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10 People Who Coined Paranormal Terms Mar 15th 2016, 07:00, by Micah Duke Weird Stuff Debra Kelly March 15, 2016 There are a lot of terms that you can expect to hear frequently if you choose to delve into the seamy underbelly of the unknown, the unclassified, the undocumented, and the paranormal. Those terms all started somewhere, and the people who coined them have some fascinating stories to tell. 10 Vincent Gaddis The ‘Bermuda Triangle’ The Bermuda Triangle is one of the most famous supposedly mysterious spots on the planet, and its history goes back pretty far, long before the ill-fated Flight 19 left Florida and disappeared into the mysterious waters of the triangle. Even Christopher Columbus made notes about the strange lights and even stranger compass readings that he was getting within the confines of what would be called the Bermuda Triangle much later. The term itself only dates back to 1964, when it was used by the writer Vincent Gaddis in an article for Argosy magazine. The story of the missing Flight 19 was on the cover, and Gaddis’s dubbing of the area as “the Bermuda Triangle” gave the myth a different sort of life. In the article, Gaddis recounted some of the most famous disappearances of the area, including the tanker Marine Sulphur Queen in 1963 and two KC-135 Air Force tanker jets the same year. He went on to say that more than 1,000 people had disappeared there over the course of the previous two decades, with the US military publicly claiming that they were “baffled.” Gaddis wrote, “The Bermuda Triangle underlines the fact that despite swift wings and the voice of radio, we still have a world large enough so that men and their machines and ships can disappear without a trace.” Part of the problem with the travel conditions in the Bermuda Triangle is not just the weather, but the fact that it really is the center of some sort of natural phenomenon, being one of the few places where true north and magnetic north sync up, which can affect compass readings. But when Gaddis used the term “Bermuda Triangle” alongside words like “menace” and a mysterious weather abnormality he called “a hole in the sky,” the name elevated the area into something more ominous, even though the area doesn’t actually have more disappearances than any other heavily traveled ocean areas. 9 Charles Richet ‘Ectoplasm’ Ectoplasm is essentially the stuff that ghosts are made of. During the Victorian era, seances were all the rage. With a little deft sleight-of-hand, a good medium could convince the audience that they were channeling spirits in a very physical form. Everyday materials like cheesecloth (and some not-so-everyday ones like bits of animals) doubled for a mysterious, otherworldly substance that Charles Richet first called “ectoplasm.” Before anyone condemns the idea as mystic nonsense, it’s important to note that Richet had serious scientific credentials. The winner of a Nobel Prize for his work on anaphylaxis and allergens (not to mention some pioneering work on the nervous system and anesthesia), his interest in ectoplasm was scientific. Scientists already knew, after all, that living cells had plasma in them. It didn’t seem too far-fetched, then, to believe that there were other types of plasma making up other parts of the universe. The idea of ectoplasm had been well documented in seances dating back to at least the 1870s, but Richet didn’t officially coin the term until his 1923 book, Thirty Years of Psychical Research: Being a Treatise on Metaphysics. He described it as a tentacle-like, filament-like substance that came from somewhere on the medium’s body but didn’t have to remain connected to the person. He also noted that it was a very personal thing and was a substance that seemed to reach out to feel its way around an unfamiliar, mortal world. Richet didn’t make the word up, either; it had a legitimate scientific usage before it came to be associated with the presence of spirits. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it first showed up in 1883, in reference to a description of the jelly-like body of the amoeba. 8 Ivan T. Sanderson ‘Out-Of-Place-Artifacts’ (‘Ooparts’) Like countless other paranormal researchers and believers in things out of this world, Ivan T. Sanderson started out in legitimate science. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he traveled the world, collecting and cataloging specimens for noted British museums, and even worked for the British Ministry of Information during World War II. During the war, he was stationed in New York City, and it was there that his life seemed to take a detour from legitimate science into the more glamorous realm of the public eye. Starting out as a respected nature writer, he moved on to television and radio and discovered that the idea of the unknown, the paranormal, and the monstrous often provided better stories to tell than what he’d been doing all along. By the 1960s, his work was almost exclusively in nontraditional science. He made Bigfoot a household name, established the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, and published his own magazine. Not only did he elevate the idea of Bigfoot and help convince people with way too much money to fund hunts for the elusive creature, he also coined the term “Ooparts,” or “Out-of-Place-Artifacts,” to refer to objects that couldn’t be explained away by conventional science. Sanderson claimed that these Ooparts were found all over the Earth, often embedded in the geological record, and their appearance in places where they shouldn’t be was clearly a clue that there was something more going on than we knew about. Writers like David Hatcher Childress have gone on to make the idea of Ooparts one of the cornerstones of the paranormal and the unexplained. Citing incidents like ancient Roman coins showing up in Latin American graves and treasure troves or stones with Assyrian writing cropping up in the Americas as proof that countless civilizations managed to cross the Atlantic, Childress and others have no shortage of otherworldly explanations for Sanderson’s Ooparts. 