On the only place in feudal Japan where a merchant could beat a samurai, a woman ruled everyone, and a grown man had the right to make a fool of himself.

An evening in Edo, somewhere near Yanagibashi – the year does not matter; it could be 1770, it could be 1820. The street smells of smoke from yatai stalls and the dampness of the Sumida, but behind the indigo cloth of a noren curtain at a quiet machiai-chaya (待合茶屋 – a teahouse of meetings) the scent shifts to something gentler – incense, warm rice, sake poured into porcelain so thin you can see a candle flame through it. Two men sit on tatami. One wears a cotton kimono, the kind the law demands – though beneath it, in a place invisible to anyone, he has a silk lining worth thirty times as much. He is a merchant. Across from him sits a low-ranking samurai whose annual stipend would not cover a single night in this room. In the morning the merchant would have to step aside for him in the street, bow, let him pass. But now it is evening. Sake stands between them, a geisha is tuning her shamisen, and in a moment the samurai will be on all fours, pretending to be a tiger, and he will lose – to a woman armed with nothing but a fan.

Edo Japan was one of the most rigidly codified societies in human history. The shi-nō-kō-shō system – samurai, peasant, artisan, merchant – was not merely a hierarchy. It was a script for life: it determined the colour of your kimono, the height of your roof, the type of fan you were permitted to use, and even the side of the street you walked on if someone of higher rank approached. The samurai, with no wars to fight, had become a bureaucrat on a dwindling stipend paid in rice, while the merchant – though he lent money to daimyō and financed castle construction – formally occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder, because he produced nothing with his own hands. Sumptuary laws regulated everything: silk was forbidden, a house too tall was suspect, a meal too rich was dangerous. Every colour, every gesture, every centimetre of a building’s façade said: know your place. And yet the Tokugawa shogunate understood that a system so airtight needed safety valves – places where the corset could be loosened in a controlled way, lest it one day burst entirely. Yoshiwara, ochaya, kabuki – these were not the margins of Edo. They were its lungs. And the deepest breath was drawn in a tatami-mat room where a geisha set the rules and rank was left at the door.

This essay is about the only room in a feudal society where hierarchy ceased to apply. A room in which ukiyo – the floating world – became flesh: not on a woodblock print, not in a philosophical treatise, but in a specific cup of sake poured by a specific geisha at a specific hour of the evening. We will explore the games played in this room from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century – from konpira fune fune, where losing tastes better than winning, through tora tora, where weakness defeats strength, to tōsenkyō, where a thrown fan lands in a configuration named after a chapter of “The Tale of Genji” and scores points for unintended beauty, not accuracy. Above all, we will consider why the most disciplined society in history paid fortunes for the right to be foolish.

Zashiki – a room you enter but leave part of yourself outside

Ozashiki (お座敷) literally means “a tatami room in which one sits.” It sounds like a definition from an architecture textbook. But in Edo the word meant something entirely different from a description of a room – it meant an event, an atmosphere, a kind of freedom. When someone said “we’re going to ozashiki,” they were not describing a room but an experience. Something like saying “we’re going to a feast” – except with the precise Japanese emphasis on the space in which that feast takes place.

The space always looked the same and was always different. Tatami on the floor, a tokonoma alcove with a hanging scroll and a seasonal flower arrangement, a byōbu (folding screen) positioned to create a zone of intimacy, and objects any of which could become a game prop at a moment’s notice: the hakama stand beneath a tokkuri flask, a fan, sake cups, go stones, even the screen itself. In ozashiki asobi nothing is brought from outside – everything needed is already in the room.

Entry was not simple. Ochaya – the teahouses where meetings with geisha took place – operated under the ichigen-san okotowari system: without a personal recommendation from a regular patron, you did not cross the threshold. There were no advertisements, no prices on the door. To become a guest, someone had to vouch for you. The system built something we might today call institutional trust – but at the time it was simply the right to enter a room where no one would judge you. The okami (the proprietress of the ochaya) guarded that threshold like a priestess: she decided who entered and who did not, matched geisha to the temperament of the guests, and set the menu and the mood of the evening before the first cup of sake was even poured.

