Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  Unfortunately all these brothels and teahouses remained largely empty. Foreigners, it became apparent, preferred more illicit pleasures. Many came to sightsee but few stayed on to enjoy themselves. The project was particularly overambitious given the small size of the foreign settlement at the time and the fact that a large proportion of the foreigners were missionaries.

  By now the Japanese were beginning to get the measure of the foreigner’s prudery. They had already discovered, to their astonishment, that foreigners not only thought there was something wrong with male-on-male sex but punished it with death. It was utterly different from the Japanese notion that when it came to sex, anything went.

  Shortly after the ignominious closure of the New Shimabara, an extraordinary event occurred which focused Japanese attention on the gulf between foreign attitudes and their own. In June 1872 a Peruvian ship, the Maria Luz, dropped anchor in Yokohama Harbor for repairs. A Chinese coolie jumped overboard to try and escape, revealing that the ship was carrying a cargo of 230 Chinese slaves. Thirteen were children, including one, a little girl, who was under ten. There was international uproar and the captain was arrested and put on trial. The slaves were finally declared free and sent back to Hong Kong.

  In the course of the furor the Peruvians pointed out that the Japanese too trafficked in slaves—the women of the Yoshiwara. This was not strictly accurate. The sale of human beings had been declared illegal in 1612 and services in the Yoshiwara were known as “term employment.” Nevertheless, the women were not free even to leave the quarter, let alone give up their “employment” there.

  Having been a closed society for so long, the Japanese now squirmed under the eyes of the world. The Meiji government was eager to persuade the Western powers that Japan was every bit as civilized and modern as they. Four months after the Maria Luz incident, the government passed the Prostitute and Geisha Emancipation Act, prohibiting the sale and trade of human beings. “Said prostitutes and geisha,” went the wording, “have lost their human rights and are treated no differently from cows and horses. Human beings cannot logically demand payment of obligations from cows and horses. Therefore the said prostitutes and geisha should not pay debts or the balance of installments.” The act became known humorously as the Cattle Release Act. (The Japanese, incidentally, were early by international standards in this respect. In Britain, for example, the Public Prostitution Law was repealed only in 1886.)

  Many prostitutes went home and brothels were forced to close though, as the individual members of the government knew perfectly well, there were plenty of “cattle” who did not wish to be emancipated and had no idea how to make a living if they were. Many brothels quickly reopened for business under the designation “rental parlors.” Before emancipation, according to the census of the time, there were 5,759 prostitutes and 280 geisha in the seven licensed districts. Afterward the figures show that the number of prostitutes had quartered to a mere 1,367. Geisha conversely had increased to 417.

  The act in fact gave a fillip to the geisha, who were already far more popular and chic; there were always fewer geisha than prostitutes because of the stringent artistic requirements for the geisha. The government also recognized a distinction between geisha and prostitutes. Hereafter prostitutes who wished voluntarily to carry on their trade were required to have a license. Geisha who also practiced as prostitutes had to have two licenses, one for the sale of gei, “entertainment,” the other for iro, “sex.”

  The Yoshiwara continued to do business right up until prostitution was made illegal in 1958. But it had long since ceased to be the cultural center it once was. It had become a splendid relic of a bygone age, the sort of place where Victorians went to gape and the hoi polloi went for sex. A decade after the Cattle Release Act, in 1883, cognoscenti were dismissing the geisha of the Yoshiwara as low class compared to their sisters in the unlicensed districts. By then all the most fashionable geisha were to be found in the romantically named Yanagibashi (Willow Bridge) and Shimbashi (New Bridge), while the second-rank of geisha were those of Sukiyacho and Yoshicho. The Yoshiwara geisha came a poor third.

  Yanagibashi took on the mantle of Fukagawa as the home of the most elegant and witty geisha who entertained the merchants of old Edo. This was an area of boathouses along a tributary giving on to the River Sumida whence the chokibune—light swift boats with a single long oar—set off to carry customers to the Yoshiwara. Enterprising boathouse-keepers turned their properties into stylish teahouses and restaurants so that customers need not even bother with the journey.

