Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  Finally the owner of a big department store agreed to do it. By now Haruyu was fifteen, old for mizuage. Afterward she had the even greater embarrassment of having to walk around with her hair in the ofuku—“just deflowered”—style. The house mothers kept stopping her on the street to congratulate her. She was so embarrassed that she ran home.

  At the time, she wrote, there were two “professional deflowerers” who took care of Gion. She gave them pseudonyms: “Mr. Kawada” and “Mr. Kimura.” Once a maiko was getting past her sell-by date, if she still hadn’t been deflowered, the mother of her geisha house would go to one of them and suggest he do the honors.

  Once, she wrote, all the maiko of the district were performing at the annual Cherry Dances. There were two pathways like catwalks—hanamichi, “flower roads”—stretching through the middle of the audience from the back of the theater to the stage. For one piece there was a line of maiko dancing on each. “This catwalk is Kawada-san’s,” yelled a wag in the audience. “That one’s Kimura-san’s!” 3

  One woman, frail but still lovely, had been the child of a famous geisha and remembered the twenties, when there were 2,500 geisha and 106 maiko in Gion alone. When I met her she was ninety, a little hard of hearing and slow on her feet but imperious still and beautiful, with silky skin as fine as parchment and delicate features. She was perfectly turned out in a kimono of watered silk with a pale-gray swirled ink pattern. She spoke not just Kyoto dialect but archaic Kyoto dialect. It was rather like meeting someone who speaks in Dickensian English.

  She had grown up in one of the most prosperous teahouses in the district, with maids to serve her. “Thanks to the money of our patrons,” she said in her thin but piercing voice, “we ate very well, better than people outside the geisha districts.”

  The daughters of geisha and of teahouse owners were in a highly privileged position, very different from girls who had been recruited from outside the geisha areas. They had no debts, they were not in bondage, they had the family house to live in. So she had no need of a patron to support her. In fact, she had no need to become a geisha at all if she didn’t want to. She could have simply taken over as the mama-san of the teahouse, the family business. But in those days it would have been unthinkable for a beautiful young girl not to have become a geisha, particularly if she came from a geisha background.

  But even though she came from a privileged background, she had mizuage, which suggests that it was seen not as a terrible ordeal from which a mother would wish to protect her daughter, but a necessary rite of passage.

  “Mizuage is when you become a woman for the first time,” she said. “In those days everyone had mizuage around fourteen. I was late, I was fifteen. I was embarrassed. I changed my hairstyle, so everyone knew I had had it. It was like getting married. Everyone congratulated me and I gave celebratory presents to everyone. I gave gifts of food to my teachers and seniors.”

  As for the perpetrator, “in those days it was just a man who makes a woman for the first time. He only did it once. Some customers were mizuage specialists. Mostly they were honorable senior citizens, rich and old. I don’t know about nowadays. Young maiko do as they please! Mizuage is really awful; but afterward you celebrated. The danna paid a lot of money but the family spent it all on celebrating. It certainly wasn’t embarrassing. It was normal; it would have been embarrassing to have been late in having it. It would have looked as if you couldn’t find a danna.”

  To a modern woman, the concept of being deflowered on a one-night stand by a rich old man who paid a lot of money for the privilege and liked to spend his time going around deflowering virgins is unspeakably abhorrent. But, barbaric though it may seem, it needs to be seen in context. One way or another, most Japanese women who grew up before 1958 wound up having to have sex with someone they barely knew and didn’t care about. If they were of the social class that had arranged marriages, often they had met their prospective husband only once or twice before the wedding and most probably had been so shy they had not dared raise their gaze higher than his shoes.

  Japanese women in their seventies have told me that the first time they saw their husband’s face was at their wedding. For them their wedding night could not have been much different from mizuage. They too had no choice but to have sex with someone who was virtually a stranger. The difference was that at least they could expect him to look after them economically in the future. They certainly did not expect fidelity or love. As for the old men who carried out mizuage, ghastly though they were, they were quite likely practiced and expert. If the fumbling upper-class youths whom respectable women had to marry had any idea what they were doing once the lights were out, it was because their fathers had packed them off to the geisha district to be taught.

