The Seto Inland Sea (瀬戸内海), which hugs the coast of my hometown, is dotted with more than 700 islands—each with its own history and secrets. Today, I’d like to introduce one such island: Osaki-Shimojima (大崎下島).
From the Edo period through the early Showa era, this island flourished as a bustling port town, powered by the wind and the ebb and flow of maritime trade. Yet, time has changed everything.
The fate of its once-thriving red-light district, which rose and fell with the tides of history, was carefully chronicled by Kunio Yanagita, the “father of Japanese folklore,” in his classic work The Islands of the Seto Inland Sea (1927).
Below is my English translation of Yanagita’s account—a rare glimpse into the everyday life and quiet melancholy of old Japan. If you’d like to read the original, search for “柳田國男, 瀬戸内海の島々” (Kunio Yanagita, Setonaikai no Shimajima).
While on Osaki-Shimojima I rounded up several courtesans, poured tea, and asked them for the unvarnished truth about their trade. Here are a few things that stuck with me.
Mitarai—a name originally tied to a shrine—blossomed into a “wind-waiting” port in the days of sail. When the westerlies or the mountain wind (yamaji) blew, business boomed; once an east wind (kochi) set in, the town fell silent. Up-bound ships carried cargo but little cash; down-bound crews had just been paid. While the wind pinned them in harbor they spent freely, yet a single fair breeze sent them scurrying to sea and left the brothels empty.
During the age of coastal daimyō processions to Edo, a fleet stuck here could turn the place into a carnival so wild that common folk struggled to find food. A more recent boom came near the end of World War I, when coal-laden Daruma barges jammed the channel and nearly three hundred women worked the pleasure quarter. When I visited two years after the war, barely seventy remained. The island’s biggest brothel had already become a Buddhist chanting hall—only its skeleton of timber hinted at past glories.
One eerie legend clings to that house: hire a hundred girls and one will surely die, so no keeper ever dared go beyond ninety-nine. Nowadays even ninety-nine is unthinkable—five to seven girls is standard, some houses have only one. If you want a head-count, check the shamisen hanging on the earthen-floor wall: one instrument per woman. The plain merchant-style facade makes the sight even stranger.
The proprietor, called Otottsan, rows the tiny taxi boat known as a Choki—unless the house is too small, in which case they hire a skipper. Typically five or six girls share one boat. At sunset they stroll to the pier, check in at the kenban office, draw numbered tags, and push off. Earlier numbers mean better pickings, so elbows fly. Client or no client, they must stay on the water until the stroke of midnight. A balmy moonlit summer night is lovely; a cold, wet gale is misery incarnate.
On rainy evenings they pull on a fisherman’s oil-cloth cloak called a Tonza—umbrellas are hopeless on a bobbing skiff. Drenched and shivering, the women call up to ships or the quay: “We’re soaked—please haul us aboard!” Moved by pity, customers often hoist them onto the deck and out of the rain. After midnight, Otottsan ferries any unclaimed women back to town, only to fetch them again at dawn. It’s common for a favorite girl to linger late aboard a patron’s ship.
Need a second customer? Someone blows a trumpet across the bay—drums did the job in olden times. It is, in effect, the maritime version of “incoming client.” If the first guest refuses to yield, he pays an extra tip—once reckoned at about ten sen per drumstick, though the exact maths escapes me. Land-based quarters had the same custom, strict enough to decree “no more than one drum call per first guest.”
In Shimo-no-e, Oita, bedding belonged to the woman herself, so a midnight drum meant the customer had to rise and return the futon—no such fuss aboard the larger pleasure boats here. Ai-jima in Iyo used to run a similar system, but it has vanished completely. Thirteen years ago, I saw only two women on the beach, dressed in plain white cotton robes already patched at the elbows.
