Marrying Up

30 June 2022

Having read far too many nineteenth–century English novels, I fell easily into the habit of describing my relationship with Hiro, my husband, as marrying up.

Although Hiro’s family is not of a higher social status than mine— his father’s family descends from samurai stock, however—I use the phrase to jokingly refer to Hiro’s qualities that exceed mine. I happily claim that he is much more handsome than me, and from my inculcation as a North American fat, femme queer, it took some deprogramming in Japan to realize that Hiro finds me as attractive as I find him. Of course, I can always quote Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy, when Arnold agrees to Alan’s pursuit of Arnold: if anyone asks, I’m the pretty one.

Hiro finally heard me say that I had married up enough times to ask what I meant by it. When I described the meaning in English, a light came into his eyes.

We have a way of saying that in Japanese. たまのこし (tamanokoshi).

I was confused at first. 玉残し, I asked, spelling out the sounds with the characters that first came to mind. Leaving my balls behind? (玉, tama, can be shorthand for 金玉, kintama, which literally means golden jewels but more frequently is used euphemistically to refer to testicles, also referred to as the family jewels, no?)

Hiro laughed—homophones abound in Japanese—and then showed me the correct characters: 玉の輿.

Time to dust off my Japanese Wikipedia skills.

According to one etymological conjecture 玉 (tama) refers to お玉 (Otama), the mother of Tsunakichi, the fifth Tokugawa Shōgun.

Some of her seventeenth century contemporaries note, perhaps jealously, that she was either the daughter of a lowly Kyōto greengrocer or the daughter of a tatami mat weaver. She caught the eye of the third Tokugawa shōgun, Iemitsu, in 1639 (she was twelve at the time—yikes, from a twenty-first century perspective but not so cringe back then).

She began her shogunate service as a handmaiden to the most powerful women in Edo, the wives and concubines of the Shōgun. She bore a son for Iemitsu, who went on to become the fifth Shōgun, Tsunakichi. When Iemitsu died, she entered a Buddhist convent, but when Tsunakichi began his rule, she returned to the castle and was elevated in court rank, first to the Third Rank, after which she skipped ranks to be elevated to the First Rank.

Image item — A portrait of Otama as an abbess. She retired to a Buddhist convent for the second and final time after the death of her son. As is traditional, she adopted a Buddhist name and is also known to history as Keishōin.

These court ranks entitled her to many privileges, among them the use of a palanquin and bearers—the best way to get around city streets which were as crowded back then as they are now. The Japanese word for a palanquin is 輿 (koshi)—I think the character, a wheeled cart supported by a pair of hands above a stable platform, looks very much like a palanquin, but that might be just me.

So, お玉の輿 is Lady Otama’s palanquin. How does that mean marrying up? It actually has less to do with the fact that a commoner’s daughter bedded a Shōgun and more to do with her elevation in rank at the hands of her son, Tsunakichi. Her sudden rise to Third Rank and her unprecedented elevation to First Rank from Third is a testament to the power she earned throughout her life, power she received first from her futon-partner Iemitsu and then from her son Tsunakichi.

So the analogy with the English phrase, I married up, is a little looser than Hiro and I thought, but I sometimes like to consider myself a concubine who pissed off her jealous contemporaries and ascended to more awesomeness anyway.