It is 400 years since the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters were established in Edo (now Tokyo). The area changed greatly through its history, but its importance to the development of Japan’s ...

The Yoshiwara is not marked on modern-day maps. The old neighborhood names survived until 1966, when new ones were introduced, severing the last tangible link with the past. Not all is lost, however.

True, this imagined place had real-world equivalents, by far the most famous of which was Edo’s New Yoshiwara (the old Yoshiwara burned down in 1657). But pleasure districts, wrote Screech ...

and the streets of the Yoshiwara, which in the past had been bright enough not to even need lamps, descended into a deep darkness. It had changed so much that, in that one instant, I said to ...

A fire which started in a room on the third floor of the Mikado-ro at number 20, Nichome, Edomachi, Yoshiwara (in Tokyo), about 11 o'clock Sunday morning swept an area four miles long and a mile ...