Hmmm. I don't think I know anything about how prospective onnagata were chosen for training, although offhand, this site (http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/tokyo.html) provides the term "kagema" for an apprentice onnagata, though other sites say that a kagema was merely a transgender prostitute... and yet others say that all onnagata moonlighted as prostitutes offstage.
However, this site (http://www.androphile.org/preview/Culture/Japan/japan.htm) does say that brothels of boys were fairly common in large cities.
I'm not sure we can really know what Shinta and the girls were intended to be sold for, unless someone can substantiate the claim that hakubaikou was a characteristic prostitute's perfume *and* we assume from Hiko's passing comment near the beginning that he was concretely inspired to mention it because of a passing wisp of scent from the girls. Prostitution is certainly a reasonable conjecture in this context, but so is normal household servitude.
wrt red hair, I was *really* surprised to read that when the current Empress was a girl, her hair had a (natural) reddish color and was slightly wavy, which made her new classmates a bit standoffish when she changed schools. So I guess the taboo can't be universal. I still think that the big question about Shinta's family is why he put crosses over all of the bodies when he buried them, which raises some further questions about the relevance of the Amakusa Arc (which, like almost all of the third season, I still haven't seen).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2007-08-29 02:02 am (UTC)However, this site (http://www.androphile.org/preview/Culture/Japan/japan.htm) does say that brothels of boys were fairly common in large cities.
I'm not sure we can really know what Shinta and the girls were intended to be sold for, unless someone can substantiate the claim that hakubaikou was a characteristic prostitute's perfume *and* we assume from Hiko's passing comment near the beginning that he was concretely inspired to mention it because of a passing wisp of scent from the girls. Prostitution is certainly a reasonable conjecture in this context, but so is normal household servitude.
wrt red hair, I was *really* surprised to read that when the current Empress was a girl, her hair had a (natural) reddish color and was slightly wavy, which made her new classmates a bit standoffish when she changed schools. So I guess the taboo can't be universal. I still think that the big question about Shinta's family is why he put crosses over all of the bodies when he buried them, which raises some further questions about the relevance of the Amakusa Arc (which, like almost all of the third season, I still haven't seen).