Pawned Wives, Prostitutes, and Purchased Women in Seventeenth-Century Japan

At the dawn of the early modern period, a newly-installed magistrate in the remote mining town of Innai Ginzan in northeastern Japan was confronted with a series of lawsuits involving different versions of the same question: Could a husband sell his wife to another man, and if so, could he still claim to be her husband? In a town where men routinely sold and pawned their wives and daughters in order to raise capital to invest in mining, the answers were not obvious. This talk analyzes the magistrate’s deliberations in these cases in order to explore the transition between medieval ideas about female family members as property and early modern conceptions that equated a woman’s place within the household to a subject’s position in the realm. It also suggests how women may have participated in and benefitted from this process of change. In Innai, the magistrate treated women’s bodies as interchangeable units of currency, and he saw no meaningful legal or social distinction that would prevent husbands from selling their wives or forcing them to have sex with other men. But married women insisted that wives were entitled to monogamy and maintained that they should not be considered alienable property. Though their suits were usually denied, their arguments presaged the legal reforms ultimately implemented by the Tokugawa shogunate, which imposed clear distinctions separating marriage from trafficking and wives from prostitutes.