| Chapter 1: | Distance, Containment, and Connoisseurship: The Privately Dying Demimondes of Bokutô kidan and “ ‘Iki’ no kôzô” |
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Chapter 1
Distance, Containment,
and Connoisseurship
The Privately Dying Demimondes
of Bokutô kidan and “ ‘Iki’ no kôzô”
We all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously.
—William Vollmann, Whores for Gloria1
Already an enclosed world, at least in officially sanctioned incarnations such as Yoshiwara, the karyûkai and its age-old traditions grew even more shut off and distant from the rest of society, first as Japan geared up for war and furthered its colonialist ambitions in the 1920s and 1930s and later as the nation recovered from catastrophic devastation and reinvented itself, both culturally and economically, after WWII. Postwar reforms such as the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Act (Baishun bôshi hô), which were intended to give Japan a more modern veneer within the international community,