Calling by Name or Crawling in the Dark

When we think of Japan, three images usually come to mind: the refined court of Heian, the harsh world of the samurai of Kamakura and Sengoku, lively Edo with its theater, bathhouses, and merchants. For most of Japanese history, most Japanese did not live in any of these three worlds. They lived in the countryside. And the countryside had its own culture, its own festivals, and its own customs – including some that today cannot be told without hesitation. One of them began like this.

Night. The side door had no lock. A piece of bark slipped into the crack would have been enough to block it, so the absence of a lock was not the issue – no one was blocking the door. Under a roof of rice straw, a girl slept on her own mat, breathing steadily, her arm beneath her cheek. On the other side of the thin wall lay her parents. They heard the floorboard creak beneath a foot. They heard someone unfold a piece of cotton to muffle the next step. They did not stir. The man was perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty. Earlier that evening he had drunk tea with the other bachelors of the village, in a room belonging to one of the eldest among them. He was walking back alone.

The girl could move away. She could whisper the single word the young men were attuned to. She could turn her face to the wall. Then he would leave, duck his head beneath the low eave, and walk on, to another house or back to his own. The next day no one would say he had been there. She could also choose not to move away. Then he stayed until dawn, and when the first gray light began to seep through the paper of the window frames, he slipped out the same way. After some time – weeks, months, several seasons – they would go together to the elders of the village to settle when it was proper to go to her parents and ask for their consent to marry.

This was not a scene of erotic excess or a transgression against morality. It was a custom. It endured in some villages for nearly fifteen hundred years, regulated by unwritten rules and policed by the eldest among the village bachelors. It gave the village a mechanism for matching couples where arranged marriage, built on the calculations of fathers, left out everyone without land, dowry, or good lineage. Later, when the Meiji state began drafting civil codes on the European model, the same custom ceased to be a custom and became a disgrace. Yobai – 夜這い – literally “night crawling” – was for centuries part of the order, not its violation. Beneath the kanji hides an older verb meaning “to call by name.” What changed, somewhere over the last few centuries?

From Calling the Name to Tsumadoi-kon

Yobai (夜這い) is written today with two characters: “night” and “to crawl” (or “to creep”). This is a late spelling, etymologically wrong, chosen to fit the image of a furtive nighttime slip into someone else’s room. The original was different. The verb yobau (呼ばう) is an intensive form of yobu – “to call” – and meant “to call insistently,” “to summon,” “to invoke.” In the ancient Japanese belief in kotodama (言霊) – “the soul of words” – repeating someone’s name drew their spirit close. A man who wanted a woman called her by name from a distance. The word was the first touch.

山科の木幡の山を馬はあれど徒歩より我が来し汝を思ひかねて

(Yamashina no Kohata no yama wo / uma wa aredo / kachi yori wa ga koshi / na wo omoi-kanete)

“Though I had a horse,

I crossed Kohata pass

on foot, silently –

such was the longing for you that drove me.”

– Manyōshū, book XI,

poem 2425 (anonymous)

One of the earliest written testimonies appears in the Manyōshū (万葉集), the poetry anthology completed around 759. In book eleven, among the sōmonka – love poems from the Hitomaro collection – there survives an anonymous piece by a man walking at night through the mountains to his beloved. He had a horse. He chose to go on foot. Hoofbeats would have given him away in the narrow ravine, so he walked quietly, long, with open eyes in the darkness.

Earlier, in the Nara period, there was an even more open rite. Utagaki (歌垣) – “the song enclosure” – or regionally kagai (嬥歌), were spring and autumn gatherings on the summits of sacred mountains, drawing young people from neighboring villages to spend the entire night singing, eating, drinking, dancing, and freely making love. The most famous account concerns Mount Tsukuba in Hitachi Province. It is briefly described in the Hitachi no kuni fudoki (常陸国風土記, 713–721), but the full picture was left by the poet Takahashi Mushimaro, an official in the same province:

鷲の住む 筑波の山の 裳羽服津の その津の上に 率ひて 娘子壮士の 行き集ひ かがふ嬥歌に 人妻に 我も交らむ 我が妻に 人も言問へ この山を うしはく神の 昔より 禁めぬわざぞ 今日のみは めぐしもな見そ 事も咎むな

“On Mount Tsukuba,

where the eagles dwell,

above the ford of Mohakitsu,

young women and young men

gather hand in hand

for the song contests of kagai.

