Word: yoshiwara
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...film investigates the lives of six prostitutes who work in "Dreamland," a better-class brothel in Tokyo's notorious Yoshiwara district, and for the most part, the acting is excellent. Machiko Kyo is particularly good. She slips so naturally into lace undies and Americanized manners that she is hard to recognize as the stilted medieval heroine of Rashomon and Gate of Hell. If the story seems repetitive and interminable, so indeed must the life of a prostitute...
...though less and less firmly; male legislators perversely refused to outlaw the ancient profession of prostitution that, with some 500,000 practitioners, flourishes in Japan as it does almost nowhere else. Infamous the world over, Tokyo's thriving red-light districts, ranging from the lacquered pleasure domes of Yoshiwara to the noisome and disreputable turmoil of Shinjuku and Kamedo, have felt the chill winds of reform blow closer and closer, but each time the storm has passed...
Koryusai, a contemporary of Shunsho, was among the few high-born Ukiyo-e artists. The samurai generally thought printmaking and even print buying beneath their dignity. Famed for his woodcuts of Yoshiwara girls, Koryusai did equally well with more imaginative pictures of birds and animals. His Phoenix Bird (above at right) is notable for its delicacy and restraint, makes elaborate use of embossing, i.e., printing without ink, for plumage...
...major Ukiyo-e artist who vastly preferred the stage to Yoshiwara subjects was Shunsho (1726-1792). His clean, bold woodcuts of single actors in self-induced throes of emotion (left) have earned him a deep if narrow niche in Japanese art. Wrote Novelist James Michener in his recent book on Ukiyo-e: "None followed his particular interpretation of art more honestly than he, and few men in any field have ever attained so close to one hundred percent of their capabilities...
Utamaro (1753-1806) has been called one of the most refined printmakers who ever lived, and damned as a decadent who started Ukiyo-e on its downward course. (The censure may stem from the fact that he spent at least a thousand nights in the Yoshiwara, and that the girls in his designs are impossibly tall and willowy.) Actually Utamaro's work shows as much range as refinement. His first important series of prints was a book of insect studies, and his greatest depicts the wilderness upbringing of Kintaro, the Japanese Hercules. Kintaro Reaching for Chestnut is as healthy...