  The chronicler of Yanagibashi wrote under the pen name Ryuhoku, meaning “North of the Willows.” The last of the great tsu sophisticates, he wrote scathingly of the uncouth ways of the country bumpkin samurai, of ghastly post-Restoration parties where people were so boorish that they talked politics or even spoke in English and ignored the geisha and their singing and dancing. He complained of modern geisha, little better than prostitutes, who were more interested in money than art and bought copies of the official gazette to find out how much their clients were earning.

  But Yanagibashi was too thoroughly imbued with the decadence of old Edo under the shogunate. The men who had spent their youth rabble-rousing in the teahouses, the industrialists, politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen who ran the brave new Tokyo, now found Shimbashi, New Bridge, more to their taste. With all things Western coming into vogue, Shimbashi had the advantage of bordering on the Ginza, where the first street of brick buildings with a long colonnaded arcade was built in 1872. And, as it happened, it was also where many of the Gion geishas who had followed their lovers the 250 miles to Tokyo had set up teahouses.

  There, men like Hirobumi Ito, the country’s first prime minister, and Taro Katsura, one of his successors, would spend the evening after a day of wrangling over the fledgling constitution in the Diet, the country’s new parliament. And there, in their crass, forthright, country samurai way, they would discuss matters of state between nibbling on delicacies, exchanging banter with the geisha, and showing off their own skills at singing and dancing.

  The larger-than-life women whose names were on every tongue, and whose stories gripped the popular imagination of the time, were mainly Shimbashi geisha—women like Okoi, “Honorable Carp,” who was the mistress of, among others, a famous kabuki actor, a sumo grand champion, and prime minister Katsura. Connoisseurs of the old school, nevertheless, continued to favor the Yanagibashi geisha, who were much admired for their elegance and stylish femininity.

  The most celebrated geisha of the era was Sadayakko Kawakami, who rose to become the concubine of the country’s first prime minister and later the first woman to tread the boards as an actress. Her story casts light on the women who became geisha, the life they led, and the way in which becoming a geisha opened doors that would otherwise have remained firmly shut. It was the only way in which a woman could hope to take control of her own destiny.

  The Story of Sadayakko

  Sadayakko or Sada (as she was known at the height of her career) was born in the Nihombashi district of Tokyo just four years into the new era, in 1872. Her father had been a successful businessman but when she was six his business collapsed. Desperate, the family took her along to a geisha house in the Yoshicho geisha district and arranged for her to be adopted by the proprietress, a woman named Kamekichi, who became her geisha “mother.” Undoubtedly money changed hands and the family finances benefited from the transaction. Still, it was an adoption, not a “sale of persons,” considered a perfectly normal way in those days to ensure the future of one’s child.

  Mother Kame too did well out of the deal. Not only was the child “of good family,” which would make her more salable as a geisha, she was also strikingly lovely, with translucent white skin, lustrous black tresses, and extraordinary eyes. The left was flat like an Asian eye, the right had a crease like a Western one. And she was very quick; she could “learn one thing and pick up ten,” as the saying went. At the age of ten she demanded t
o learn to read and write, an outrageous request for a young girl training to be a geisha. The first high schools for women had opened only in 1870 and they were certainly not for the likes of Sada.

  Had it been any other child, Mother Kame would have said, “What are you trying to do? Reading and writing is for men!” But she had high ambitions for Sada. She could win, she thought, not just a good danna but the very best in the country. To groom her, she arranged classes in riding, swimming, billiards, and martial arts as well as reading and writing.

  The word danna means “master” in the sense of “patron” or “husband,” though the geisha’s patron will almost always already be married to someone else. Until the enormous changes brought about in Japan by the Second World War and its aftermath, it was a matter of prestige, a mark of a man’s wealth and success in the world, to be known as the patron of a beautiful and famous geisha. Even the dashing rebel samurai leader Kido, devoted as he was to his wife the ex-geisha Matsuko, was the patron of a Gion geisha named Okayo, who had been one of Matsuko’s friends. And, as he wrote in his diary, he also spent much time carousing in geisha quarters.

