The Pleasures of the Boy Love Teahouse

Welcome to the Kagemajaya, it’s a Boy Love Teahouse. In the Edo, or Tokugawa, Period in Japan (about 1600-1850 A.D.), hundreds of Kagemajaya flourished in the urban centers of Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo (which was later named Tokyo). At the teahouses, men (or boys) of the merchant and ruling classes could buy time with attractive teen boys, known as Kagema, for companionship, and sexual services. This silk print from the mid-1700′s is how it looked to an artist at the time:

The Teahouses operated openly and there was no social stigma from going there. That’s because at the time Nanshoku – sex between 2 guys – was a pretty regular part of Japanese life. We’re going to take a look at some actvities in a teahouse, but first I get to rattle some about the history of Nanshuko in Japan.

Until about 150 years ago, male/male love and sex were pretty prevalent and accepted in Japan.  As far back as at least the 9th century, Buddhist monks were fucking young acolytes at their monasteries, who were known as “chigo.”  By the 13th Century, the practice spawned a whole Japanese literary genre, the “Chigo Monogatori,” or Acolyte Tales, with sometimes very graphic descriptions of the action.

Diaries of court nobles from the Heian period (800 – 1200 A.D.) talk about sex with male courtiers and about the Emperors who took their “pleasure” with handsome teens.  During the Kamakura Period (1200 – 1300) the growing practice of older samurai being both mentors and lovers of younger ones acquired its own formalized name, “Wakashudo,” or the “Way of Youth” (the addition of “do” as a suffix to a term was a recognition of its status as a Way of Life, as in Bushido, the Way of the Warrior). Often, the age difference between the samurai in such pairings was only a few years and the two would enter into vows of lifelong commitment. Soon, Wakashudo became an established part of the samurai way, both for warriors and for the warlords of the clans that dominated different parts of the country.

By the 1500′s, the term had become shortened to Shudo and was used to refer in general to male/male sex.  The Edo Period in Japan was sort of like the Renaissance period in Europe.  Interest in science, arts, and aesthetics flourished.  A merchant class emerged and the population began to concentrate in urban centers – the capital, Edo , grew from a small town in 1500 to a population of over 1 million by 1720. The country was governed by the powerful Tokugawa Shogunate, with thousands of samurai, and their lovers, occupying the highest tier of the social order.

During the period, Shudo became more and more widespread and accepted as a social norm. Of the 11 Tokugawa Shoguns who ruled Japan from 1603 to 1837, 8 were known to have male lovers (one of the other 3 died when he was 7, so he probably shouldn’t count). One of the more notable shoguns was Iemitsu, the third Tokugawa Shogun, who became shogun in 1623 at the age of 19 and ruled until his death in 1651. At an early age he took on a slightly older attendant as a lover. But when he was 16 he got angry with, or tired of, the 21 year old and murdered him while they were sharing a bath. Iemitsu is credited with ridding Japan of the Christian missionaries that had begun to pour into the country to impose their righteousness on the “heathen” Japanese. The absence of Christian moralizing was probably one of the main reasons Nanshuko stayed alive as long as it did. After the reopening of Japan to the west in the mid-1800′s, Christianity resumed its infiltration, and, wow, what a surprise, the acceptance and prevalence of Nanshuko started to decline.

But our focus for now is the time just before that, when guy/guy sex was at its peak. The monks, the shoguns, and the samurai had been hard at it for centuries, but in the 1600′s members of the growing merchant class decided to start getting in on the fun. For them, Shudo got started with young actors from the Kabuki theaters that had become popular in the cities. Women were banned from the Kabuki stage in 1629, so boys played all the roles. Many of the pretty ones, the oyama, started moonlighting, doing some offstage “drama” with wealthy admirers. Eventually, the dressing rooms or wherever they were doing it got too crowded and there weren’t enough oyama for all the eager customers.

And that gave birth to the Kagemajaya, nice places full of hot boys with hot asses for hire. The most popular Kagema were boys in their mid-teens, 14 to 17 or so. When they got to be 18 or 19, their business would decline some and they began spending time training 12 and 13 year olds to become new kagema.  I’ve done a few series of pics about what I think these boys and their Teahouses might  have been like.  You can visit them by clicking on the images below.

A Visit to the Bath-house

The New Kagema