Getting to Know You

a mirror of our present in the past

29 March 2022

The year is 1855 CE. The Tokugawa family has ruled Japan as shoguns since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Travel around the country increases, because the shoguns require the feudal lords to maintain residences in Edo, and there are regular trips between Edo and the feudal domains. Roads are built or upgraded, and along the roads there are tolls, horse-changing stations, restaurants, and inns. (There are even souvenir stands and shopping opportunities but that’s a story for another day.)

The system also included an old woman at each stopping place whose sole employ was to inspect the genitals of travelers. Known as 改め婆 (aratamebabā), literally the old woman who makes sure, she was, in essence, a law enforcement official.

Women were not allowed to travel on their own. Even influential members of the aristocracy and Buddhist nuns needed entourages. And although I haven’t yet done significant research into this (I can, however, recommend Stranger in the Shōgun’s City, by Amy Stanley), I have a theory: the shogunate decrees that created the office of old woman who makes sure likely stem from the fact that women had disguised themselves as young men in order to escape bad marriages or forced engagements, or to escape servitude to other families or to pleasure houses.

This print by Utagawa (Andō) Hiroshige (yes, the same artist who did the Great Wave Off Kanagawa) and Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III) of Arai, the 32nd station on the Tōkaidō, the coastal road that linked Edo and Kyōto, includes an image of the old woman who makes sure at work.

Her monocle was technology that the Dutch (restricted to contact with Japan for the duration of the Edo Period from the single small island of Dejima, off the coast of Nagasaki) introduced, and she is very carefully inspecting the crotch of a traveler at Arai.

There’s not a lot of research either in Japanese or English that describes her duties, but I suspect her work was strictly hands-off. I love to imagine how fulfilling her job might have been (in spite of her role in perpetuating misogyny). All day long, she got to inspect the goods, as it were.

And in our current era, one of increasing hostility to queer identities, especially directed at our trans and non-binary siblings, I wonder if this job is about to make an unfortunate comeback.

One last thing. Can I just get an amen for the traveler’s cloth shin guards? They are a thing of beauty. A traditional Japanese tie-dye pattern.