"Geisha"

The geisha is the aristocrat of the mizu-shobai (water business)… but she is not a prostitute… Her business is tosell a dream-of luxury, romance, and exclusivity-to the wealthiest and most powerful men in Japan…

For many years the world of the geisha, often referred to as the flower and willow world, has perplexed and intrigued people around the world. The most common image of a geisha is a white faced, red lipped, kimono clad, glorified prostitute, but in truth they are so much more. A true geisha is a person of art and can be male or female. To become a geisha requires more skill and dedication than the Western World is able to comprehend and because of that, the misconception is, more often than not, upheld. Arthur Golden’s critically acclaimed book and feature film Memoirs of a Geisha was able to open the eyes of the Western World to the beauty, grace, and plight of these women; however, there is much more than meets the eye.

The geisha culture is the only business in Japan that is run exclusively by women for the pleasure of men and has been successful for many centuries. In this society, where a woman's place was either in the home or in the brothel, the geisha carved out a separate niche, creating a community of women that became known as the karyuaki (flower and willow world). Despite the often harsh realities of this world, a geisha could gain an education of sorts, acquire an art, make her own money, establish an independent identity, run a business, pursue romance, and sometimes find true love.

The heart of the geisha life lay in two Japanese cities, Kyoto and Tokyo. One, Kyoto, is a snapshot in time of the geisha of the past; living in the hanamachi with their geisha family, learning the arts, and preserving the way of the geisha. The other, Tokyo, is struggling to retain the dwindling geisha arts where technology advancement threatens to take over. In Kyoto an apprentice geisha is referred to as a maiko, person of dance, and a fully fledged geisha is a geiko, person of art. In Tokyo the names are hangyoku, because sharing in the company of an apprentice would only result in half of a charge, and ippon, meaning literally “one full point”, respectively. For ease, rather than use their Japanese names the words “apprentice geisha” and “geisha” will be used. This is because this paper will focus on both Kyoto and Tokyo geisha and to use one or both sets of names would become quite confusing. For convenience, there is a glossary at the end of this paper where the definitions of italicized words are provided.

Origin of the Geisha

The history of the geisha began during the Japanese Renaissance when the class system that previously governed Japan was being turned on its head. During this time, the first of the pleasure quarters, called Yanagimichi, was built by a man with an entrepreneurial spirit named Hideyoshi Toytomi. Before the Renaissance, the samurai had been directly under the shogun, and they still were, but they were forbidden from retaining other employment and as a result, they were struggling survive on their stipend. To survive they had to borrow money and the direct result was an increase in the income for the money lenders. To prevent the merchants from overtaking the samurai, edicts were frequently passed forbidding them from using their wealth to do things such as wear silk or live in three story houses. There was no tax system, but in order to keep the merchants in line every so often the shogunate would come up with reasons to confiscate everything.

Since no one wanted to relinquish all of their hard earned wealth to the government, squandering their wealth became a common habit, but since there were edicts preventing the merchants from acquiring silver and gold, the only option left was to go into the pleasure quarters to squander their wealth rather than lose it. This caused the pleasure quarters to prosper which was not what the shogun wanted in any way, shape, or form. He believed that if he walled in all of the people and things that were directly related to pleasure, the upstanding citizens would eventually get tired of having to travel to indulge themselves. However, the lure of sex and other sensual pleasures combined with the "elegance, culture, and brilliant conversation with beautiful women in an atmosphere of refinement" proved to be even too much for the shogun to control.

With the popularity of the pleasure quarters growing exponentially, it became vital to retain many new girls to ensure the unwavering attention of the merchants with their new wealth.

This necessity in conjunction with kuchi berashi ensured a steady stream of girls being acquired by zegen “who scoured the countryside and poorer sections of the city” where they could find parents willing to give up their children to lower their debt or reduce the number of mouths they had to feed. This was not looked at with the same disdain nor did it have a similar stigma that it would have today because it was viewed as improving the life of their child. They were able to send them off to a place where they would have a steady supply of fine food, clothing to wear, and be educated, if not completely, at least more than they could hope to provide.

Once a child was in the pleasure quarter, yes, they did indeed have the opportunity for a better class of life, but they were now the property of the brothel owner and saddled with an outrageous level of ever increasing debt. They began to repay their debt by becoming maids; and as they grew older, if they showed promise, they would become kamurof. This was the predecessor to the current day maiko in Kyoto. During this period the child would follow an older courtesan and learn the secrets that made her successful. At this point, the child would learn many things, but the most important idea that would be passed from courtesan to apprentice was the key rule: “Play at love but never, never to allow oneself to feel it. That way lay disaster.”

It was assumed that a person reached sexual maturity around the age of thirteen and at this point an apprentice was expected to accept a rite of passage called mizuage. This rite of passage was still performed until it was deemed illegal. The mizuage ceremony consists of a bidding war between patrons and the winner receives the right to take the virginity of the apprentice. This was required for a girl to be considered a fully fledged courtesan or geisha. After the mizuage ritual, a girl would be ranked and that would determine what kind of work she would receive. Often girls would be ranked as lower class prostitutes and condemned to a life of sitting and waiting for customers to come and choose them; but if the girl had exceptional beauty, she could be ranked as koshi and have the opportunity to work her way up to being tayu.

Tayu, at the time, were in high demand and very difficult to obtain. If a man wanted to partake in the company of a tayu, the first step was to go to an ageya…to apply for a meeting…The owner of the ageya would write a letter to the bordello where the courtesan lived, roll it up, and give it to the messenger. While the customer was waiting, he would enjoy to services of jesters and dancing girls and ply them with food and drink, all of which, of course, would be added to his bill. The customer would then be able to spend time with the courtesan and they spend the “evening playing music, dancing, exchange poems, and enjoy the tea…and incense ceremony.” Even at this point in time, the tayu had the ability and responsibility to be selective because if they were not, their reputation could be tarnished if it was perceived that they were too easy.

The success that was enjoyed by Hideyoshi Toytomi in Yanagimichi led to Saburoemon Hara to petition to begin another pleasure quarter in Kyoto, specifically Edo; however, it was ultimately a wealthy brothel owner, Jinemon Shoji, who was successful in creating a licensed pleasure quarter. The success of this pleasure quarter was because of unmarried merchants and tradesmen from Kyoto and Osaka, and unmarried samurai who, on the stipend provided to them by their employers, could not begin or support a family. Yoshiwara set itself apart from Yanagimichi by not only offering sex, but also entertainment such as kabuki, shrine dancing, wrestling, and singing. As a result of these diverse offerings, Yoshiwara was “far larger than the country’s other famous pleasure quarters.”

“Gradually the number of women worthy to be designated tayu began to decline...It was then that a new breed of woman first began to step out…a woman who was not a caged bird, who dressed with understated sophistication, not showy glitter, and who sold not her body, but her arts.”

This was the foundation of the geisha.