7 John Wall, Lucien Blancou & Bernard Heuvelmans ‘Cryptozoology’ And ‘Cryptids’ Cryptozoology is arguably one of the most well-known unscientific sciences, and the origins of the name are as enigmatic as the creatures it claims to study. The first time the term was ever used in print is fairly recent—in a 1959 book written by a French author called Lucien Blancou. Blancou’s dedication stated that he was writing for Bernard Heuvelmans, whom he credited as the “master of cryptozoology.” Heuvelmans himself claimed that he was the one that came up with the term, but another person—Ivan T. Sanderson—had admittedly come up with the same word at the same time in another part of the world. In another version of the story, Heuvelmans said it was Sanderson who first came up with the word on his own and should get the credit for using it first. But it might not be as clear-cut as that, either, with a different form of the word, “cryptozoological,” used in a 1941 review of a book called The Lungfish, the Dodo and the Unicorn. Written by Willy Ley and subtitled “An Excursion into Romantic Zoology,” the book was a compilation of creatures both fantastic and mythological and a collection of “facts” pertaining to these magical beasts. While the terms “cryptozoologist” and “cryptid” might seem to go hand-in-hand, “cryptid” wasn’t coined until much later. In 1983, John Wall wrote a letter to the International Society of Cryptozoology and proposed the term as a sort of catch-all word that could not only be applied to any and all unknown or unusual beasts, but as one that sounds a bit more scientific than the words used before. The definition of “cryptid” continued to be argued for years after. It was only in 2004 that the community agreed on one that organized potential cryptids into four different groups—members of a species appearing outside their accepted range, individuals of a known species showing a distinct and undocumented variation (such as in size or color), a creature bearing a resemblance to an extinct species, and of course, a creature previously unknown and undocumented. 6 Jenny Randles The ‘Oz Factor’ There are several things that often come up when people recount alleged encounters with a UFO, and one of them is a weird sense of calm that comes over them while they’re looking up at something extraterrestrial. In 1983, British author and paranormal researcher Jenny Randles named this dissociative mental state the “Oz Factor,” after the imaginary land of Oz. According to Randles, the Oz Factor says loads about what’s going on during these encounters, and she thinks that the calm that descends over some people is a clear sign that the aliens aren’t just targeting the person’s physical form, but their consciousness as well. She developed the term while investigating a close encounter that involved two men. One saw an alien craft, while the other saw nothing. No one else in the area saw anything, either, and rather than doubt the first witness’s credibility, Randles took another approach. She started to develop the idea that there was a “zone of influence” around alien craft. Only those within the zone were able to see—and remember—the craft being there at all. The more research she did and the more people she interviewed, the more she began to see patterns in the witnesses’ claims. (As long as she was asking them the right questions, according to her.) There was a sort of mental tingle, a sense that something was calling to them, the fading away of ambient sounds, and a sense of complete isolation. She found that each encounter had an average of only 2.6 witnesses, and to her, that suggested that each of those encounters was focused only on the individual and removing them (or their consciousness) from reality in a way that interrupted the normal flow of information between the brain and the world outside, much like heading off to the magical world of Oz. 5 Alfred Watkins ‘Ley Lines’ Today, ley lines are the fanciful stuff of the paranormal, referring to a network of lines that cross the globe and connect faraway places through magical energy. Whether they’re the stuff of New Age claims, dowsing, or magnetism, ley lines are definitely the stuff of the mystical, and they absolutely didn’t start out that way. In 1921, Alfred Watkins was riding through the English countryside when he stopped at the top of a hill. He was struck by the extraordinary pattern of the landscape below, which was laid out in a series of straight paths. Those paths, he discovered, connected everything from ancient