Since the second half of the eighteenth century, commercial authors, artists, and playwrights, but also everyday observers, began to look at the night not with fear but with pragmatism and even humor, removing one obstacle to the idea of nocturnal outdoor play. Meanwhile, guidebooks created a public by inviting the urban dwellers – men and women, young and old, samurai and commoners – to partake in the spectacles of the city after dark. Participation in nocturnal public gatherings in early modern Japan, however, was self-regulated and not emancipatory. Commercial publications show that the lack of streetlights and of public spaces openly dedicated to sociability in the cities of early modern Japan did not preclude the possibility of a thriving urban nightlife that included regulation, consumption, curiosity, fantasy, and sociability.