And here lies the key to ozashiki. On the streets of Edo the shi-nō-kō-shō hierarchy was absolute. A merchant, even one whose fortune was ten times a samurai’s, had to yield, bow, and wait. A low-ranking samurai, living on a rice stipend whose value shrank with every decade, still maintained formal superiority over the wealthiest silk trader. But in ozashiki those ranks stayed outside the door. No edict regulated this – it was simply that the logic of this room operated differently from the logic of the street. The geisha controlled the pace of the evening, the taikomochi (male geisha, jester, master of ceremonies) defused tensions with jokes, and the guest – whether he carried two swords or a lining of forbidden silk – was simply a guest. In the room only one hierarchy applied: the one dictated by the game.

This was the realization of ukiyo – the “floating world” – in practice. Not in a philosophical treatise, not in a ukiyo-e woodblock print, though those documented it. But in a specific room, at a specific hour, with a specific sake poured by a specific geisha. The Tokugawa shogunate understood perfectly well that a system as airtight as the one it had created needed safety valves.

The game every evening begins with

Imagine: you are sitting on a zabuton across from a geisha. Between you is a low table, and on it a wooden stand called a hakama – the bowl-shaped base on which a sake flask normally rests. The shamisen begins to play. The geisha sings:

金毘羅船々 追風に帆かけて シュラシュシュシュ 回れば四国は 讃州那賀の郡 象頭山 金毘羅大権現 一度まわれば

(Konpira fune fune / oite ni ho kakete / shura shushu shu / mawareba Shikoku wa / Sanshū Naka no gōri / Zōzusan / Konpira Daigongen / ichido mawareba)

Boats to Konpira, boats,

wind in the sail –

shura-shu-shu-shu.

Sail around Shikoku –

Sanshū province, Naka district,

Mount Zōzu,

Konpira, the Great Deity –

sail around once more…

The lyrics do not make much sense. The melody is simple as a lullaby. And yet you can already feel the sweat on your back.

The rules: if the hakama is on the table, you place an open palm on it. If someone has snatched it away, you tap the bare table with a fist. Taking turns with the geisha, in time with the shamisen. You may grab the hakama off the table to confuse your opponent, but no more than three times in a row. The shamisen starts slowly. Then quickens. And again. And again. And you must react instantly: palm or fist? There or gone? Open or closed? The geisha wins almost every time. She has been playing this several times a day for years. Her hands move on autopilot; her eyes read your hesitation before you notice it yourself. You are playing for the first time in your life, two cups of sake in. You will lose.

And here comes the moment that defines all of ozashiki asobi: the penalty. The Japanese term is bappai (罰杯, lit. “cup of punishment”). The loser drinks sake served by the geisha. But not in silence. The geisha pours with grace, singing something like: “Let us see how our guest drinks – bottoms up!” – and when you finish, she exclaims with admiration: “What an elegant drinker! Impressive!” This is not humiliation. It is inclusion. Bappai is a ritual in which defeat transforms into distinction – the geisha gives you her attention, praises your drinking, refills your cup with a devotion you will not find anywhere else. You lose and feel valued. You drink more and play worse. And drink more still. A spiral someone designed with surgical precision.

The song about Konpira refers to the shrine of Kotohira-gū on the island of Shikoku – one of the most important in Japan, dedicated to a deity protecting seafarers. In Edo, a pilgrimage to Konpira was one of those things everyone wanted to do at least once in a lifetime but few could – because travel required special permits from the authorities and, of course, money. The song about the boat to Konpira was therefore a song about longing for the unattainable, sung during a pastime that was itself unattainable for most – because an evening with geisha cost as much as an artisan’s annual income. Layers of irony piling up on their own.

But the most important thing about konpira fune fune is what you cannot see in the rules: control. The geisha decides when to speed up, when to slow down, when to let the guest win – and yes, she sometimes does, because a good geisha knows an evening of nothing but losses is not a successful evening. She is the director, not the participant. The shamisen that dictates the tempo is in the hands of the geisha or her colleague. The guest thinks he is playing a reflex game. In reality he is playing a game whose rules can be changed at any moment by the person on the other side of the table.

Tora tora – the tiger, the samurai, and the old woman behind the screen

A byōbu folding screen set in the middle of the room. On one side the guest. On the other the geisha. Both begin singing together – the melody is simple, repetitive, easy to remember even after five cups of sake: Tora tora tora, tora tora tora… On the last beat both leap out from behind the screen and strike one of three poses. Tiger: on all fours, snarling, hands as paws. Samurai: upright, thrusting a spear. Old woman: bent double, shuffling with an invisible cane.

