Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/143

 female attendants at a bath-house to three, but Iyenari adopted the more drastic course of abolishing them altogether. It is evident, however, that great difficulty was experienced in checking abuses of this nature. The strict regulation of the social evil, though a wholesome measure in itself, made successful evasions of the law correspondingly profitable. Even elders of wards, though themselves responsible for the enforcement of moral restraints, began to maintain large numbers of female servants who received training in polite accomplishments and were sent to act as waitresses in tea-houses and restaurants at the request of the guests. This clever device to elude official control elicited a proclamation (in 1824) that any householder indulging in such practices should be imprisoned, and that the leading citizens of his street should be liable to confiscation of their house-lots. Nor did the administration limit its vetoes to semi-professional ministers of vice. It endeavoured also to check demoralising habits among the mercantile classes. As a result of the extraordinary vogue enjoyed by the dramatic recitatives called jōruri and naga-uta, it became fashionable for merchants' daughters to sing music of that nature to audiences of friends and acquaintances in houses specially fitted up for the purpose. This practice was peremptorily forbidden (1805), on the explicit ground that girls performing in such a manner reduced themselves to the level of beggars and vagabonds, who