Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  Charmed to find himself in such delightful company, the businessman bought the maiko snacks and drinks and enjoyed their girlish chatter. The three-hour journey passed like a dream. When they arrived at Tokyo Station, he bade them farewell, wished them all the best, and went off to his meetings.

  Several days later—when, no doubt, he had almost forgotten the encounter—a letter arrived in the post. Puzzled, he opened it. It was from a Kyoto teahouse and contained an enormous bill for the time spent with three maiko: three hours each, plus additional charges. It was, said the geisha who told me this story, nothing to do with greed. It was not that the teahouse mistress wanted money. In the geisha world, things have to be done properly. Time spent with a maiko or a geisha has to be paid for, even if it is distasteful to have to ask. It was a matter of doing things with style.

  Another story in the same vein concerns an elderly professor who was strolling across Shijo Bridge one day when he happened to meet some maiko he knew. They were off duty, pattering along in cotton yukata, their glowing young faces unpainted.

  “Big Brother,” they greeted him. Geisha and maiko always address their danna as “Father” and other customers as “Big Brother,” no matter how old they are. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to have lunch,” he beamed. “I don’t have any classes today.”

  “We haven’t had lunch either,” chorused the maiko.

  Thrilled at the prospect of several hours in the company of these charming young women, he took them to the best French restaurant in Kyoto, wined and dined them. But alas, for all his generosity, he suffered the same fate as the unsuspecting businessman.

  A man who “knew how to spend money and have fun with geisha”—that was the kind of man a geisha liked. Quite apart from the no-strangers rule, this meant that the geisha world would be eternally exclusive, the realm of the very, very rich. For no one else could possibly keep up with the spending required.

  In modern times, elderly geisha grumbled, standards had slipped badly. These days you got vulgar types throwing around not their own but company money and who were so déclassé as to ask for a receipt. “The receipt society,” they called it, wrinkling their elegant noses in disdain.

  Back in the eighties, when the Japanese economy was on a roll, big spending was all the rage. In those days there was a coffee shop, legendary in Tokyo, where you could get a cup of coffee for $200. You could buy exactly the same cup of coffee in the same shop for $5 but that was no fun. The thrill was in spending $200 on a cup of coffee. In the geisha world, that mentality continues. As in the days of the courtesans, it is a world where money speaks.

  From the moment a maiko or a geisha slips her dainty feet into her clogs and slides open the geisha house door, she is at work. The meter clicks on. It continues to run as she moves from party to party until she is back in the geisha house at the end of the evening. Whether you take a geisha out for dinner, for a trip to the theater, or a day of golfing, no matter how relaxed and informal the occasion, she is still at work, earning an hourly wage.

  Geisha were quite unembarrassed to talk about money, though of course one never called it “money.” The word for the maiko’s or geisha’s fee was “flower money”—hana-dai or o-hana, “honorable flower.” In the old romantic days, when Japanese clocks pursued a rather eccentric course and the pleasure districts ran on a different time from other parts of the country, a geisha’s or a maiko’s time was measured by the number of incense sticks which burned down while she was working. The incense sticks in different areas were different lengths. In Gion, twelve sticks equaled an hour; in Pontocho an hour was four sticks. The nomenclature continues, even though the practice has ended. In theory all geisha in any particular area earn the same. There is no sliding scale for seniority. In other words, as geisha were at pains to point out, being a geisha is not a career. It is a calling.

  As for the actual rate, it varies area by area but is in the region of 10,000 yen ($100) an hour. For an evening’s work, a geisha might average 30,000–40,000 yen ($300–$400). On top of that there are tips, invariably lavish. No one would dream of insulting a maiko or geisha by giving her less than at least 10,000 yen ($100). Often by the end of a single evening she will have slipped 40,000–50,000 yen ($400–$500) into the collar of her kimono.