The logic of victory is Japanese to the marrow. The samurai kills the tiger – because he has a spear. The tiger devours the old woman – because it is a beast. But the old woman defeats the samurai. Why? Because she is his mother. 親は強い, oya wa tsuyoi – a parent is strong. In a society that placed the samurai on a pedestal, in a game played in a room full of men with status and money, a frail old woman beats an armed warrior – not by force, not by cunning, but by the fact that she is a mother. This is not a joke. It is a cultural truth encoded in the mechanics of a game.

Tora tora draws on Kokusenya Kassen (国性爺合戦) – the famous jōruri drama by Chikamatsu Monzaemon from 1715, telling the story of the half-Japanese, half-Chinese Koxinga (Watōnai), who fought tigers in the Chinese jungle. The spear-wielding samurai figure is Watōnai himself. The old woman is his mother, who in the play commits suicide so her son can escape. The tiger is a tiger – literally, physically, a beast from the jungle that Watōnai defeats with his bare hands. In the game these characters have been flattened into poses and the cyclical logic of rock-paper-scissors, but their literary roots give the play a depth the guest may not even have known about – though in Edo everyone knew Chikamatsu the way Poles know Mickiewicz. Hm… Better, actually.

The physicality of this game is the point. A dignitary, a merchant in an expensive kimono, a samurai whose two swords have been set aside at the room’s entrance – all end up on all fours, snarling like children, leaping from behind the screen with exaggerated expressions. The absurdity is deliberate. You cannot maintain dignity when you are on your knees pretending to be a tiger while across from you a geisha in a perfectly arranged kimono does the same thing with a grace that you, half-drunk, cannot begin to match. Defeat – bappai again. The affectionately humiliating praise of your drinking style. And you play again. And again: all fours, snarling, laughter.

The dynamics of tora tora reveal something important about the Japanese approach to play: the theatrical element. The song before the reveal is not filler – it builds tension. The screen is a curtain. Leaping out from behind it is an entrance onto a stage. Each round is a miniature spectacle: song, movement, reveal, resolution, penalty or triumph. Ozashiki is theatre scaled to a single room – with the difference that in this theatre, everyone performs.

Tōsenkyō – when a fan becomes a poem

If ozashiki asobi had its own aristocracy, tōsenkyō (投扇興 – lit. the amusement of throwing a fan) would be its oldest lineage. It is a game in which you throw a fan at a target – but calling it “fan throwing” is like calling the tea of Sen no Rikyū “pouring hot water into a cup.” Everything that matters in tōsenkyō happens after the throw.

On a low pedestal of paulownia wood – called makura (枕, “pillow”) – stands a small target shaped like a ginkgo leaf, covered in cloth, with tiny bells at each end. This is chō (蝶, “butterfly”). The player sits on a zabuton, an arm’s length from the target. They take an open fan and throw it, aiming at the butterfly. The fan floats slowly because it is light – this is no dart; it is an object that sails through the air with a grace you cannot fully control. It strikes the butterfly or it does not. The butterfly falls or it does not. The makura topples or it does not. The fan lands in some position – open, closed, on its ribs, on its side, leaning against the makura. And now the real game begins.

What is scored is not accuracy. What is scored is the configuration in which the three elements – fan, butterfly, and makura – come to rest after the throw. Each such configuration is called a mei (銘, lit. “inscription”) and has its own name, its own score, and in the most popular variant of the game – its own place in the structure of the fifty-four chapters of “The Tale of Genji.”

It is worth pausing here, because this is the moment when ozashiki asobi stops being a game and becomes something the West may have no name for. The scoring system in tōsenkyō is poetic. Literally. Each configuration of fan, butterfly, and makura refers to a chapter of Murasaki Shikibu’s novel and is judged for beauty, not force. A few examples:

Asagao (朝顮, “Morning Glory,” Chapter 20 of “The Tale of Genji”) – the fan rests on its ribs, the butterfly lies on them like a flower on a trellis. Seven points. Suzumushi (鈴虫, “Bell Cricket,” Chapter 38) – the butterfly lies beneath the fan’s ribs like an insect under branches. Seven points. Usugumo (薄雲, “Thin Cloud,” Chapter 19) – the fan leans against the makura, the butterfly beneath it. The fan is the cloud, the butterfly the moon. Eight points.