  Good Days for Men

  Daytimes in the geisha district were often quiet but evenings were busy. One night I was out with Sara, who was Japanese-American, looking for Ishibei Koji, Stone Wall Alley, the small enclosed quarter where, Mori-san had told me, rich men had built houses for their concubines. He had shown me the entrance, a tiny stone doorway, like the entrance to the Secret Garden, hidden in a long wall. We were strolling around the backstreets behind Yasaka Shrine when I spotted the discreet sign.

  Stepping through the doorway was like walking into a fortress. There was a long paved alley lined with high stone walls ending in a massive gateway which led to the inner sanctum. There, well away from the main road and almost impossible to find unless you knew where to look, was a cluster of imposing houses like miniature castles barricaded behind sturdy buttresses of hewn stones topped with wooden palings or brushwood fences. There were no front gardens, only a few spindly pine trees peeking over the tops of the palings which closed in around the path. It was a strange, isolated, claustrophobic little place, a tiny hidden city. There the concubines must have lived rather a peaceful, sociable life awaiting—with pleasure or distaste, depending on their feelings—the visits of the men who were paying for all this.

  As we strolled on I realized that we were just around the corner from the home bar of the formidable mama-san in the severe navy-blue kimono. Mori-san had given me her phone number so, on the off chance, I called. I was sure that, despite his introduction, I would still count as a first-timer and be roughly rebuffed. I was pleasantly surprised when she said, all affability, “By all means; do come round!”

  In the small bar with the rows of whiskey bottles along the mirrored wall, business was a little brisker. Some businessmen, rather the worse for wear, were sitting around a low table, jackets discarded, ties akimbo, enjoying an evening of karaoké. One by one they rose unsteadily to their feet to belt out a sentimental ditty, following the neon words on a video screen.

  The mama-san was as buttoned up as ever, smiling glacially, arranging dishes of snacks. I had been hoping to continue our intriguing conversation but was not sure how to set about it. I had been reading Haruyu’s autobiography, I told her, trying to break the ice.

  “Haruyu-san,” she smiled. “Everyone knew her. She was ‘main’ ”—using the English word—“she was a very important person in Gion society.”

  “There was something we couldn’t understand,” said Sara. “Did you ever hear of mirare?”

  The mama-san’s face changed. Yes, she knew all about it.

  In her book Haruyu wrote about mirare—literally “being seen”—without ever making it clear exactly what it was. In Ichiriki-tei, Gion’s famous terra-cotta-walled teahouse, there was a small enclosed room called Kako-i where maiko would go “to be seen.” It was dark and shadowy. Usually four or five maiko were sent for at one time. The customer would look them over and decide on one.

  “Mirare was not nice for the maiko,” wrote Haruyu. “If you were chosen it wasn’t nice; and if you weren’t chosen it wasn’t nice. If you didn’t like the person who had chosen you, in theory you could say no. For a girl born in a geisha house, it was not so difficult to do that. But if you were a maiko who came from far away and were w
orking hard to make money, you couldn’t afford to say no.”

  “That was the difference between tayu courtesans in the old days and geisha,” said the mama-san. “Tayu chose who they slept with. They’d say to a customer, ‘You! I’m sleeping with you tonight!’ But geisha couldn’t choose. They were chosen.”

  “Being seen” was the process by which a customer picked a sleeping partner, either for the night or as a long-term arrangement. First he informed the mistress of his regular teahouse that that was what he wanted to do. She sent for a selection of geisha and maiko who clattered over to the teahouse accompanied, as always, by the “boy” (the dresser/assistant).

  “You always knew it was mirare,” said the mama-san, “when you got one customer asking for a group of maiko and geisha. When we were getting ready, we’d tuck a comb backward in our hair at the back, where the customer couldn’t see it.” She demonstrated slipping a small curved comb back to front into her hair. “It was like a charm to ward off being chosen.”

