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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& #39;s not forget what it meant for women for millenia: A short violent life that had little to do with the many stylized portraits. https://youtu.be/8BivAAC5Zz4 ">https://youtu.be/8BivAAC5Z...
"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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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.
