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The Katsurame: A Window into Professionalization, Legitimation, and Gender in Edo Japan 

The katsurame were a group of women outside of Kyoto who practiced matrilineal succession and fulfilled a wide variety of occupations: they were fishmongers, religious specialists, entertainers, military camp aids, and prostitutes. In this talk, I begin by teasing apart the various professional threads that define the katsurame, charting the history of their multifaceted job description and drawing comparisons to other professions occupied by women. While katsurame were not the only women who existed outside official categories on the fringes of society, or who engaged in both entertainment and the sex trade, their range of occupations was in many ways unique and thus required narrative legitimation in order to perpetuate it. Accordingly, starting in the Edo period, they claimed to be descended from Empress Jingū’s midwives, connecting their work to various threads of her narrative. I examine the two items most frequently cited in their references to Jingū: the katsurame’s distinctive headdress, and the maternity sash (haraobi) from which it is held to have originated. These were not only tools of their trade, but important woven objects connected to the labor of other women and to significant childbirth rituals. I argue that by tracing their roots to Empress Jingū, the katsurame gained further legitimacy and renown as professionals in an increasingly diverse world of working women.

Emily Simpson

Dr. Emily B. Simpson is an assistant professor in the Department for the Study of Religions at Wake Forest University. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Prior to her appointment at Wake Forest University, she taught Japanese religions at Dartmouth College and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Dr. Simpson specializes in medieval and early modern Japan and is interested in the creation and structure of Japanese deities, the intersection of religion and gender, and in the role of narratives in promoting and spreading religious discourses. Her current book project, Crafting a Goddess: Divinization and Womanhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of Empress Jingū, explores how an ancient empress was divinized as a goddess both in imperial circles and regional, women-centered deity cults.

Simpson Lecture Poster