With another’s wife I too shall join.

Let another speak to my wife.

The god who rules this mountain

has not forbidden this since ancient times.

Only today –

do not look upon us with reproach,

do not call us to account.”

– Manyōshū, book IX,

poem 1759 (Takahashi Mushimaro)

A gloss in the original text explains: “嬥歌 (kagahi) – this is what they call in the language of the east what is otherwise called utagaki.” This was not an orgy but an institutionalized fertility ritual, included in the village calendar like the harvest or the solstice festival. The god of the mountain sanctioned the suspension of the usual rules – for one day, in one place.

From there to yobai runs a straight line. In the Heian era the aristocracy practiced tsumadoi-kon (妻問婚) – “visiting marriage” – in which the wife lived with her parents and the husband came to her at night. Three consecutive nights were enough for the union to be considered concluded. Genji, the protagonist of Murasaki Shikibu’s tale, visits women this way whom he has never seen in daylight. What aristocrats did by the light of an oil lamp and behind silk screens was done much the same in the villages – but without the poems and the fans.

A fertility ritual had no need for shame. Shame was invented later.

The Mechanics of Silence

Every larger village had two rooms in which the young slept. Boys from the moment of male initiation went to wakamono-yado (若者宿) – “the bachelor lodgings” – girls from their first menstruation to musume-yado (娘宿) – “the maiden lodgings.” These were usually the houses of senior members of the respective age organizations, wakamono-gumi (若者組) for boys and musume-gumi (娘組) for girls. Sometimes the young lived with old widowers and widows, who gladly gave up a room in exchange for help in the fields. The young did not sleep at their parents’. It was simpler that way for everyone. (more on wakamono here: How the Japanese village took care of itself. Wakamono-gumi – the youth who acted where no one else would come to help. )

Entering yobai had its own procedure. A boy around the age of thirteen or fifteen underwent fundoshi-iwai (褌祝い) – “the festival of the first loincloth” – the ritual of being given his first adult loincloth. From then on he could sleep in the wakamono-yado. Some time later came fudeoroshi (筆下ろし), literally “dipping the brush,” the first sexual encounter with an older woman from the village. Most often one of the widows, or one of the wives whose husbands worked far away. A girl, in turn, entered yobai from her first menstruation, sometimes a little later. Her initiation ritual was much more modest, sometimes entirely absent – simply, from a certain point, the door of her room became a nighttime destination for the village’s young men.

The procedure of the visit was meticulous. The boy slipped in barefoot, in nothing but a fundoshi (褌, loincloth), so as not to rustle his clothes. He left his sandals far from the house. At the threshold he placed a piece of cotton cloth on the floor – in some villages a piece of jute – to muffle the creak of a board. Hatanaka Kamegiku, now a hundred years old, whose memories the Japanese press published in May 2025, described this gesture as something so obvious that it did not have to be taught. You learned it from your older brothers. The girl’s parents heard everything. They pretended to sleep. This gesture of silence was not naivety but a form of conditional consent. As long as the boy behaved as he should – quietly, without violence, ready to withdraw at the first rebuff – her parents simply did not exist.

Akamatsu Keisuke (赤松啓介, 1909–2000), of whom more in a moment, in his fieldwork in Banshū Province (播州, the western part of today’s Hyōgo Prefecture) described several types of yobai coexisting side by side. The closed type: entry only for men from the same village. The open type: also for visitors and wanderers, especially after temple festivals, when merchants, monks, and actors came to the village. Some villages allowed access only to maidens. Some allowed visits only to married women and widows, with maidens off-limits until formal engagement. Some allowed almost everything. In several places – Aichi, Kumamoto, Sagami, Shinshū, Tango – the reverse variant was documented: the woman went at night to the man.

The map of yobai aligns with the Pacific belt west of the Bōsō Peninsula. The ethnographer Yagi Tōru lists the Chita and Atsumi peninsulas in Aichi Prefecture, the shores of the Seto Inland Sea, the eastern coast of Kyūshū, southern Wakayama, the Izu Islands, the valleys of Akita. Each area had its own name and its own rules. In Akita the bachelors called the expedition yomeyobi – “calling for a wife” – which captured its character well. In the mountains of Wakayama yobai lasted longest, into the mid-1950s – in isolated villages of the Kii Peninsula, where asphalt only arrived in the 1960s.

