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Nonetheless, the picture darkened by degrees. By the mid-1820s the pleasures of the Floating World had became pretty much the only ones there were and, now that they had almost consciously become an antidote to despair, their pursuit had become something rather desperate. The trend was reflected in the arts. Having by now lost their novelty value, ukiyo-e were beginning to deteriorate and the genre entered its decadent stage. Sex became a subject even more favoured than before. A note of satire had crept in – although taking extreme care to ensure that the targets were only famous courtesans and kabuki actors, and not samurai.

The schoolgirl icon, one that even shop-worn harlots aspire to emulate, has by now been a staple in Japanese sexual iconography for 50 years. Many Japanese men are galvanized by what they call Roricon – short for ‘Lolita Complex’. Recently there has been a rash of teenage prostitution in Japan, for which no one entertains any doubt about the materialistic motivation – least of all the acquisitive Lolitas themselves. Although widely reported and occurring on an 51 | THE JAPANESE STATE OF THE ARTS unprecedented scale, the phenomenon is not especially new; scandals involving unrepentant teenage prostitutes have been surfacing in the Japanese press for 30 years.

Punishments for breaking sumptuary rules were strict, although this rather depended on where and when, since enforcement went through periods of laxity as well as of severity and bribery was common. Such regulations were applied to all classes, but the samurai were especially closely watched. It should be pointed out, though, that the ultimate sanction against the samurai – enforced suicide – is largely a modern myth and did not, in fact, happen; moreover, the term for this was seppuku, not harakiri.