barrows to old churches, from standings stones to centuries-old trees. Watkins would describe that moment as a “flood of ancestral memory,” and he’d go on to map these straight lines that radiated out from all these incredibly important locations. By September 1921, he gave his first lecture on these lines, which he called “ley-lines,” and he pitched the idea that they were all over the country. His ideas were pretty deeply rooted in regular history. Watkins suggested that these ley lines were the tracks of ancient people who had once walked the land. They were the remains of ancient trade routes running between major locations, which he named “beckon sites.” Along the ley lines were mark-points, tracing the ancient paths across the landscape, and they were traversed by craftsmen wandering from one village to another and by religious pilgrims going back and forth between churches, cairns, and monoliths. They were laid out by men tracing the shortest distance between two points—a straight line. When Watkins died in 1935, his Straight Track Club, a group dedicated to mapping these ley lines, died with him. They’d failed to get mainstream archaeology to accept their theory, but when John Mitchell learned of it, he turned ley lines into a series of mystical connections mapping an energy grid and connecting Britain’s ancient sites. 4 Ivan T. Sanderson (Again) The ‘Devil’s Graveyard’ And The ‘Vile Vortex’ In the early 1970s, Ivan T. Sanderson ran first a diagram and then an article in speculative magazines detailing what he called the “12 Vile Vortices.” The title of the article, “The Twelve Devil’s Graveyards Around the World,” was just as sensational as you’d imagine, and it built on his previous work on the Bermuda Triangle. According to Sanderson, these 12 places were locations across the globe that had an uncannily high rate of disappearances of planes, ships, and people, and those disappearances were identified by the patterns of electromagnetic vibrations that they gave off. The areas, he went on to say, form a definite pattern themselves. Located at 72-degree intervals across the globe, the 12 are the North and South Poles, the Bermuda Triangle, the Algerian Megalithic Ruins near Timbuktu, Karachi in Pakistan, the Devil’s Sea Triangle near Iwo Jima, Hamakulia (southeast of Hawaii), the megaliths of Sarawak in Borneo, Nan Madol in Micronesia, the center of Inca culture in South America, Easter Island, and Gabon in West Africa. When his article and his theories went public, a group of researchers from the Soviet Union released a subsequent paper proposing the idea that the world could be laid out in the form of a dodecahedron (think of a 12-sided die) and that the 12 vortices fit neatly within the model. David Hatcher Childress also theorized as to what these vile vortexes might mean in his attempts to map what he called the “world grid.” It’s been suggested that all sites where electromagentic anomalies are regularly recorded in addition to mysterious disappearances and other sorts of activity are weak spots and the locations of doorways to other dimensions. When the doorways of the vile vortexes open, said writer Nicholas R. Nelson, people disappear. 3 J. Allen Hynek ‘Close Encounters’ The term “close encounters” was made famous by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it was coined by astronomer Josef Allen Hynek. There are seven different kinds of encounters, ranging from the First Kind (seeing objects in the sky) to the Seventh Kind (mating and the creation of a human-alien hybrid), and the story of how the terms came about is rather odd. Hynek was a consultant on Project Blue Book, the notorious US Air Force project of investigating UFO sightings. Hynek was one of the chief skeptics involved, although he’d later come out as one of the major supporters of the need to investigate UFOs with the same diligence given to any other scientific phenomenon. Well before Project Blue Book, he had long been fascinated by the occult and the esoteric writings of the Rosicrucians, and in 1948, he was a part of Project Sign, the Air Force’s initial investigation into UFOs and attempt to discover the truth about what they believed to be top secret Soviet technology. Hynek spent decades debunking sightings as meteors, planets, and weather balloons, but during his interviews of countless military pilots, he’d later report that he was starting to have a change of heart. By 1966, he had completely separated himself from the programs and called for the organization of a committee of scientists to study what he considered to be a very real threat. Hynek took a massive hit to his credibility in what had been his field for decades. By 1968, peers who had previously respected him were viewing him with greater and greater contempt, and his 1972 book, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, was a failed attempt at getting some of that respect back. In the book, Hynek detailed his classification system for close encounters in an attempt to bring some scientific credibility to the study of UFOs, but astronomers were having none of it, especially when Hynek joined the television circuit and a panel of experts formed by The National Enquirer. 