  For the geisha house “mother” and “older sisters” who had the future of a young geisha in their hands, their most important task was to find her a suitable patron. In the course of her career, a geisha would probably have several. The first would have the unique privilege of introducing her to the ways of love through mizuage.

  At sixteen, Sada, who, as a virgin geisha, had been given the name of Ko-yakko (Little Yakko), was an exquisite girl with feathery eyebrows, delicate features, and those extraordinary mesmerizing eyes. As the proprietress of a top geisha house, Mother Kame had many connections in high society. One day she met up with Eiichi Shibusawa, a great industrialist, real-estate magnate, and banker who lived in a splendidly baroque faux-Moorish mansion. To him, Mother Kame confided her ambition for Sada. He suggested the prime minister himself, Hirobumi Ito, and said he would put in a word on Sada’s behalf.

  Like Kido, Ito (1841–1909) had been a swashbuckling gallant from Choshu. Under the stern rule of the dying shogunate he risked execution by smuggling himself aboard a British ship in 1863 when leaving the country was still a capital offense. (According to another version of the story, it was actually the shogunate that sent him and his colleagues on a secret mission to find out how things were in the West.) With four friends he sailed via Shanghai to London, where he lodged in Hampstead and studied at University College for a few months. Reading one day in the Times that an international coalition led by the British was planning to attack his home province, he rushed back to Japan to mediate. By 1880 he was the leading figure in the government and in 1885 became the first person to take the title of prime minister. He was instrumental in developing the country’s constitution and served four different terms as prime minister.

  A short, stout man who loved to strut around sporting a chest covered in medals, he had a broad forehead, turned-up nose, and straggling goatee beard. He was a notorious libertine. Pompous in public, in private he loved nothing better than the company of a group of charming geisha, whom he would regale with an endless flow of improvised songs, finally driving all but the one who struck his fancy out of the room with a favorite ditty such as “Oh, what a boor and nuisance are you!” 8

  A great dancer, he once hosted a magnificent masked ball at his Western-style mansion, to which all the foreign diplomats in the city were invited. He went as a Venetian nobleman but the evening degenerated into an orgy of ribaldry and bawdiness, after which his cabinet became known, rather unflatteringly, as “the dancing cabinet.” Of his incessant love affairs, the most scandalous involved a Japanese nobleman’s wife. 9

  On his raffish nights out in the geisha districts, Ito had already noticed the ravishing, precocious child who shyly filled his saké cup. He was not the sort of man to turn down a proposal to deflower a girl like this. His wife, however, being, he said, something of a dragon, he suggested that the encounter should take place at his villa on an island outside Tokyo. He also handed over a very substantial amount of money to Mother Kame.

  As for Sada, she was already in love with a swarthy thickset farm boy turned student but knew well that as a woman, her private feelings were utterly irrelevant. One summer afternoon in 1888 she boarded a boat for Ito’s palatial villa, where she had a bath and carefully applied her makeup. The tubby, bewhiskered Ito, who at forty-seven must have seemed like a grandfather to her, arrived in time for dinner. Knowing her charmingly eccentric interest in reading and writing, he had brought with him, so the story goes, a Chinese book full of extremely explicit instructions on lovemaking. He read to her before putting the instructions into action.

  Having now officially become a woman, Sada was entitled to wear the kimono of an adult geisha and took the name Yakko to mark her change in status. Given his wife’s no-nonsense attitudes and the need to avoid scandal, explained Ito, he could not openly keep her. But he bought her the latest fashions, new-fangled Western items like a bathing suit, riding costume, boots, and spurs of 14-karat gold. Whenever he could, he arranged clandestine visits to continue his lessons in sexual techniques. When a policeman questioned her for swimming in the Sumida in her glamorous bathing costume, she tossed her black tresses and said, “I am Yakko, Count Ito’s concubine.”