It was sometimes turned into a festival. After the harvest, girls left their doors open as a sign of readiness; boys “threw bones” – in some regions by playing jan-ken (rock, paper, scissors) – to settle the order of visits. There were villages where a girl might receive different men (Akamatsu Keisuke, the Japanese ethnographer from Hyōgo Prefecture, explicitly describes regional variants of yobai in his work Yobai no minzokugaku, Yobai no seiairon). And there were villages where one girl repeated the same choice for several seasons, until he began to stay for breakfast. All of it fit under the single word “yobai.”

The whisper was the custom. The silence was the contract.

Three Mechanisms by Which It Worked

First – mate selection in a small population. A typical Japanese village had between fifty and two hundred inhabitants. At that scale, a system of fully arranged marriages would have left many young people without a partner, and many others with a partner chosen without regard to whether they could even stand each other. Yobai offered a compatibility test in the broadest sense, including a fertility test. If a child came of the relationship, formal marriage was merely the completion of reality. “Planned pregnancy” as an instrument for forcing the families’ consent was not, in these areas, a modern concept but a traditional mechanism of exchange.

Second – regulating the surplus of young men. In every village cohort there was a group of bachelors who had to burn their energy somewhere before conflicts arose over land, over girls, over standing. The wakamono-gumi were not wild bands – they were a self-governing institution, disciplined by age and hierarchy. The oldest boy in the group was responsible for the younger ones; the youngest were taught the procedure of yobai with the same care with which they were taught to bind sheaves of rice. Disobedience ended in public reprimand, sometimes in expulsion from the group, which effectively meant exclusion from the village’s social life. The age-based youth organization managed sex, fighting, work, and religion in parallel, as parts of the same process of growing up.

Third – the social economy and the child of an unknown father. An old saying recorded by the researcher Akamatsu sounds today like a declaration of the right to rape:

村の娘と後家は若衆のもの

(mura no musume to goke wa wakashū no mono)

“the village’s maidens and widows belong to the young men”

It was nothing of the sort. It was a declaration of shared responsibility. When the father of a child remained unknown, the village raised it together. Often the infant ended up in the family of the most likely father, with his wife taking care of it – often gladly, because every child in the household meant more hands for the harvest ten years on. There was no stigma, because there was as yet no concept on which stigma could fasten itself. Legitimate and illegitimate are categories that came in with the civil code. Perhaps this is hard for us to grasp today – perhaps even harder than war and killing in the name of various ideas – but the question is whether this says more about us than about the inhabitants of medieval Japan.

There was a fourth mechanism: Akamatsu did not name it explicitly, but later historians have. Yobai reduced the weight of virginity to zero. In a farming village, where a woman entered her new household as a worker and as a future mother, her earlier sexual life was useless information. What counted was whether she could bear children, whether she could work, whether she could get along with her mother-in-law. Maidenly chastity in its Western sense, as a separate economic value, entered the village vocabulary together with universal schooling and the etiquette manuals of the Meiji period – that is, in effect, as a borrowing from Europe and America.

There was no “virtue” here. There was a web of obligations.

How Meiji Made Yobai a Disgrace

It was not a single decree. It was a chronology of small steps whose sum, within a single generation, stripped the village of the vocabulary for its own intimacy.

In 1873 the Meiji government issued an ordinance criminalizing keikan (鶏姦) – anal intercourse between men – modeled on the code of the Chinese Qing dynasty. Six years later the provision quietly disappeared, replaced by the penal code drafted by the French jurist Gustave Boissonade. The episode itself is less important for our topic, but the precedent here is essential: the state had decided that it had the right to look beneath people’s bedding (or into their futons). Before, only kin and neighbors had looked.

In 1876, in Aikawa Prefecture, today’s Niigata, the first regional ban on yobai appeared. The ordinance declares that nocturnal visits are a barbaric custom unworthy of a civilized nation. Local authorities are instructed to enforce it. The penalties are at first modest – a fine, an arrest – but a reference point is set: from now on, the custom is a crime.