Higher: Sawarabi (早薕, “Young Ferns,” Chapter 48) – the butterfly stands alone, upright. Ten points. Higher still: Miotsukushi (澜標, “Channel Markers,” Chapter 14) – the fan lies atop the makura after knocking the butterfly away. Eleven points. Utsusemi (空蝉, “The Empty Cicada Shell,” Chapter 3) – the fan leans against the makura, the butterfly dangles from its edge. Eighteen points.

And at the top of the pyramid: Ukifune (浮舟, “A Boat Upon the Waters,” Chapter 51) – the butterfly stands on the fan. The fan is the boat, the butterfly the sail. Thirty points for something that lasts a second and happens once in many dozens of throws. And finally the configuration almost no one has ever seen with their own eyes: Yume no ukihashi (夢浮橋, “The Floating Bridge of Dreams,” Chapter 54 – the last chapter of “The Tale of Genji,” the one that is open, unfinished, suspended). The butterfly stands alone. The fan holds itself between the makura and the butterfly without touching the floor. Fifty points.

Knocking over the makura – a brutal, inelegant throw – yields low or negative points. Force is not rewarded. Control, chance, and beauty are. Tōsenkyō is a game whose scoring mechanics align with the aesthetic of mono no aware – the beauty of things fleeting, uncontrolled, existing for a moment.

The game appeared in Kyoto and Osaka around 1773 (An’ei 2). Legend has it that it was invented by a gambler named Kisen whose nap kept being interrupted by a butterfly landing on his pillow – Kisen threw his fan, and the fan landed differently every time. From a tedious nap a game was born. It quickly gained popularity – everyone played, from children to merchants – until popularity killed it. People began placing bets on throws; gambling flourished. In 1822 (Bunsei 5) the shogunate banned tōsenkyō by official edict. An aesthetic game in which beauty was scored and positions named after chapters of a love story had become an instrument of greed. That, too, is very Japanese.

Kikunohana, bekuhai, and others – a small encyclopedia of tatami-room foolishness

Konpira, tora tora, and tōsenkyō are the games that survived longest and are best documented. But an evening in ozashiki comprised many games – shorter, simpler, sometimes absurd. The geisha selected them the way a musician selects a repertoire: according to the guests’ mood, level of inebriation, and the evening’s dynamics. Here are a few.

Kikunohana (菊の花, “Chrysanthemum Flower”). A number of sake cups placed upside down on a tray – one more than the number of players. Under one cup a small object is hidden – traditionally a chrysanthemum blossom. Players take turns flipping one cup each. Whoever uncovers the chrysanthemum must drink as many cups of sake as were turned over before them. If you are lucky and the chrysanthemum is under the second cup – two drinks. If you are unlucky and it is under the last – well. A Japanese sake roulette.

Omawarisan (お回りさん, lit. “Mr. Spin-Around”). Two people stand on either side of a drum. They sing omawarisan, strike the drum twice in rhythm, then draw lots – the loser spins around their own axis. Lose twice in a row and you are the loser and must drink. The effect: after a few rounds players are spinning in circles, losing their balance, trying to hit the drum with increasingly poor coordination. Sake, dizziness, and a drum.

Bekuhai (べく杯) – a game from Kōchi on Shikoku, transplanted to ochaya in the big cities. A bekuhai set consists of three sake cups shaped so that they cannot be set down: tengu (with a long nose), okame (a round woman’s face), and hyottoko (a comical man’s face with pursed lips). Each cup holds a different amount – the tengu cup holds three to four shots. A player spins a top, and the result determines which cup they drink from. The cup cannot be put down while there is sake in it – there is no flat bottom, so it tips over. You must drain it, here and now. If fate points to the tengu – you have a problem. The people of Kōchi, where this game originated, have a saying: “folk from Kōchi will drink you under the table.” Bekuhai explains why.

Kin no shachihoko (金の鬱, “The Golden Castle Fish”). This is not a game but a performance. The geisha executes an acrobatic figure imitating the shachihoko – the mythical golden fish that crowns the roofs of Japanese castles. The geisha’s body becomes sculpture: an arched back, raised legs, arms in a position that requires years of training. There is no competition, no losers. There is an artist who renders an architectural ornament with her body, and a room full of people who fall silent for a moment. That moment of silence in the middle of an evening full of laughter is part of the dramaturgy – the geisha knows when to lower the tone so she can raise it again.

