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The history of #prostitution in Japan as told through folklore and ghost stories. When talking about the sex industry today, let's not forget what it meant for women for millenia: A short violent life that had little to do with the many stylized portraits.
"The Courtesan Jigokudayū Sees Herself as a Skeleton in the Mirror of Hell" by artist #Yoshitoshi. Images of women in #prostitution were utilized in many artworks reflecting on the beauty and fleetingness of life, but they also hint at the dark reality life in Japanese brothels.
Artists like #KitagawaUtamaro build their entire careers on depicting brothels and portraying the women inside them. While you will sometimes see sex buyers there being entertained - often it's just the women themselves, sitting, washing themselves, reading - pseudo idyllic.
When I put the #Japan into Instagram I got results for semi-pornography. This has a long tradition with Japanese women being exocitized and sexually exploited by men from other cultures, but in it's compartively isolated times Japanese men still managed to be horrible to women.
Sold to brothels as minors, sexually exploited as teenagers, frequently debt-bonded for life - women in Japanese #prostitution had a lot to be angry about and the men who paid to access them knew it - that's why there are stories of their ghostly revenge.
There was the superstition that a deceased person could come back to haunt any items formely in their possession - especially their Kimono: When a woman died in #prostitution, her hands mit return through her Kimono sleaves to beg for freedom, proper Buddhist burial or to attack.
In order to gain a sliver of autonomy over their bodies some women in Japanese #prostitution would self-harm or neglect to no longer be attractive to sex buyers. This may have inspired stories about the #Kejoro, a monster who looks like a normal woman until you get close to her.
There is the #KeraKeraOnna - the gigantic ghostly apparation of a woman who has died in debt-bondage in #prostitution and returns to haunt the red-light district and terrify or even drive insane the men who were the cause of her early demise.
There are also many femme fatale like stories of magical foxes, cats or spiders turning into prostituted women seeking to seduce men - sometimes marrying them, then vanishing, but often in order to drain them of money, energy or life itself. #Kitsune #Bakeneko #Jorogumo