1880: the Old Penal Code (旧刑法). Abortion ceases to be a private matter of the family and becomes a criminal offense. With this, one of the mechanisms of yobai – planned pregnancy as a tool to force marriage – is shifted from the “strategy” mode into the “risk” mode.

1889 (entry into force 1890): the Constitution of the Empire of Great Japan. It introduces the concept of kazoku kokka (家族国家) – “the family state” – in which the emperor is the father of the nation and the nation is his family. This is the level of ideology, not of detailed regulation, but it builds the frame into which everything else will soon fall.

1898: the Meiji Civil Code (明治民法). It introduces the institution of ie (家) – “the house” – with a head of family (koshu, 戸主), patrilineal succession, monogamy established by law. A woman under the age of twenty-five (a man under thirty) requires the consent of the head of the family in order to marry. Illegitimate children fall into a new legal category, shoshi (庶子), with limited rights of inheritance. The village, which had raised every child without distinction, now receives a paper document dividing infants into the real and the unreal.

1907–1908: the New Penal Code. Adultery becomes a crime – asymmetrically, of course: a married woman commits it with any man, a husband only with a married woman. The penalty for abortion is doubled. The noose tightens.

May 1938. Kamo village in Okayama Prefecture. Toi Mutsuo, a twenty-one-year-old man suffering from tuberculosis, whom the village community had earlier excluded from yobai (his mother, a widow, was said by the neighbors to “control” his sexuality), kills thirty people in a single night, including his own grandmother and several former lovers of his mother. He then shoots himself in the chest. The metropolitan press – Ōsaka Mainichi and Sunday Mainichi – reports the event through the lens of “the loose sexual relations of mountain villages.” Yobai as pathology. Yobai as the backdrop of degeneracy. After the incident, the custom is publicly branded at the national level.

Akamatsu proposed a thesis that still divides historians: the Meiji government suppressed yobai deliberately, because it was uneconomic in the fiscal sense. Unregistered, unpaid, generating no tax revenue. The state was building, in parallel, the system of yūkaku (遊郭), the licensed pleasure quarters, with taxed and recorded turnover. By suppressing yobai, the state redirected sexual demand toward the fiscal counter. Sonia Ryang, reading this history through Foucault and Agamben, described it in Love in Modern Japan (2006) as the manufacture of “loving citizens” – the state invents a model of intimacy in order to bind its subjects to the nation.

There were also more prosaic reasons. The electrification of villages in the 1920s and 1930s killed nocturnal discretion. Where before one moved in darkness lit only by an oil lamp, now a neighbor’s lightbulb shone through the paper wall. The ideology of ryōsai kenbo (良妻賢母) – “the good wife and wise mother” – became the obligatory program for girls in middle school. Girls who had completed middle school were given the village nickname suso-naga (裾長) – “long skirts” – and were isolated from the rest of the group. A single generation was enough for the traditional vocabulary of village intimacy to be replaced by the vocabulary of school textbooks and code paragraphs.

It was not a single decree. It was a decade of changes, after which the village was left without its own language for its own life.

Three Waves of Return. And a Fourth...

The first wave – Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962). The father of Japanese ethnography, author of Tōno monogatari (遠野物語, 1910). He built what he himself called jōmin no minzokugaku (常民の民俗学) – “the ethnography of the common people” – and for fifty years documented legends, festivals, rites, tools, country cooking. Village sexuality he practically did not touch anywhere. Akamatsu, his fierce critic, wrote that Yanagita came from Fukusaki in Hyōgo Prefecture – the same region where yobai endured during his lifetime. “He could not have not known” – runs Akamatsu’s formula. Then why did he not write of it? Akamatsu suggested ideological-political reasons: Yanagita was building the image of a nation in which there was no room for peasant sex, for the yakuza, or for the emperor seen up close. The ethnography of the common people was, in effect, the ethnography of a chosen people, with the subtraction of what the state preferred to erase.