Hasami-ken (笸拳, “chopstick fist”) – two players simultaneously extend zero to five fingers while simultaneously guessing the total of both hands. Guess correctly and you win. Miss and you drink. A game so popular in Kōchi that tournaments were organized. There is also a version with chopsticks and go stones: whoever picks up more smooth go stones with chopsticks in one minute wins. After the fourth sake, go stones become as “slippery” as wet soap.

The geisha, the taikomochi, and the architecture of an evening

The Western stereotype: a geisha is a beautiful, silent woman who pours sake and smiles behind a fan. The Edo reality: a geisha is a professional who, after years of training in dance, music, calligraphy, the art of conversation, and ozashiki games, performs a function whose closest Western equivalent is – director. Not actress. Director.

A good geisha reads the room. She knows when a guest is tense and needs a simple reflex game to relax. She knows when the atmosphere thickens and the rhythm must change. She knows when someone has drunk too much and the tempo of the shamisen should slow. She knows when to let a guest win – because an evening in which the guest loses everything is not a successful evening. She controls the tempo of the games, their sequence, their intensity. The shamisen that dictates the rhythm of konpira fune fune is in the hands of the geisha or her colleague – which means the tempo of the game is the geisha’s tempo, not the guest’s. She decides when to accelerate to the edge of human reflex and when to ease off for a moment so the guest can catch his breath.

Before the geisha, someone else ruled the room: the taikomochi (太鼓持, “drummer carrier”), also known as hōkan (幇間, “helper across the gap”) – a male geisha, or more precisely a male entertainer whose role evolved over the centuries like few other professions in Japan. In the thirteenth century taikomochi were dōbōshū – companions to daimyō: advisors, musicians, connoisseurs of tea, sometimes spies. They served on battlefields and in castle chambers. With the advent of the Tokugawa peace their military function evaporated. What remained was the ability to make people laugh, to tell stories, to command the mood of a room. They became professional jesters – but not in the European sense of a court figure in a belled cap. The Edo taikomochi was a master of conversation, erotic tales, pantomime, improvisation, and above all – social mediation. He could defuse the tension between guests of different rank with a single joke.

The fate of the taikomochi is one of the most fascinating stories of social degradation in Edo. At their peak there were several hundred. In the Yoshiwara district in 1770 – thirty-one taikomochi against only sixteen geisha. By 1800 the ratio had reversed: one hundred and forty-three geisha, forty-five taikomochi. The women won the competition through artistry, subtlety, musicality. The men were pushed into supporting roles – warming up the audience before the geisha entered, telling jokes, filling pauses. The Edo authorities held them in such low regard that in official censuses taikomochi were recorded as “shampooers” (who washed hair and massaged scalps), “pest exterminators,” or “latrine cleaners” – because admitting that the city contained professional male entertainers would have been an acknowledgment of a culture of pleasure that the shogunate preferred to ignore officially. Today there are six taikomochi in all of Japan. All of them in Asakusa.

An evening in ozashiki had its own dramaturgy. It began with a greeting from the okami and conversation over kaiseki (a multi-course seasonal meal). Then the geisha entered with dance and music – a serious, aesthetic performance during which guests fell silent and watched. Then the mood shifted: the geisha invited everyone to play. Simple games first, like konpira. Then more physical ones, like tora tora. Then perhaps tōsenkyō, if time allowed and the guest’s eyes were still sharp enough. And then – if the evening had gone well – free conversation, songs, perhaps improvised poems. Five rules every regular knew: when the geisha dances, be silent and watch, because she is selling her art and you are buying it with your attention. Address every geisha as onee-san – even if she is fifty. Arrive in clean, dark blue, new socks – because you will remove your shoes at the entrance and your feet will be visible all evening. Play without shame – as though you were ten years old again. And do not tell the geisha to eat – offer her sake.

Asobi – play as an equal part of life

The kanji 遊 consists of two parts: 辶 (movement, road) and 斿 (banner, pennant). In classical Chinese 遊 meant “moving freely” – travelling without purpose, wandering. In Japanese it evolved into something broader: asobi (遊び) is play, but also freedom, time that does not belong to duty, a space in which a person does something because they want to, not because they must. The verb asobu (遊ぶ) is a common word – “let’s go have fun” is said by both a child and a fifty-year-old businessman inviting a colleague for a drink. In Japanese there is no dissonance in this.

