Goze

Goze (瞽女^?) is a Japanese historic term referring to visually-impaired Japanese women, most of whom worked as musicians.

The ideographs for goze mean "blind" and "woman." The kanji are so because the individual ideograph for goze already existed. Goze is most likely derived from mekura gozen (盲御前^?), which also means "blind woman" (gozen is a formal second-person pronoun). Although the term goze can be found in medieval records, other terms such as mōjo (盲女^?), jomō (女盲^?) were also in use (especially in written records) until the modern era. In spoken language, the term goze is usually suffixed by an honorific: goze-san, goze-sa, goze-don, etc.

From the Edo period (1600–1868), goze organized themselves in a number of ways. Few large-scale organizations have been found in urban areas, though during the nineteenth century some documents speak of a goze association in the city of Edo. In Osaka and some regional towns, goze were sometimes informally linked to pleasure quarters, where they were called to perform their songs at parties.

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