  As one maiko told me with a candid smile, she made a far better living than her schoolmates who had taken jobs as OL—“office ladies” or secretaries. At the geisha house, everything was paid for. Her kimonos, her fans, her bags, her taxi fares, and the costs of her trips to the hairdresser were all supplied by the house. The house mother kept all the maiko’s earnings as repayment of what was effectively her debt, though she did give her pocket money in the region of 30,000–40,000 yen ($300–$400) a month. And the tips were hers to keep (although in some houses the maiko were required to hand over their tips too). For both the maiko and the house mother, it was a very profitable business.

  But if the maiko were to decide to stay on and become a geisha, she would move out of the geisha house and set up on her own after a year or two. Unlike a maiko, she would no longer be in such enormous demand. Men loved the company of the doll-like maiko in their brilliantly colored kimonos, giggling artlessly; that was why they came to Kyoto. The geisha, however, had a serious profession. A geisha’s success depended on her skill in conversation, music, and dancing; it was not enough just to have a pretty face. As a geisha, she would keep all her own earnings; but she would have to try to make a living from that alone. Life, in fact, would be much easier if there were a danna around.

  The amount a customer paid, of course, bore little relation to the amount a geisha received. When a customer wanted to organize a geisha party, he began by calling the proprietress of the teahouse where he was a regular customer. Customers were expected to observe teahouse loyalty. Most businesses, particularly those in Kyoto and Osaka, always used the same teahouse, as did many families. It was like being a member of an exclusive private club. Fathers would take their sons to their teahouse when the boys were in their teens and introduce them to the teahouse mistress and their regular geisha. “Teahouse crawling” was frowned upon—though, if you were the customer of the venerable Ichiriki teahouse, you had such kudos that you were welcome in any teahouse in Gion.

  Most probably the teahouse mistress had known the customer for decades and could plan the perfect party for him on the basis of his tastes and requirements. That was why he had entrusted the job to her. Teahouses were not restaurants. If he had asked for food, she ordered it in from one of the outside caterers.

  Then she set about planning the best mix of geisha and maiko. There would have to be geisha who could dance, geisha who could sing, and geisha who could play the shamisen. The shamisen in particular took years to learn. The best shamisen players were old and were in huge demand. Then there would need to be shy pretty maiko to sit around looking decorative and filling saké cups. The union office at the large concrete Kaburenjo was the center of operations for the whole district. There they pored over detailed charts showing where each geisha and maiko would be at any particular time in the evening. There was frequently feverish juggling of names as last-minute calls for geisha came in.

  The system varied district by district. Sometimes the teahouse mistress called the Kaburenjo to sort out geisha for the evening, at others she would call the geisha house direct to book a particular geisha.

  The first party of the evening was from six to nine p.m. Invitations in Japan usually tell you what time the party will end as well as what time it begins and formal parties invariably end precisely when they say they will; geisha are being paid by the hour and running over would be extremely costly. Popular geisha might not stay for the whole evening but might flit from party to party. After the party was over, everyone relaxed. A guest might take a maiko or a geisha out for dinner or to a karaoké bar and later on they might come to some private arrangement for the night. But no matter how relaxed the evening became, t
he meter ticked relentlessly on.

  On such occasions, nothing so crass as a bill would ever appear; neither would money ever change hands—unless it was a tip proffered to a maiko or geisha. At the end of the evening, the customer thanked the geisha for their hospitality, they thanked him for his patronage, and he left. From time to time a bill from the teahouse covering the last few months would arrive discreetly at the accounts department of his company. He would probably not even see it. If he did, he would not dream of checking it, let alone—perish the thought!—asking for a receipt.

  In any case, there would be no itemized charges, no hint as to how the final figure had been arrived at, though one could be sure that that final figure would be earth-shatteringly huge. Quite apart from the costs of the geisha, there was the fee to the teahouse owner for organizing the party. Each tidbit or sip of liquor that passed a guest’s lips cost a fortune and the expense, if a meal was ordered, can barely be imagined. A geisha party I attended along with two other guests, which included four geisha and a light meal for the three of us, cost the host more than $3,200. I heard of parties costing $8,000 to $16,000, as much as a new car. But then again, the kudos for the party-giver was to show that for him this was a mere nothing. As in the old days, when a dashing young fellow would happily ruin himself for pleasure, it showed that he was a man not only of means but of style.

