Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/144

 alone were permitted to entertain the public with singing and playing in wayside booths and church-yards. Side by side with this legislation renewed vetoes were issued against the professional danseuse. She was described in one notification (1822) as "a female singer who, magnificently apparelled, hires herself out to amuse guests at restaurants, ostensibly by dancing and singing, but really by practices of a very different character." All such females as well as similarly immoral girls kept at archery galleries and in tea-houses were to be classed as "secret prostitutes," and the owners of the house-lots as well as the street-officials were to be punished as accessories. Any maidservant at a restaurant or tea-house who was observed wearing handsome garments or hair-ornaments unsuited to her position, became liable to arrest and imprisonment; no one was permitted to engage a girl for training as a singer; any females that had already adopted such a profession were to be immediately released from their engagements; men were cautioned against allowing daughters or sisters to pursue the occupation of danseuse even for the purpose of supporting parents or family, and merchants' daughters who wore conspicuously fine clothes or costly hair-ornaments were warned that they exposed themselves to the reproach of immorality.

The growing popularity of the theatre and cognate places of public amusement from the