2 Jean Paul ‘Doppelganger’ The idea of a doppelganger is an undeniably creepy one, literally meaning “one who goes twice.” As far back as ancient Rome, a form of doppelganger was used when an emperor died. While the emperor’s real body went through all the indignities that went along with death and cremation, and effigy was constructed to symbolically be attended by doctors, mourned by subjects, and finally cremated in public. The same process was done in medieval Europe, but it wasn’t until the 1790s that writer Jean Paul coined the term “doppelganger.” In 1796, Jean Paul wrote Siebenkas, the story of two men so identical that they were able to exchange their names, leaving no one the wiser. The men, Siebenkas and Leibgeber, were as opposite in personality as they are identical in appearance, and when they married some unsuspecting women, hilarity of the 18th-century variety ensued. Jean Paul had long been obsessed with the idea of the disconnect between appearance and personality, writing some eerie stuff that sent his protagonists into situations that completely divided the mind and the body. In The Invisible Lodge, the as-yet-unnamed doppelgangers were wax dolls that duplicated all of the novel’s human characters in an attempt to show just how disconnected our minds and our bodies can be. In another book, Hesperus, the main character makes a wax double of himself and descends into a complete mental disconnect between bodies. By his third book, he’s on to Sienbenkas, and it’s not easy reading. The book was so bizarre that it has the dubious honor of being banned by censors, who deemed it incomprehensible and pointless. The term “doppelganger” stuck, however . . . sort of. Originally, the two men are called doppeltganger, which Jean Paul called “the name for people who see themselves.” The term “doppelganger” was actually used to describe two courses in a meal, served together as opposed to one after the other. 1 Albert Bender And Gray Barker ‘Men In Black’ The Men in Black are arguably among the eeriest of all figures of modern folklore. They’re clearly military, they show up after a close encounter, and those who see them describe them as having certain physical characteristics that perhaps suggest whoever—or whatever—created them had heard some stories about what it meant to be human but hadn’t really bothered to experience it firsthand. But they started out as a bit of a joke—and a cruel one, at that. In the 1950s, a man named Albert Bender formed the International Flying Saucer Bureau and started publishing the magazine Space Review. The organization, official-sounding as it was, had only one member—Albert Bender. He ran it out of the home he shared with his stepfather, from a skull-decorated room that he called “The Chamber of Horrors.” He soon hired someone to fill the role of chief investigator, a man named Gray Barker. By this time, Project Blue Book had released its findings that UFOs really weren’t the threat that some people, including independent organizations like Bender’s, were making them out to be. While his one-man operation wasn’t named in particular, the report sent Bender spiraling off the deep end that he’d already been teetering on. When he notified the local newspaper that he was shutting down his organization, he also told them that he had been visited by three men in dark suits who threatened him and told him that he’d better stop publishing information about UFOs if he knew what was good for him. Gray Barker knew a good story when he saw one, and in 1962, he convinced Bender to write a book detailing what had happened to him. Flying Saucers and the Three Men detailed Bender’s experiences astrally projecting himself into an alien base in Antarctica, where he met aliens (who had three different genders) and then received his vision of the government-type men. This became a firsthand account of a phenomenon that Barker had already run with. He wrote his own book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, in which he made up the entire story about the Men in Black. There’s something of a sad footnote to this story: Barker saw his work as entertainment rather than anything that anyone would take seriously, but in order to build up the myth behind the Men in Black, he even went as far as sending letters to other UFO publications on stationery that appeared to be from the US Department of Defense and the imaginary Men in Black. Bender, meanwhile, was possibly suffering from genuine delusions and some sort of paranoia that made him think the Men in Black really were out to get him, and that delusion was spread to pop culture by one enterprising writer. Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed

