Die "böse Alte" in der japanischen Populärkultur der Edo-Zeit

From the middle of the 18th century, the urban commoner population in Japan supported a strongly commercialized popular culture, including such diverse, but nonetheless interrelated genres as the kabuki theatre, the multi-coloured woodblock prints (ukiyoe) and the richly illustrated popular novels called kusazōshi. Although these genres enjoy world-wide fame for their aesthetic qualities, to date their contents have rarely been studied in detail. Since they can be shown to have offered their consumers foils onto which they could project their real hopes and fears, they offer an interesting field for socio-historic research and interpretation. Supplemented by 56 colour and 109 black-and-white illustrations, the analysis of the figures of wicked crones that appear in many of these works shows that female old age obviously inspired substantial fear in contemporaries, belying our common view of Japan as a country where old age is unconditionally a serene state spent within the warmth of a caring family. During the later part of the Edo period (ca. 1750–1868), a considerable ageing of the population had taken place, in the course of which old age increasingly became a social problem.