  It was a little like an audition. After the customer had looked them over, he would inform the mistress of the teahouse or her maid of his choice. She passed the message on to the “boy.” He took the message back to the mother of the geisha house where the maiko in question lived. Then, when she had given formal consent, he returned to the teahouse and the teahouse mother told the other maiko they could leave. Until then none of them knew which it would be. The chosen maiko was left alone.

  In theory she had the right to refuse the customer. In practice, said the mama-san, there were times when you could refuse and times when you couldn’t. Meanwhile the customer and the mistress of the teahouse would negotiate the price. There was a sliding scale, depending on what the customer wanted, ranging from a single night to some sort of long-term arrangement.

  If a customer decided he wanted to become a danna, the patron of a maiko or geisha, that was often how he chose her. In those days, as far as a geisha or maiko was concerned, she needed a danna in order to survive. Whether he looked like a monster or was young and handsome, it would have been absurd of her to refuse. In any case, she could always take a lover in secret or trade him in for another patron if she got a better offer.

  If, as the phrase went, she was “pulled [out of the geisha world] by a danna”—danna-san hika sareru—in other words, if she decided to take up his offer and become his concubine, she removed her name from the geisha registry. As a farewell, she handed out dishes of white rice called hiki-iwai—“celebrating being pulled”—to her teachers, seniors, friends, and colleagues in the geisha community. The whiteness of the rice symbolized that she would be with that danna until her hair was white. If, however, she had had her debts paid off by a danna whom she did not love and wanted to keep her options open, there would be red aduki beans scattered among the white rice, hinting that this was not forever and that she would most likely be returning to the geisha world one day. The customer, of course, never saw the rice. Most women slipped in a few red beans just in case.

  Another permutation popular with the customers was sleeping over—zakone, “sleeping huddled together like small fish.” At the end of an evening’s partying, the customers might ask the teahouse mistress to call the geisha house and ask if the maiko could sleep over. The payment was the hourly rate for each maiko’s company times twelve—in other words, very expensive.

  The dresser arrived with the maikos’ nightwear, put all their combs and hair ornaments into a box, then took the combs and kimonos back to the geisha house. He would reappear the following morning with fresh kimonos for them. Meanwhile the maids at the teahouse were spreading futon bedding around one big room. The maiko and customers slept together, spread out around the room, with a pinch-faced old maid awake all night to make sure that nothing untoward took place. Sex, after all, was to be properly arranged and paid for, not stolen. The men could chat to the maiko and the maiko could chat to each other; but the rule was no touching. Still, men loved sleeping surrounded by beautiful young women. For the maiko it was a chance to steal a customer’s heart. With luck he might be sufficiently entranced to go through the proper channels and buy her for a night or even become her danna.

  One elderly teahouse “mother” I met remembered “sleeping over.” “We used to have it in the big room upstairs,” she told me rather indiscreetly, smiling wistfully at the memory of those jolly days long gone by. “In the summertime. There’d be three or four guests, five or six geisha and maiko, and a maid or two. The fun was to try and grab the girls’ breasts.”

  For the customers it was expensive fun, for the maiko an edgy combination of fun and desperation. The customers, after all, were at play. They had left the real world of home and work behind to enter this world which operated by different rules and where there were no real responsibilities. That was why it was so expensive. But the maiko were not at play. They had a living to make and, until 1958, a frightening debt to pay off. For them it was deadly serious. As for the steely mama-san in her dark-blue kimono, she had long since put all this behind her. It was a bad memory from the distant past. She had survived. In fact, she had done better than that, she had managed to acquire a teahouse of her own. She had become not just independent but a successful businesswoman. Maybe she had inherited the teahouse from the cruel house mother who had tormented her; or maybe she had had a danna to help her out.