  As Ito’s mistress, Sada was a celebrity, one of the most famous faces in the country. When she went to meet her student lover, she had to go in disguise, hiding her face in her shawl. She in her turn initiated him in the arts of love. But he, like her, could not afford to be ruled by sentiment. Offered the chance to marry into one of the country’s most powerful and wealthy families, he took it and was sent to the United States to study.

  Sada knew there was no point pining. Beautiful and famous, she took a succession of lovers, including two kabuki actors, heartthrobs of their day, and a mountainous sumo wrestler. Then one fateful day in 1892 she was summoned to entertain Ito and his guests, among them the real-estate tycoon Shibusawa who had introduced them. He had brought along a young man who was the talk of the town, an actor and satirist named Otojiro Kawakami.

  Eight years older than Sada, Otojiro came from a rough rural background and had spent time in prison because of his scurrilous tongue and subversive speeches. Making a living by his wits on the streets, he had become a rakugo comedian, the Japanese equivalent of a stand-up comic. He quickly became famous for his savage but very funny stories in which he targeted pretentious city dwellers who made a fad of all things Western, right down to Western government, but somehow always got it wrong.

  Shibusawa expected Otojiro to do his piece in front of the prime minister but the young man refused. “If you want to see my performance, you’ll have to come to my theater and pay for a ticket,” he said cheekily. It was the kind of effrontery that Ito, who had been a rebel himself, rather liked.

  Entranced by this brusque young man, Sada saw him to the door, introduced herself, and a few days later went to see him perform. The result was a love affair which was to last for the rest of their lives.

  It was the end of Sada’s career as a geisha. It was one thing for a geisha to have a professional relationship with a danna, quite another for her to have an all-engrossing personal relationship. It gave her a different flavor. Men could no longer enjoy the pleasures of an innocent flirtation with her. Thus if a geisha wished to marry, she had to leave the profession immediately.

  As for the danna, the only course was to respond with a good grace. Normally he would offer to be the official go-between, a key part of the formalities of marriage in Japan. Given Ito’s position he could not do so; instead he did the next best thing and arranged for a friend of his—a man of rank—to perform the role.

  Otojiro became a famous (some would say infamous) actor, director, and impresario and built his own theater while Sada busied herself in time-honored Japanese fashion being his wife. Some years later he started planning a world tour in which, as was usual in Japa
n, onnagata—male actors—would take the female roles. Ever since Izumo no Okuni and her followers had been banned from the theater in the seventeenth century, women had been forbidden to perform as actresses in public. Not that this meant there were no actresses. Geisha and courtesans were, as it were, “parlor actresses,” performing on a small stage to a select audience, and just as famous and celebrated as if they had performed on the public stage.

  But, said the promoter, in order to attract an audience in the United States Otojiro would have to have a female star—and who better than his own deservedly celebrated wife, the beautiful Sadayakko!

  So Otojiro, Sada, and their troupe of twenty actors set sail for San Francisco. It was 1899, the cusp of the new century and Sada was twenty-seven.

  The West which they were on their way to seduce had been enjoying a love affair with “olde world” Japan ever since Commodore Perry opened the doors of this extraordinary feudal society. Japonisme was all the rage. In Britain Victorian artists, notably James McNeill Whistler, were painting in the Japonesque style and collecting Japanese art; Arthur Lasenby Liberty spent much time in Japan studying fabrics and buying goods for his store on London’s Regent Street; and Victorians avidly bought kimonos, fans, and blue-and-white porcelain to decorate their homes. “In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention,” commented Oscar Wilde in his supercilious way. “The Japanese people are simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.”

  In England, The Mikado had been a smash hit, with a thousand performances over an eleven-year run. Across the Atlantic on one particular night in 1886 there were 170 separate performances going on simultaneously all over the North American continent. A pin-up that same year of the much-adored star Marie Lloyd showed her dressed as the Westerner’s notion of The Geisha in a red long-sleeved kimono open like a coat, waving a fan, with hairpins in her hair and an enormous bow on her back. The chorus to her song was inscribed beneath the picture: