Why It Sucks to Be a Palace Maid in Edo Japan

You are a girl in your early teens, and you have just been hired by the shogun. You will be housed, fed, given firewood, charcoal, lamp oil and silver to buy salt, and paid a salary in rice by the same treasury that pays samurai. In the seventeen hundreds there are very few jobs anywhere in the world that offer a girl of your background any of that. Here is what it costs. You get up at four in the morning and sweep more than a hundred rooms. You haul water out of a locked well and carry it, two women to a bucket, into every one of them. You are allowed to leave the compound for six days once every three years. If your father comes to the gate, you may not see him. This is the ohashita, the lowest rank of servant inside the Ooku, the sealed women's quarters of Edo Castle. Five acres under one roof that no adult man could enter, staffed top to bottom by women, with a bucket of the shogun's bath water passing through three sets of hands every morning because the law said the last pair had to be female. And the strange part is that people wanted this job. Edo made a board game about climbing its career ladder, starting at the bottom square, at ohashita. Episode 5 of EDO LIVES. The real lives behind old Japan. CHAPTERS 00:00 The job you were just hired into 01:33 The building with no men in it 04:08 Four in the morning 06:27 The relay 08:33 The gate that closed at four 10:46 Six days in three years 13:02 Four koku and two ryo 15:46 The room upstairs had no light 17:46 What happened to them SOURCES Yamamoto Hirofumi, Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo, lecture text on the work and daily life of the Ooku, Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library https://www.library.metro.tokyo.lg.jp... Kyuji Shimonroku, the 1891 interviews with former shogunate officials and former Ooku women, National Diet Library Digital Collections https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/772630 On the pay of the Ooku women, drawn from the Jochu Bugencho, the Tokugawa Reitenroku and the Kyuji Shimonroku https://www.nippon.com/ja/japan-topic... On the last three months of the Ooku, and the departures of April 1868 https://www.nippon.com/ja/japan-topic... Iida City, on the Ejima incident of 1714 and its consequences https://www.city.iida.lg.jp/site/bunk... Kyonan Town, Hishikawa Moronobu Memorial Museum, on the Nanatsu-guchi, the gate named after the hour it shut https://www.town.kyonan.chiba.jp/site... Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library, the surviving floor plan of the Honmaru palace, an Important Cultural Property https://www.library.metro.tokyo.lg.jp... The Rise Through Service in the Inner Quarters, the Edo board game about the Ooku career ladder https://www.library.metro.tokyo.lg.jp... ABOUT THIS CHANNEL EDO LIVES follows one person through one job, in the Japan of the shoguns. Researched from Japanese language sources and primary records. New episode most Saturdays. This video uses AI narration and AI generated illustration. The research, the script and the editorial choices are human. #japanesehistory #edoperiod #edocastle