There are a lot of complications that come with getting pregnant,
and as a man, I think I’m uniquely qualified to talk about them.
In the Edo Period in Japan, for ladies of the night in the pleasure districts,
getting pregnant was considered a pretty rude thing to do to your peers and to your brothel.
But they had many different ways to deal with it.
Let’s start by talking about the more tame practices and move to the extreme ones
that’ll make you spit out those ramen noodles.
Unfortunately, the more extreme practices were the more common ones.
Licensed prostitutes were called yūjō 遊女.
If they got pregnant, their managers yelled at them and even beat them.
Getting knocked up was a big deal for yūjōs because they couldn’t work.
Nothing deflated a customer’s excitement like having the facade of erotic glamour be
shattered by a swollen belly.
Reality is a fly in the wine glass of lust.
And what do you do when a fly lands in your wine?
You quickly pick it up, and yell, “Spit it out, you thief!”
Pregnancies also came with health issues like
depression, childbirth, and getting beaten by your manager.
A yūjō could be out of commission for months, costing the brothel that sweet sweet cash,
and forcing her peers to pick up the work.
This is why all yūjōs had a PhD in birth control methods, and a Master’s in swallowing.
Water.
Here are some of the methods they used.
Certified techniques, seven days a week.
The Rinse Method.
After seeing a client, a yūjō would scoop and rinse out any lingering customer juice down there.
The Bamboo Paper Method,
where you would fold a piece of bamboo paper and just shove it up in there. Simple.
Some women used this strategically to discourage a client she didn’t like from coming back,
because many men did not like the feeling of their little man being ground down by paper.
It wasn’t the type of grinding they expected.
Other women rewarded clients they did like by not using the bamboo paper method.
So, if it’s slippery down there, it means she likes you, or she’s on her period.
The Moxa Method.
Moxa is a plant called mugwort.
You crush the plant and place a few piles below the belly button, and burn them.
It’s supposed to prevent pregnancy; in certain cases, for almost a whole year.
No, it really works.
You see, if you get pregnant, then you’re guaranteed not to get pregnant again
for almost a whole year.
The Horn Condom Method,
where the customer would use an animal horn to cover his own horny horn.
I’m guessing they were horns from oxen mostly.
This method was not very popular for the client or the yūjō.
There were cases of people using softer material.
Surprisingly, their flawless, watertight birth control methods didn’t always work.
Sometimes a determined, Naruto-like tadpole who never gave up would slip through the bamboo.
So how did they deal with this?
In many different ways that we’ll talk about now.
So pull up your panties, do some stretches, and get ready.
The natural solution was giving birth.
This wasn’t the norm, but it wasn’t uncommon either.
Pulling that baby out of the womb was risky.
Women did prayers to survive childbirth.
Techniques for encouraging an easy birth included spells, holding a seahorse during labor, and
drinking medicine from a seashell.
They had these establishments that cared for female entertainers until they were well enough
to return to work.
Yūjōs gave birth there and stayed for a while afterwards.
These places also cared for yūjōs who were sick or ones who ended their pregnancies.
Of course, most female entertainers did not get to stay at a nice place to relax and recover.
It was only for the high status ladies, the ones whose bodies attracted coin
like hot tubs attract Twitch streamers.
Sometimes the mother would choose to keep her baby.
Usually only high class courtesans went this route because they had rich long-term clients
who were happy to help support the kid, anything to keep the mother away from that box of bamboo paper.
The brothel might choose to care for the child.
Girls were trained as child attendants and became future entertainers.
Boys were raised to do work for the brothel like cooking, cleaning, and helping yūjōs
escape a rotten life.
Some boys even grew up to become male entertainers, like male geisha.
However, it was more common for babies to be given up for adoption.
Most women couldn’t support a child, and brothels usually didn’t think it was worth the hassle.
Wait, what about the father, you say.
Fathers didn’t bother.
Were there exceptions where the father returned and took in the baby?
Sure, and sometimes a woman swipes right on your profile, but it generally did not happen.
Also, the father had no right to the child,
not that there were many clients eager to step up.
No, the fate of the baby was something for the brothel to deal with.
Fun fact: most pregnancies happened because the yūjō fooled around with a male coworker
rather than a client.