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10 Bizarre And Fascinating Facts About Life In Old Japan Mar 15th 2016, 07:00, by Micah Duke History Tristan Shaw March 15, 2016 After more than a century of civil war, Japan was reunited by military warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603. Tokugawa founded the Tokugawa shogunate, a dynasty that would rule Japan until its overthrow in 1867. This period of Japanese history is known as the Edo era, named after the country’s capital city (present-day Tokyo). For more than 200 years, the shogunate kept Japan sealed off from the world until the US forced it to reopen in the 1850s. Despite its isolation, however, Edo Japan enjoyed a long period of stability and wealth as well as a golden age in the arts. Life in Edo Japan was colorful and interesting, and there were plenty of unique aspects that made it unlike any other place then or since. 10 It Was Illegal To Leave And Enter The Country Beginning in 1633, the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu issued a series of edicts that laid the foundation for an isolationist foreign policy that would last for more than 200 years. In the Closed Country Edict of 1635, Tokugawa made it illegal for any Japanese ship to set sail for a foreign country. In fact, all Japanese were now forbidden to leave Japan under penalty of death. Secretly planning to leave the country or returning to Japan after going overseas could also warrant execution. These laws seem ridiculously harsh, but the government wanted to curb the potentially destabilizing influence of Christian missionaries and European traders. In 1639, another edict was issued that forbade the Portuguese from entering the country. Any Portuguese ship that attempted to land on Japanese soil would be destroyed, and all of its passengers would be beheaded. This was only to be done as a last resort, however, and violent retaliation against Portuguese ships was actually quite rare. Amazingly, even within the limits of these isolationist laws, foreign trade flourished during the Edo period. Although foreigners were banned from the country, the Chinese, Koreans, and Dutch were still allowed to trade under strict regulations. The Dutch especially benefited from this trade. They were the only Westerners allowed in Japan until the US forced Japan to open its borders after the expeditions of Commodore Matthew Perry in the 1850s. 9 The Average Man Was Only 155 Centimeters (5’1″) Tall Although the Edo period is renowned as a great time for art, culture, and commerce, it was generally a miserable time for the common people. The social hierarchy of the period was rigorously enforced, with most people staying in the class in which they were born. Samurai were ranked as the highest class, followed by farmers, artisans, and merchants. Comprising the majority of the population, farmers were the only class that was taxed. Although conditions improved a bit in later times, farmers generally lived in terrible conditions. Poverty was so bad in some areas that families practiced infanticide. The poor in urban areas weren’t much better off. According to a study by Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science, the average height for adult Japanese males and females during the Edo period was 155 centimeters (5’1″) and 145 centimeters (4’9″), respectively. By analyzing the remains of nearly 10,000 inhabitants from that time, researchers found that many people were short and malnourished. Some of the remains showed marks of syphilis. A lot of the women had lead poisoning from their makeup. Many of the remains belonged to young people, suggesting that the mortality rate was high for that age group. 8 Human Feces Were Regarded As A Valuable Commodity Due to the lack of a major livestock industry, Edo Japan suffered from a lack of animal manure that could be used as fertilizer. To make up for this, farmers used night soil, human feces that they or professional collectors gathered at night. All across the country, entrepreneurial farmers and landlords set up toilets and outhouses along the roads. Urine was also collected, although it wasn’t as valuable as feces. Collecting, selling, and buying night soil was serious business. Stealing night soil could land you in prison. Guilds and associations were established to regulate the industry and fix prices. Fighting over collection rights in a given territory was common, especially when people were granted special monopolies. In one case in 1772, the collectors of Watanabe village were given exclusive rights to collect the urine containers in Osaka. Other collectors were so upset that they tried to challenge Watanabe’s collection rights and even sabotaged their containers. Remarkably, the night soil industry made Edo Japan one of the cleanest places of its time. Unlike European cities, where the streets were filthy from people disposing of their waste outside their windows, Edo cities were typically clean and free from outbreaks of hygiene-related epidemics. 7 There Was A Thriving Pornography Scene Most people regard porn as a uniquely modern vice, but there was plenty of pornography produced in the ages before the invention of photography. In Edo Japan, erotic wood-block prints called shunga (“springtime pictures“) were especially popular. Although the government tried its best to censor and discourage shunga, the prints were enjoyed by men and women of all social classes. So the restrictions were rarely enforced. Shunga prints were often collected as books, and these erotic works typically sold better than more general ones. Although they were produced anonymously, nearly every major artist of the period, including Hokusai and Utamaro, dabbled in the shunga genre. The subjects of these prints were innumerable, including soft-core scenes, orgies, gay sex, trysts with exotic foreigners, and proto-hentai tentacle rape. In 1859, as Japan’s contact with foreigners increased, an American visitor in Yokohama named Francis Hall was shocked on two separate occasions by Japanese hosts who proudly showed him their collected books of shunga. In his diary, Hall noted that “these books abound and are shamelessly exhibited.” Shunga’s seedy popularity faded once Japan embarked on its path to modernity and Westernization, but it has since witnessed a resurgence in appreciation and interest. 