aristocrats from the capital started patronizing them. The women were organized into matrilineal clans headed by a chōja, the standard word used to refer to the head of an occupational group. No men worked as procurers in the sex industry at Eguchi - the women themselves handled all of their own affairs. The payment from a patron was distributed equally among all of the asobi in a clan, except for the chōja who received an extra share. While we don't know how many women one clan typically consisted of, the evidence suggests that there may have been a lot of them since sometimes there was hardly enough to go around. Unlike court women, who were known by nicknames based on the titles of their male relatives, asobi took on stage names with playfully lofty titles.

One of these women was Kokannon, whose name meant "the little Kannon" - a reference to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. Her name was one borne by several later asobi of Eguchi, and it's possible that stage names were passed down from mother to daughter, or from chōja to chōja, in the clans. Nothing is known of Kokannon's background. Asobi were considered to be of the lowest social class, grouped with beggars and thieves in one 10th century text. And yet, some chōja came from more exalted backgrounds, such as the daughters of families who had lost out in imperial political disputes. Kokannon may have been born into the sex trade, or she may have entered it through other means - chōja are thought to have "adopted" women into their clans as well as passing on the trade to their biological daughters.

However Kokannon entered the sex trade, she soon became a skilled asobi. Trained in the arts of music and poetry as well as sexual techniques, the asobi were known for their unique method of attracting customers. They would row small skiffs out onto the water and sing imayō from their boats. One Heian writer, Ōe Masafusa, described it thus:

There, female entertainers have banded together; they pole their skiffs out to meet incoming boats and solicit men to share their beds. Their voices halt the clouds floating through the valleys, and their tones drift with the wind blowing over the water. Passerby cannot help but forget their families. The ripples spray like flowers among the reeds along the shore, and the boats of old fishermen and peddlers line up stern to stern, almost as if there's no water in between. From the highest nobility down to the hoi polloi, the women invite all to their bamboo-matted chambers and bestow favours upon them. Some men make these women their wives and mistresses and love them until death. Even wise men and princes are not exempt.

Masafusa goes on to name some of the most famous encounters between men and asobi in recent history - including one involving Kokannon. For in the year 1000, Kokannon rowed out to meet the most powerful man in Japan as his boat drifted along the Yodo River: Fujiwara Michinaga. Michinaga was both the uncle and father-in-law of the current emperor Ichijō, and after the recent deaths of his older brothers, he was now in the coveted position of Regent. This gave him control over the Emperor in all but name, and his rule saw the height of Fujiwara family's domination over the imperial family. Michinaga and his sister, the Empress Dowager Higashi Sanjō-in, were on their way back from a pilgrimage to the Sumiyoshi Shrine, a popular destination for both aristocrats. The Sumiyoshi Shrine was also a centre of worship for Hyaku Dayū, a phallic deity who the asobi prayed to for customers. While men were discouraged from patronizing asobi on the way to the shrine to avoid ritual pollution, on the way back there were no such restrictions.

With one asobi rowing the skiff and another holding her parasol, Kokannon sang out sweetly to Michinaga, enticing him to come closer. The other asobi joined in as Kokannon beat her little drum, their voices drifting across the water. Everyone in Michinaga's party was enchanted by the singing of the asobi, but it was the Regent who would spend the night with Kokannon. He is said to have become infatuated with her during their brief acquaintance. The asobi would sometimes bring men back to their houses on the shore, but other times they would make love in the boat, an experience that Heian men spilled plenty of ink in praise of. When it was time for Michinaga and Kokannon to part, he, his sister, and the other noblewomen in her entourage paid Kokannon with incredible amounts of rice and other gifts. For a community who sometimes struggled to make ends meet, Kokannon's effort in securing the imperial family's patronage would have kept her asobi fed for a long time to come.