  “ ‘Being seen,’ ‘sleeping over’—all that came to an end in 1958,” she said with an edge of pleasure in her voice. “Those were good days for men. Now it’s good days for women. These days girls become maiko because they want to and leave when they want to.”

  With that she presented us with our bill. For a glass each of whiskey and water, a small dish of snacks (dried squid, unappetizing crackers) which we didn’t touch and about an hour of the mama-san’s time, not to mention the cost of sliding open the door and walking in, the bill for myself and Sara came to 14,000 yen, about $140. Sara, who knew about these things, said that we had got off lightly.

  chapter 6

  geisha in the victorian age

  And west you’ll sail and south again, beyond the sea-fog’s rim,

  And tell the Yoshiwara girls to burn a stick for him.

  Rudyard Kipling, Rhyme of the Three Sealers, 1893

  The Black Ships

  One fateful day in 1853, four warships bristling with cannon and trailing clouds of smoke appeared on the horizon, steaming toward the coast of Japan. They dropped anchor in the shadow of Mount Fuji, threateningly close to Edo. Fishermen at work in the placid waters fled panic stricken for shore.

  The Japanese called them the Black Ships. Their commander, Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794–1858), carried a golden casket containing a letter from President Millard Fillmore of the United States of America demanding that Japan open its doors to trade and friendship forthwith. He sent a message that he would speak only to the highest-ranking man in the nation. After waiting a week he finally stepped ashore. Bedecked with medals and gold braid, flanked by two burly black sailors and accompanied by an escort of marines and a brass band, he presented his letter. He would return the following year for an answer, he declared, and with a much larger fleet.

  The night of Perry’s arrival, a comet flashed across the sky like a harbinger of doom. Until that moment, it might have seemed to the Japanese as if nothing would ever change. For a quarter of a millennium Japan had been able to develop a rich and idiosyncratic culture almost entirely free from prying eyes and unwanted influences. One of the cornerstones of the shoguns’ policy was isolation, keeping the country sealed against the many dangers—both literal and ideological—which the outside world might present. Apart from a tiny enclave of Dutch and Chinese traders who were forbidden to leave the foreigners’ compound in the distant city of Nagasaki, Japan had been closed to foreign contact. The flower and willow world of the Yoshiwara and the geisha had bloomed in this hothouse atmosphere.

  But the last years had been marked by a growing sense of malai
se. The country was wracked by economic crises, and famines sparked riots among the peasantry.

  In the Yoshiwara courtesans and prostitutes continued to ply their trade but the balance had shifted decisively. The real heart of the demimonde was now the spirited women of Fukagawa, not Yoshiwara, and in Kyoto, Shimabara had long since yielded in popularity to Gion. In 1811 one observer had written that “the Yoshiwara has fallen on hard times nowadays . . . It seems to me that the courtesans are fewer and the number of famous ladies halved.” There were, he had said, only two women of yobidashi rank (the top rank which had replaced tayu); in fact there had been almost no high-ranking courtesans at all. 1

  Another batch of reforms in 1841 had only hastened the Yoshiwara’s decline. Once again several thousand prostitutes and geisha had been rounded up from the unlicensed districts. The prostitutes had then been dumped in the Yoshiwara, thus filling it to overflowing with untrained low-grade women. But the geisha had been allowed to return to work so long as they promised to restrict their activities to music and dancing. It was the first time that geisha had been officially recognized as different from prostitutes. By 1851 the Yoshiwara, once the exclusive domain of the super-rich, had been reduced to trawling for trade with discounts and special offers. The writer who chronicled this with disgust added grimly that veritably it marked “the end of the world.” 2

  Early in 1854, half a year after his first visit, Perry was back, this time accompanied by a squadron of eight well-armed vessels. Hopelessly out of touch with Western technology and modern warfare, Japan did not even have a navy. The government had no option but to sign a treaty opening two ports to American ships. That same year an earthquake leveled Edo and the shogun who had signed the treaty died shortly after his brush left the paper. The omens were bad.