YOBAI (NIGHT CREEPING)

YOBAI (NIGHT CREEPING) – Before the advent of Love Hotels, Karaoke Boxes, personal vehicles, and other such sites of sexual liaison, a young man would have little choice but to visit the bedroom of his lover in a practice known as Yobai. Yobai meant silently creeping around the village in the still of the night, carefully and quietly sliding open the door of the young woman’s bedroom (urinating along the bottom of the door is said to have stopped it from squeaking), and then slipping under the covers for a night of passion until at the first cocks crowing, once more creeping through the village back to home. Of course it was usually an “open” secret, but maintaining appearances was, and is, extremely important in Japan. After marriage Yobai would continue for three more nights and on the third morning the girl’s family would “discover” the young couple in bed together, thereby cementing the union. During Yobai it could sometimes be very useful to be naked. In Fukuoka there was a law on the books that made it illegal to cut with a sword a naked man you found in your house. The logic being that a naked man was engaged in yobai, but a clothed man was probably a thief and it was perfectly legal to use a sword on him. Of course, if it was the wife who had been visited, then profuse and fervent apologies accompanied by a sizable gift of sake would usually be enough to smooth the situation over. A second type of Yobai was practiced in the rural regions of Western Japan after the rice had been harvested in the autumn. All the young men of the village would gather together at the headman’s house and after consuming plenty of sake would en masse make the rounds of the village. At each house where a young woman lived, the men would play janken, the Japanese version pf paper, rock, scissors, and the winner would enter the house and spend the night with the girl. In the cities of Japan, where most Japanese now live, there is still speculation whether Yobai has completely disappeared in the more remote parts of Japan, though this probably represents wishful thinking on their part. Japan termin.