  When the payment arrived, the teahouse mistress took a percentage that included the cost of paying the caterers who had provided the food. She also sent an agreed sum to the union to cover the costs of the maiko and geisha. The registry office would take a percentage of that and send the requisite fee on to the geisha house.

  The Danna

  The geisha world was always awash with gossip and rumors. There was the house a few doors up from mine, built of shiny new wood, half-hidden behind a bamboo fence with a permanently closed gate pressed up almost against the front door, adding a symbolic extra barrier against intruders. The houses to each side were bustling with life. Maiko would slip in and out in their cotton yukata, the house mothers would emerge and bow to passersby as they went to tidy the small shrine across the road or went off to the coffee shop for breakfast. I would hear the plangent notes of the shamisen as the same riffs were practiced uncertainly over and over again. But the house in the middle was always silent and the door firmly shut.

  “That was her danna had that house built for her,” people told me.

  “Is it a geisha house?” I asked.

  “Nah, she doesn’t have to work at all. Doesn’t do a thing.”

  Then there was the story of the beautiful geisha who had had an affair with the popular singing star which had been blazoned all over the weekly magazines (the Japanese equivalent of the tabloids). And there was the oil magnate who had given his mistress—complete with her house—to a government minister as a “gift,” in exchange for which the minister had turned a blind eye to some illicit activity he was engaged in. All these stories were impossible to confirm and, like most such tales in Japan, probably true.

  The geisha I knew were canny, down-to-earth, working-class girls. But once they put on their makeup and the last cord of their obi was in place, they became fantasy creatures in a dreamworld which existed solely for the pleasure of men. There they were expected to be the epitome of femininity, dizzy doll-women who understood nothing of the harsh realities of life. As one ex-geisha told me, if a man asked about the cost of anything, she would say—smiling a sweetly helpless smile and speaking in a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice—“Oh, I really don’t know anything about that!” Though, of course, she added, she knew perfectly well.

  Until recent years, most geisha had not had to bother their pretty little heads with such distasteful matters as money because almost all of them had danna who supported them. As the young mistress of Ichiriki had said, tips from customers, entertaining at parties, running a teahouse, all that had been mere pin money. The real financial backing had been provided by the danna. All the older geisha had had danna as a matter of course. Love did not come into it. It was a practical arrangement.

  My seventy-nine-year-old neighbor, a gracious and still beautiful woman with lacquered white hair and a twinkling smile, had been a geisha before the war. “If you didn’t have a good danna, you couldn’t live,” she told me. The mistress of the teahouse where she worked had arranged a danna for her when she was twenty-three.

  “You could tell immediately,” she said, “if someone would make a good danna. They’d approach the teahouse mistress. You could refuse if you wanted.” In those days a danna was almost like a husband except, of course, that he already had a wife. The geisha would be his concubine, his number two wife, or, if he was a wealthy man, his number three or even number four wife. My neighbor’s danna, who was in the ceramics business, supported her for thirty years and she bore him two children. She also at one point had a lover. Once, she recalled, they talked about marriage.

  “But I told him, ‘I can’t get married.’ It’s part of being a geisha. If you become a geisha, you don’t think about marriage. I never think now, ‘I wish I’d got married.’ ”

  A Tokyo geisha I met, who was seventy-three, lived alone, rather sadly, in a small house where she subsisted by giving shamisen lessons. “You have to have a danna,” she told me. “You need money.” Her danna had been the president of an iron company. “Some people kept their relationship secret,” she said. “But ours was open. His wife met me; she understood.