The second wave – Akamatsu Keisuke (1909–2000). A communist, imprisoned for violating Chian ijihō (治安維持法) – the Peace Preservation Law, the central instrument of repression in the militarist period. After the war, knowing he would never make the university bibliographies, he built his own alternative: hijōmin no minzokugaku (非常民の民俗学) – “the ethnography of the non-common people.” That is, the ethnography of those omitted by Yanagita: the urban poor, vagrants, prostitutes, blacksmiths without a fixed address, illegitimate children, the peasants of Banshū. His material was the memory of living witnesses, his own experience (Akamatsu as a boy took part in yobai, of which he wrote openly), and everyday speech. His two central books, Yobai no minzokugaku (1994) and Yobai no seiairon (1994), published together in 2004 by Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, are today the basic source for anyone who wants to know what this looked like from the inside. They also have a flaw: a lack of scholarly distance. Akamatsu liked what he was writing about, and at times the tone tips into that of an “erotomaniac grandfather” recounting his memories in detail after the years. His critics pointed this out.

The third wave – the reception that began in the 1980s. Akamatsu is pulled off the shelf by Ueno Chizuko (上野千鶴子), the most prominent Japanese feminist of the last four decades, as proof that pre-modern Japan had a “free sexuality” – and that it was only the Meiji state that imposed patriarchal monogamy. The conclusion was politically tempting and pleasingly progressive. It also drew a sharp response.

Iwata Shigenori (岩田重則, b. 1961), professor at Chūō University and editor of the collected writings of Akamatsu (Akamatsu Keisuke minzokugaku senshū, 1997–2004), in his book Mura no wakamono, kuni no wakamono (1996) introduced a series of corrections. He showed that Akamatsu had generalized from the narrow material of his own region, that he had ignored villages without yobai, and that he had idealized a custom often hard on women. Koyano Atsushi (小谷野敦) in Ren’ai no chōkoku (2000) went further and attacked the feminist reading directly: from the perspective of many women, yobai was closer to sexual violence than to free love. Iinaga Yoshiyuki, of Kokugakuin University, spoke openly of “the mythologization of Akamatsu” – the testimonies were treated as truth, even though they were memories of old men told years later, with all the selectivity that comes with that.

And the fourth wave – fetish. In manga, in adult video, and in popular literature, yobai has been reduced to a sexual scenario: the girl “unable to refuse,” the boy slipping into the dark without warning. Which is precisely the opposite of what yobai was in the village, where the girl could refuse and the community enforced that refusal. Cultural memory works in reverse. From a centuries-old, meticulous practice regulated by the entire village, a single image without rules is constructed. What was a web is presented as a single point. Of the four conflicting memories – Yanagita’s, Akamatsu’s, the feminists’, the fetish – none fits with another, and each says something true about its own era.

One custom, four memories.

What Remains

The last documented instances of yobai in some villages of the Kii Peninsula date to the 1950s. In Akita, individual accounts run into the early 1960s. Then came the asphalt road, the bus, the television broadcast, the street lamp. The last person to slip barefoot across the threshold of a neighbor’s room is today safely over eighty, and most of them are no longer alive. Hatanaka Kamegiku, whose memories appeared in 2025, was one of the last.

When a custom dies, so does its economy. In the same villages where for twelve hundred years couples were paired at night, people today marry partners met on an app or at a professional omiai arranged by a matchmaking agency in Tokyo. Many of these villages are dying off for demographic reasons, holding on without any young people at all.

I am not setting out to judge this custom. We are not here to judge – it was an entirely different world, of which we have only the faintest idea. I only wanted to point out – when people today speak of “traditional Japanese sexual morality,” which tradition is meant? The memory of the Manyōshū poem about a man running barefoot across a field? The memory of Mount Tsukuba, where another’s wife meets a stranger and no one reproaches her? The memory of a village in Banshū, where a boy placed a piece of cotton on a floorboard so as not to wake anyone, while the grandmother pretended to sleep? Or the memory of the 1898 paragraph by which a twenty-four-year-old woman needed her father’s seal in order to marry the man she had chosen?

SOURCES

1. 赤松啓介『夜這いの民俗学・夜這いの性愛論』筑摩学芸文庫、2004 (collected edition of the 1994 monographs).

2. 岩田重則『ムラの若者・くにの若者 民俗と国民統合』未来社、1996.

3. 柳田國男『遠野物語』1910 (original Japanese; no full Polish translation exists).

4. Sonia Ryang, Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society, Routledge, London 2006.

5. Jolanta Tubielewicz, Historia Japonii, Ossolineum, Wrocław 1984 (Polish-language source; context of Meiji-era reforms and the 1898 Civil Code).

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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