6 Poetry Contests Were A Popular Form Of Gambling Haiku, the internationally known poetic form that consists of 17 syllables, had its roots in a linked verse game called haikai. Unlike haiku, haikai was considered more of a light amusement than a serious art form. The opening piece of a haikai game was called a hokku (“beginning verse”). Haiku eventually developed from hokku. While some Edo poets like Matsuo Basho strove to turn haikai into a respectable artistic genre, many others continued to play it as a parlor game. As haikai spread outside the circles of aristocratic elites and professional poets, the game began to be played by country peasants and the urban lower classes. Eventually, the game became so popular that it turned into a kind of gambling contest called mae-zuke. Mae-zuke contests received hundreds and even thousands of entries in rural villages. One contest held in Kyoto in the late 17th century recorded over 10,000 entries. To the horror of educated poets and noblemen, nearly everyone seemed to be composing poetry and entering their work in the gambling contests. Tsuboi Gohei, a poet and village leader, complained in his diary that haikai had “reached the point where everyone in the country was playing at it—women, children, even mountain bandits.” Matsuo Basho did not think highly of the contests, either. He accused the participants of being “confused persons of the poetry world” and discouraged his disciples from acting as contest judges. The authorities soon discouraged and cracked down on the contests as well. They fined and even banished participants because gambling was illegal. 5 Divorce Was Surprisingly Common Compared to other societies of the same era, Edo Japan had exceptionally high divorce rates—up to 40 percent in some areas. In fact, the rate may have been higher because not every divorce was counted or reported to the authorities. Divorce and multiple marriages were quite common, especially among the lower classes. Although the husband was the only partner who could end his marriage, the wife’s parents sometimes had the power to terminate it, too. According to Confucian traditions, there were seven grounds on which a man could divorce his wife: disobedience, failure to give children, lewdness, jealousy, disease, disturbing the household or family, and an addiction to theft. In many instances, however, men divorced their wives on a “no fault” basis. When a man did want to divorce his wife, all he had to do was give her a letter of divorce. These documents were short and popularly known as mikudari-han (“three lines and a half”). Technically, as long as the man returned his ex-wife’s property and dowry, the divorce process was smooth and simple. Divorce remained high in Japan until the end of the 19th century. At that time, divorce rates began to decline due to modernization and Western-influenced reforms, two trends that are usually credited with increasing divorce rates. 4 There Was A Secret Christian Minority Comprising less than 1 percent of the population, Japan’s Christian minority is small compared to that of other East Asian countries like China and South Korea. Initially, when Christian missionaries arrived in the country in the mid-16th century, they were optimistic that religion would catch on. By the end of the century, things were looking good. Both peasants and feudal lords were converting, and there were reportedly as many as 300,000 Christians at that time. Just as Christianity was taking off, however, the authorities’ tolerance for this new religion began to wane. Japanese Christians were soon tortured and pressured to renounce Christianity, with some executed and even crucified. This brutal mistreatment continued into the first decades of the shogunate. Finally, after the Christian peasant uprising of the Shimabara Rebellion, Christianity was banned outright. Rather than give up their religion, tens of thousands of Christians decided to go underground and practice in secret. For the next 200 years, these Christians lived on remote islands and in other isolated places. They got baptized, celebrated Christmas, and chanted Latin prayers that nobody understood. These Kakure Kirishitan (“Hidden Christians”) kept themselves a secret until the last few years of the Edo era when astonished Western missionaries rediscovered about 30,000 of them. 3 Prostitution Was Legal And Brutal Although prostitution is technically illegal in Japan today, it was legal for hundreds of years before 1956. Beginning in the early years of the Edo era, the Japanese government confined brothels and prostitutes to designated “pleasure quarters” in the country’s big cities. To ensure order and safety, the pleasure quarters were kept under a number of strict regulations. Each quarter was surrounded by a tall wall and could only be reached through an entrance that was placed before a moat. Every client was expected to a follow a code of conduct, which dictated how he was supposed to behave and dress. Ordinary women were forbidden from visiting the pleasure quarters, and it was extremely difficult for prostitutes to leave. From a contemporary viewpoint, the prostitution business in Edo Japan was more like sex slavery. Poor families regularly sold their young daughters to brothels to pay off debts or to provide an additional source of income. The brothels forced the women or their families to sign harsh contracts which practically guaranteed that they could never leave. Many of these women were sold while they were still young children, although they weren’t expected to start working until they reached puberty. For low-ranking prostitutes, working conditions were often quite brutal. Despite the availability of health clinics, venereal diseases were rampant and deadly. The average prostitute died young, often from suicide or complications related to abortion. 