Epidemics as leisure killers: The transformation of Japan’ s entertainment industry in the second half of 19th century

Abstract

From 1858 through the mid-1880s, a network of ukiyo-e painters created numerous prints showing the ways to stay safe from an epidemic disease. Prints about preventing cholera and measles during the epidemics of 1858, 1862 and 1877 were especially numerous. The basic narratives expressed in these prints referred to folk beliefs and general medical prescriptions for preserving health as recorded in the texts on the “cultivation of life” (yōjō) that were popular among the commoners of the late Edo period (1603–1868). The article focuses on illustrations of the struggle against cholera and measles, which depict the economic crisis that overtook the entertainment industry during the epidemics as.city dwellers abstained from previously habitual ways of seeking pleasure. The author argues that these prints together with preventive healthcare leaflets that summarized medical knowledge in Japan at that time went beyond impugning the reputation of certain workers in the entertainment industry during epidemics to actually disseminate knowledge about the hazards of the “old ways” of taking pleasure. The transformation of the Japanese entertainment culture during the Meiji period (1868–1912) was brought about not only by the government’s efforts to implement its policy of social modernization, but also by the reaction of the common people to the epidemics in the second half of the 19th century. It was the danger from epidemics that accelerated the adaptation of public awareness and common practice to sanitary norms and rules for personal hygiene. A specific example of the theatrical industry’s response to the health concerns of the public mood is examined. The article shows that the first initiatives to modernize theater buildings came from figures within that industry as they became acutely sensitive to the mood of the urban population.