  “He gave me a monthly allowance of 200,000 yen [$550–$700 at the exchange rate of the time, equivalent to $4,800–$6,400 in modern currency], plus money for kimonos and classes, and bought me presents. It was about the same as you’d make in your first job after leaving university. I lived in the geisha house. I often used to visit his house. He took me to the cinema and to restaurants and to see kabuki and we traveled together to Hokkaido and Kyushu.

  “I saved up and bought a house for myself. He said he’d have it repaired for me, but the economy was bad. If the economy had been good he would have bought it for me just like that.

  “I remember one day he said to me, ‘It’ll be fifteen years we’ve been together soon.’ Soon after that his health got worse and he stopped visiting. Then he died. He was in his sixties, I was in my thirties. At least I got to go to his funeral. I was lucky. A lot of women I know couldn’t go to their lovers’ funerals. The wives wouldn’t allow it. That was always a painful thing.”

  The patronage or danna system was—and, to some extent, still is—the essence of the flower and willow lifestyle. The first requirement was a man who had a sizable amount of money to spare (extra, that is, after he had paid all his living expenses, his mortgage, provided for the needs of his family and dependent relatives, paid for school fees, holidays abroad, pension plans, and regular investment commitments). Such a man was likely to be at the pinnacle of his career and rather elderly. Most likely he owned his own business and could do as he pleased with his money, rather than being a salaried president, at the beck and call of the shareholders. One businessman reckoned that it would cost 20 to 30 million yen ($200,000–$300,000) a year to keep a geisha.

  Following the proper route, he would approach the proprietress of the teahouse where he was a long-standing and trustworthy customer and mention his interest in a particular geisha. The proprietress would discuss the matter with the geisha and her house mother. If all were in agreement, the “mothers” would settle the practical details with the patron and agree on the level of financial assistance he was prepared to give.

  Usually the danna paid a monthly allowance to cover the geisha’s rent and living expenses and also bought her kimonos and obis. He paid all the tuition fees for her lessons in dancing, shamisen, and singing. When she appeared at a public dance performance, he covered the considerable costs. He would be given the seat of honor and a batch of tickets to distribute to his influential friends and colleagues. If he summoned her to entertain for him at a banquet, he took priority
over other guests, though he still had to pay the usual hourly rate for her services. She was also available for sex if required, though, as he was rather elderly, it was not a foregone conclusion that he would exercise his rights.

  As to whether geisha or maiko ever slept with customers for money, as prurient Westerners like to imagine: “Geisha don’t do that,” one maiko told me firmly when I dared to ask her. “A danna and a customer are quite different. The danna is like your husband. You have a proper arrangement with him.”

  Maiko, she pointed out, lived in a geisha house watched over by a strict okasan; they did not have the opportunity for freelancing of that sort. In any case, they were too busy with their classes and work even to have boyfriends. The maiko confessed that for a short time she had had a boyfriend, not a customer but a young man of her own age. But she had not had the time to see him and eventually the relationship collapsed. Such affairs were strictly against the rules. In the old days, sex had to be arranged through the proper channels and paid for in the proper way; freelance sex was out of the question. The customer had to approach the teahouse mistress who would consult the geisha house mistress before informing the young woman in question. These days, of course, licensed prostitution was illegal.

  “Some geisha have danna, some don’t,” the maiko added. “It’s much easier if you do. It’s too expensive otherwise.”

  Men with the wealth and leisure to become danna were often highly cultured, with a keen interest in the traditional arts practiced by the geisha. They would spend a considerable amount of time and money, educating her with tender care so that she became the male ideal of accomplished and talented womanhood. At its most exalted, it was not so much “Lolita” as “Pygmalion,” with the danna as a kind of Professor Henry Higgins, choosing his Eliza Doolittle and putting her through finishing school to create the perfect woman, with no ulterior motive other than the pleasure of seeing her grow and develop. Or he might be a sort of connoisseur, a collector of beautiful items with her as his prize possession, demonstrating his wealth, taste, and status.