Meshimori onna

• Japanese: 飯盛女 (meshimori onna)

Meshimori onna were serving girls employed at post-station inns, many of whom were indentured to the inn and served as prostitutes in addition to the more standard tasks of helping run the inn.

In the 1770s, shogunate policy allowed for 500 such serving girls to operate at inns at Shinagawa-juku, and 150 each at Itabashi and Senju, which were also post-stations on highways leading in/out of Edo. In the 1840s, similarly, there were around 1,000 such meshimori onna seen in official population registers for the areas immediately surrounding the city.

Though their engagement in prostitution was technically illegal, the inns' serving girls were relatively above-board, compared to bathhouse girls and basic streetwalkers, as the serving girls were associated with known places of residence, and known chains of command (i.e. under innkeepers, post-station officials, and post-road magistrates). The authorities thus looked the other way to a certain extent, knowing that their activities helped encourage and support the economic vitality of the post-stations.

References

• Amy Stanley, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, UC Press (2012), 2, 62.