East, West and Sex

[Mark]

Seeking Pleasure Far From Home
For Western men, the Orient has long served as a playground—or a place of freedom from Christian scolds.Article Comments more in Opinion »Email Printer

By TUNKU VARADARAJAN
A Dutch-Japanese phrase book, compiled in 1770 for a trade legation from Holland -- the only Westerners permitted to reside on Japanese soil by the xenophobic shoguns -- had a mere 80 phrases. Its brevity suggests a paring down to the absolute essentials of speech needed to get by with the locals. Yet eight of the phrases -- an eye-catching 10% of the total -- pertained to hiring the services of female companions. These included a scripted exchange that would not be out of place in one of the more free- wheeling modern guidebooks for Western travelers to Thailand, say, or the Philippines: "Do you like that girl? / Yes, I like her a great deal. / Would you like me to make appropriate arrangements? / Yes, please do." One can almost picture bewhiskered Dutch lips smacking in a most un-burgher-like anticipation.

The Dutch legation was confined to a small island off the Nagasaki harbor. But the Japanese authorities -- sensitive to the basic needs even of hairy, barbarian Christian men -- allowed courtesans from the Maruyama pleasure quarter of Nagasaki to visit the Dutchmen. Occasionally the Dutch were taken on excursions to Maruyama itself, always with an official Japanese escort. "Imagine," Richard Bernstein writes, "a delegation of Japanese traders in France being escorted by Louis XIV's police to an elegant Parisian brothel." This, he observes, would have been inconceivable, even if there had been Japanese traders in Europe at the time, because Eastern sexuality "was a world apart from the sexual culture of Europe."


"The East, the West, and Sex" is the best sort of book about sex: It is replete with anecdotes from history that titillate as they inform and observations on human nature that amuse as they illuminate, all delivered in language and tone that is broadly moral without being moralizing and certainly far from prudish. To his credit, Mr. Bernstein strives hard to avoid prurience, or even the suggestion of it, although occasionally he does drop his guard, as when he writes of Western men being "powerfully drawn to the slim, small-boned, black-haired women of Asia, more plumlike than melonlike of breast, spare rather than full of buttocks and hips."

Mr. Bernstein's survey of Westerners in the fleshpots of the East -- ranging from the 17th century to the present -- is actually cultural history with a point, an attempt to show that nonmonogamous sex in the Orient (at least for men in power) long carried no contingent connotation of sin and was, in fact, a natural part of the masculine condition. While Christian scolds of old viewed such easy sexual possibility as clinching proof of Eastern degeneracy, the more worldly among Western men saw in the East an opportunity for liberation -- for a breaking of the shackles they wore, perforce, in London, Lisbon or Rotterdam, before the West's own sexual revolution.


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