But asobi has roots older and deeper than everyday language. In the Kojiki – Japan’s oldest chronicle – the goddess Ame-no-Uzume dances before the cave in which Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, has hidden herself, plunging the world into darkness (I write about this event here: Goddess Uzume dances naked and, with her sacred antics, saves us from sorrowful seriousness – Japanese mythology, how timely today). Uzume’s dance is comic, bawdy, wild – the gods collapse in laughter, Amaterasu peeks out in curiosity, and light returns. This is not entertainment. It is a cosmic act: asobi as a force that restores the order of the world. The original Japanese asobi is not a break from life. It is the essence of life.

The Japanese concept of asobi-gokoro (遊び心, lit. “heart of play”) does not mean childishness. It is a term for the highest kind of creative freedom – the ability to approach something with lightness, without rigidity, with a readiness for chance and surprise. In Japanese design, cuisine, craft, architecture – to say that someone’s work has asobi-gokoro is the highest compliment. It means the creator is not a prisoner of their technique but plays with it.

In Edo, asobi had yet another dimension: a political one. Johan Huizinga wrote in Homo Ludens that play is older than culture and that it cannot be reduced to a biological or psychological function – it is an autonomous entity, a separate sphere of human experience. In Edo Japan this thesis worked in both directions. On one hand: the shogunate needed safety valves. A society mercilessly squeezed into the corset of hierarchy, regulations, and obligations would have exploded had it nowhere to breathe. Yoshiwara, kabuki, ochaya – these were controlled zones of freedom: you enter, you play, you release tension, you leave and return to your role.

On the other hand: what happened in ozashiki was not mere escape. It was a mirror image of society – with the roles reversed. The merchant beat the samurai. A woman ruled the room. Weakness defeated strength. Beauty mattered more than accuracy. As if someone wanted to say: we know how the world works outside. But here, in this room, we are testing what happens if it works differently.

Share (洒落) – wit, style, elegant lightness – was one of the concepts that defined Edo culture. Not humour. Not coarseness. Share is the subtle intelligence of play, the capacity to be light without being shallow. In asobi-e – the playful ukiyo-e prints created by Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, Hiroshige, and Kyōsai – share is the guiding spirit: witty visual puzzles, double meanings, optical illusions, images that demand the viewer think rather than merely look. Ozashiki asobi is the quintessence of share: a game that looks simple but has a second layer. Play that looks childish but is in reality a precision instrument of social engineering.

Silence after the last throw

The shamisen falls silent. The last cup of bappai drunk, the last fan lifted from the tatami. The geisha tidies the props – the hakama goes back under the tokkuri, the screen against the wall, the go stones into a bowl. The room that for several hours was a stage, an arena, a salon, and a theatre all at once is simply a room again. Tatami, tokonoma, silence.

The merchant stands, straightens his kimono. The samurai stands, takes the swords left by the entrance. In a moment they will step into the street and the hierarchy will return – one higher, one lower, bow to the right, bow to the left. But both know that somewhere in Edo there is a room where it did not matter. A room where the samurai snarled on all fours like a child, the merchant beat the geisha on reflexes, and a thrown fan landed so that a butterfly stood on it like a sail on a boat.

Ukifune. Thirty points for something that lasts a second. Six hundred years ago Murasaki Shikibu wrote about a woman drifting in a boat through fog, unsure whether she is alive or already gone. A chapter was named after it. And then a configuration of fan, butterfly, and air in a tatami room was named after it too – a configuration that exists for a moment and then falls apart. Like everything in Edo. A world that floats.

SOURCES

1. Dalby, Liza. “Geisha.” University of California Press, Berkeley 1983. (Polish edition: “Byłam gejszą,” Książka i Wiedza, 1992, trans. Ewa Pałasz-Rutkowska.)

2. Linhart, Sepp. “License to Play: The Ludic in Japanese Culture.” University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu 2017.

3. 投扇興保存振興協会 (Nihon Tōsenkyō Hozon Shinkō Kai). Tōsenkyō rules and scoring system. tosenkyo.net

4. Seigle, Cecilia Segawa. “Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan.” University of Hawai’i Press, 1993.

5. 宮脇賣扇庵 (Miyawakibaisen’an). Mei scoring system according to “The Tale of Genji.” Kyoto.

6. 日本古典文学大辞典 (Nihon koten bungaku daijiten). Entries: asobi (遊び), ozashiki (お座敷), tōsenkyō (投扇興).

"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

of the page

    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)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

___________________

inari.smart

Would you like to share your thoughts or feedback about our website or app? Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you quickly. We value your perspective!