While aristocratic men wrote plenty about the pleasures of consorting with asobi, incredibly, we also have texts surviving from the women's own perspectives. In the 12th century, the eccentric emperor Go-Shirakawa invited an elderly asobi to court. The 70-year-old Otamae spent the next fourteen years transmitting her repertoire to the emperor and teaching him to sing in her family's style. The emperor compiled these songs into a text known as Ryōjin Hishō, some of which survives to this day. In this collection of imayō, we see a range of perspectives from asobi. Some sing frankly of the pleasures of sex, and these no doubt were some of the songs they used to attract customers; but others provide a more sobering look into the women's lives. A rare few asobi would be chosen as wives or concubines for wealthy men, and some of the women sing of their bitterness when a man they hoped would take them in abandons them to a life of instability. Unlike the more refined court poems of the time which rarely spoke of parental love, asobi sang frequently of their love of their children, sometimes condemning the rich who took their sons to work as servants or lamenting that their daughters followed in their footsteps in the sex trade.

These imayō songs have their origins in the lives of commoners but permeated the high culture of the Heian elite, who took up singing songs in what they called the "modern style" as a form of entertainment. The asobi thus served as a bridge between the "low" and "high" cultures of the Heian period, exerting a significant musical and poetic influence on the culture of the time. The cultural achievements of the Heian period are not the exclusive property of the elite, but influenced by women on the lowest rungs of society's ladder who made their living entertaining rich men.

Michinaga and Kokannon met again, many years after their brief tryst, when he had retired and become a lay priest. He was on his way back from another pilgrimage when she came up to him on the road. Such a privilege was the special reserve of asobi, who earned the right to approach the powerful without the usual restrictions commoners faced. He is said to have blushed when she greeted him, and then he took off the robe he was wearing and offered it to her as a gift. For a commoner to have such sway over one of the most powerful men in Japan that she could stop him on the street and make him blush shows us the lasting effect that encounters with asobi could have on noblemen - and the power of the asobi to make the most of their station in life by using their appeal to rich men to their own advantage.

Michinaga was a man with a high opinion of himself. He once wrote the following poem while gazing on a full moon:

This world, I think
Is indeed my world.
Like the full moon I shine,
Uncovered by any cloud.

But in this illustration, when he first meets the asobi Kokannon, the moon is only half full. Half moons were one of the symbols of the asobi. And tonight, at least, the world is not solely Michinaga's: There are entrepreneurial women who will take advantage of his carnal lusts and extravagant wealth to feed themselves and their community. The asobi occupied a unique place in Heian society, women of the lowest class mingling with men and women of the highest. The words of their songs, so enchanting in the moonlight on the Yodo River, come to us through the centuries, giving us glimpses into their lives, so different from those of the aristocrats who usually dominate our narratives about the past.

Here's what an asobi favours:
Her skills, her drums, her little boat,
The woman who holds her parasol,
The woman who poles her boat -
And Hyaku Dayū:
She prays to him for the love of men.

It was so much fun researching the asobi. I first came across a reference to them in the diary of Lady Sarashina, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, who recalls encountering a group of asobi on the road below a mountain in eastern Japan when she was a child. Originally I was going to draw some of the women from that encounter, but when I found out that we actually knew the name of an asobi who entertained a man in the year 1000, I couldn't pass that up! Once again, I'm stunned at how well-documented the lives of women of Japan are compared to other places in this period.

I took a lot of artistic inspiration from a 13th century painting of asobi as well as Japanese woodblock prints. Hiroshige is my favourite artist so it was really fun looking through his work for inspiration. The asobi are dressed in the same clothes as noblewomen would wear, since clothing was one of the main gifts that aristocrats gave them in payment for their services. Kokannon's teeth are even blackened in the court style. However, the giveaway that these are not women of the court is that they show their faces with no reserve, whereas the Empress Dowager shields her face modestly behind the blinds of her boat.

I hope you enjoyed learning about the asobi as much as I did!

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/kokan…

Others in the series include...
The Reader of Ancash
The Skiier of Sápmi
Mahendradatta
Martha Mother of Kings
Miss Zeng
The Singer and Dancer of Calos
The Devotee of Žemyna
The Little Family of Guayaquil

High Priestess Senshi

Sophia and Adelheid