2 Plays About Love Suicides Caused Even More Suicides The most frequent customers of the regulated brothels in the big cities of Edo Japan were merchants and samurai. Although merchants were near the bottom of the era’s social hierarchy, they were also the wealthiest class and commanded a lot of influence with their money. Occasionally, some of these men would fall madly in love with their favorite prostitutes and incur debt or shame by repeatedly visiting them. The era’s strict social hierarchy strongly discouraged high-ranking and middle-class men from marrying their lovers. Most could not take the risk or afford the cost of paying for the woman’s freedom from her contract with her brothel. To ensure a man’s devotion, prostitutes would sometimes resort to self-mutilation to prove their love for their favorite client. Perhaps influenced by the secret love oaths of homosexual men at that time, prostitutes began to pull out their nails and cut off their fingers for their lovers. Giving an amputated finger to a client was the highest form of devotion a prostitute could offer. However, body mutilation was an extreme violation of Confucian-influenced taboos. As a result, it was far more common for higher-ranking prostitutes to buy fingers from peddlers or beggars who had taken their wares from corpses. After a time, these gory oaths of love evolved into the shinju, the act of two lovers committing suicide together. Perhaps exacerbated by natural disasters and a financial crisis in the early 18th century, a number of distraught men committed shinju with their prostitute lovers, typically by slitting their throats with a razor. Acts of shinju always caused a surge of public interest. Some of the more sensational cases were even adapted into stage plays. Monzaemon Chikamatsu, one of the biggest figures of Japanese literature, made a career of writing plays about love suicides that often caused copycat suicides. Eventually, love suicides became such a problem that the authorities banned shinju plays and denied funerals to anybody who killed themselves in a love suicide. Anybody who survived a love suicide was banished or charged with the murder of their partner. Although these measures didn’t put an immediate stop to love suicides, the practice became increasingly uncommon and never again reached the frequency that it had during Chikamatsu’s time. 1 The Legal System Was Ruthless While cutting off a thief’s hands or beheading murderers may have seemed customary by the standards of their contemporaries, the Edo Japanese arguably went a bit overboard when administering justice and punishing criminals. For example, not reporting theft was as illegal as actually stealing something. Thieves could be punished by banishment or mutilation. In later times, an offender could also be tattooed on his forehead. Other criminals were sometimes stripped naked and forced to sit in public for as long as three days. Although execution was reserved only for the most serious of crimes, somebody sentenced to death could be crucified or gibbeted. Samurai could be ordered to commit seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment). To keep the era’s social hierarchy tight and orderly, peasants were subjected to a number of harsh measures to prevent social mobility. A peasant could only legally move to a new village if he obtained a certificate of leave known as an okurijo. The law dictated how peasants could dress and prohibited them from writing their last names on official documents. They were also expected to show the utmost respect to samurai. Any commoner who didn’t could be killed on the spot under the samurai’s right of kirisute-gomen. Another unique procedure that was practiced in rural areas was irefuda. During times of unsolved serial arson and theft, villagers could vote for who they thought the offender was. According to irefuda, whoever received the most votes was considered the criminal and thrown in jail. Anybody who defended the “winner” or failed to participate in the election could also be arrested. A more anonymous form of justice could be done with a rakushogisho, a written accusation that was dropped before shrines. Ordinary peasants hated irefuda, but rakushogisho and other anonymous accusations were sometimes used to expose corruption among public officials. Tristan Shaw runs a blog called Bizarre and Grotesque, where he writes about unsolved mysteries, paranormal phenomena, and other creepy and weird things. Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed

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