Having said all of that, raising the child or giving it up for adoption happened rarely.
What people did way way more often was they aborted the pregnancy.
It was very common.
People had different views of what it meant to be a person back then.
In the first half of a pregnancy, a fetus was not yet considered human, so ending the
pregnancy in the first 4 months or so was no big deal morally.
In the second half, people did start calling it a child, so ending a pregnancy in the second half...
was also no big deal morally.
In fact, most of the time, pregnancies were ended in the second half.
Now it wasn’t because people were pro choice.
They didn’t think in those terms.
Mothers did not have choice, actually, as we’ll see later.
Children were considered not fully of this world, not fully human,
like they had one foot in the spirit world and one foot in the human world.
I talk about this idea in another video here if you want to take a look.
So returning a child back to the spirit world was not morally wrong.
For a yūjō, it was a regular event.
Sometimes, she swallowed a drug.
If she did it early enough before her belly grew too big, no one would have been the wiser.
But if she was far along, things got more complicated.
The woman was laid down, tied up, and gagged to prepare for the pain.
Another person readied a drug mixture made up of a bunch of plant parts.
For example, they would mix in a bowl some betel nut powder, boiled mint leaves,
oh and a dash of mercury.
Some other possible ingredients were cherry root, lye, red chili, and skin of pomegranate,
oh and also mercury, they’re also mercury, there’s usually mercury.
Now I won’t be graphic in case you’re eating ramen, but the operation involved using
a tool that looked like long chopsticks.
See the description if you want to read about it in more detail.
Books about these techniques were widely distributed.
Remember they didn’t have small cameras or Dr. House.
They couldn’t see what was happening up in there.
It was a dangerous procedure.
There was risk of infection, of piercing the woman’s insides, oh and also mercury.
Luckily there was a safer option, for the woman.
This option was used just as much as ending the pregnancy, if not more.
That’s right, she could go ahead and give birth, then kill the baby.
Giving birth had its own risks, but it was still safer than aborting the pregnancy,
though the baby might have disagreed.
After a midwife successfully helped deliver a baby, it was customary for her to ask one question:
“Do you want the baby kept, or sent back?”
“Sent back” meant sending the baby back to the spirit world like the gods had a return policy,
where it would wait for another opportunity to re-enter the world elsewhere.
Choking or smothering were the usual methods.
Now the mother was allowed to say she wanted to keep it.
And it would have made no difference.
It was not up to her, it was up to her manager or the owner of the brothel.
They probably considered the mother’s wishes, but at the end of the day, it was their business decision.
Raising a child was expensive.
They had to think not only of profits, but of the well-being of all the workers.
If the business failed, it would have hurt everyone.
Another common decision for brothels was to:
One. End a yūjō’s pregnancy so she could go back to work early.
Big risk to her health.
Or two. Let her carry the pregnancy to term, then send back the baby.
Less risky, but you lose a few months of income.
Surprisingly, it seemed that mothers were generally okay with this.
Most people did not see it as morally wrong.
Sending back the newborn right after birth was common, even for mothers who were not seks workers.
People thought a fetus and a newborn were pretty much the same thing, in the same category.
Since they were okay with ending a fetus, they were okay with ending a newborn.
It was wild.
Some people even thought that parents who sold their daughters to a brothel were much
worse than parents who killed their daughters at birth, because the former were basically
parents who raised kids for money.
They sold their children as products.
Now all this didn’t mean that yūjōs didn’t care about their kids.
If they chose to keep the baby, they loved it just as much as parents today.
If they chose to keep it.
In the second half of the Edo Period, these views started to change, perhaps because there
was a problem at the time with the population not growing.
People became more vocal against the constant sending back of babies.
Anti baby killing texts appeared, arguing the merits of not killing babies.
Some regions banned the practice, but punishments were typically light.
Like you had to pay some money.
Unlike today, the public back then saw killing a baby as a much less serious crime than killing an adult.
Adults were more attached to the human world.
Now there is some debate among big-brained people about exactly how common
aborting and sending back babies was.
Recent studies suggest that it may have only been common in northeast Japan,
and less so in the rest of the country.
We’re not sure who’s right, so we’ll just let them brains battle it out.
For more related topics, check out these videos, I’ll see you there.
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