Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  Kyoto fared better. Thanks to the intervention of American scholars who argued that it was a place of irreplaceable cultural heritage, it was barely touched by bombing.

  As the war intensified, the patriotic geisha of Gion decided to do their bit. They bought two planes for the extravagant sum of 65,000 yen each, had the names Dai-ichi Gion Kogo (Number 1 Gion plane) and Dai-ni Gion Kogo (Number 2 Gion plane) painted with a flourish on the flanks and presented them to the army. The ceremony took place at a nearby military airstrip, where the troop of beautiful young geisha, clad patriotically in peasants’ working clothes and straw sandals and with their famous glossy black locks tied up in bonnets, drew much press attention. Being practical women, the geisha also instigated evacuation training at the teahouses, practiced relaying buckets of water to put out possible fires, and observed a curfew so that the quarters fell into darkness after nightfall.

  The last annual dances, entitled “Ko-koku no miyabi” (Elegance of the Japanese Empire), took place in spring 1943. Shortly afterward the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo, where dance performances and classes took place, was commandeered and transformed into a munitions factory where geisha and maiko who had not fled to the countryside were conscripted to sew parachutes and uniforms for the army. From late in 1944 they were also ordered to produce incendiary balloons (enormous hydrogen balloons containing bombs and incendiary devices) which would, in theory, drift across the Pacific on the jet stream and set America’s cities ablaze. After 17,000 fire bombs fell on Osaka, the city council, fearful that Kyoto would suffer the same fate, ordered swathes of houses, 10,000 in all, to be evacuated and demolished to make fire breaks. Among them were the beautiful old teahouses of Shimbashi, the northern part of Gion.

  The end came on August 15, 1945, after the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been obliterated by atomic bombs. A few days later, people gathered round their radios, expecting to be exhorted to fight the enemy, with bamboo spears if necessary, to the death. Instead, for the first time ever, they heard the reedy voice of their emperor, crackling over the airwaves. His words were convoluted and the language archaic but the meaning was clear. His people, he said, would have to “endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable.”

  After the Deluge

  When the American and other Allied occupation forces, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, arrived in the country a couple of weeks later, many were shaken by the scenes of utter devastation which they saw. They had been expecting violent resistance. Instead they found a nation of shell-shocked, half-starved people, ragged and dirty, who stared at them, blank-eyed, as they drove through the dusty, rubble-strewn streets. Some seemed positively—and astonishingly—pleased to see them.

  For the Japanese the first winter was, if anything, even grimmer than the bombing had been. Then they had had wartime spirit to buoy them up. Now they were a nation in defeat. Life had been reduced to the barest essentials—keeping warm and scavenging, thieving, smuggling, or begging for food. In Tokyo 60 percent of the housing had been destroyed. The few buildings that still stood were unheated, and the miserable shelters people put together out of broken bits of wood and rubble offered little protection against the icy winds and snow. Many died of exposure or pneumonia or of the plagues which swept the stricken city—typhus, smallpox, and cholera. Malnutrition and beri beri were rife.

  The geisha who had fled to the countryside used their kimonos for barter. One by one they gave them away—a priceless silk kimono with an exquisite gold thread design in exchange for pumpkins, eggplants, and sweet potatoes; a heavy brocade obi worth tens of thousands of yen for some cabbages, spinach, and radishes. Rice was like gold dust, almost never to be found. The farmers got richer and the geisha poorer; but at least they were able to eat.

  For the women who remained in the cities, whether geisha, prostitutes, or destitute women who had lost their families, there were other ways of staying alive. The victorious GIs might be well fed with clean uniforms but there was one commodity they lacked. And there were plenty of Japanese men with lengthy experience in the field ready to ensure that this gap in the market was promptly filled.

  Mark Gayn, one of the first American journalists to arrive in the country, recorded a “curious tale” reported to him by an American colonel. Barely two weeks after General MacArthur flew into Atsugi air base, on September 9, 1945, the American First Cavalry Division was poised to march into Tokyo. The GIs were nervous about how the Japanese military might react when their capital was invaded and had set up a roadblock on the edge of the city. Well after nightfall, they heard the rumble of an approaching truck.

  “Halt!” yelled the sentry when it was within hailing distance. The truck stopped and a Japanese man stepped down. Behind him followed a flock of young women. Warily they walked toward the troops. When they were quite close the man stopped, bowed low to the soldiers, gestured to the women, and announced, “Compliments of the Recreation and Amusement Association!” 18

  It was a bizarrely comic moment which pointed up the enormous cultural gulf between the invaded and the invaders. The Japanese, convinced that the Americans were beasts who would rape their wives, mothers, and daughters, had taken the precaution of sending their women as far away into the countryside as possible before the troops arrived. As an alternative, brothel owners from the Yoshiwara, which had been burned to the ground in the bombing, together with the presidents of the seven major entertainment guilds in Tokyo including the restaurant, cabaret, geisha, and brothel associations, had been commissioned by the Metropolitan Police, under government auspices and with government funding, to set up the RAA. Long before the first American set foot in the country, they started recruiting from among prostitutes, geisha, and bar girls. They were looking for 5,000 women, though only 1,360 initially responded to the poster they had pasted up in the Ginza.

  To sternly puritanical conspiracy-theorists like Mark Gayn, the RAA was “the world’s biggest white-slave traffic combine” and a prime “item of evidence in the damning record of Japan’s efforts to seduce the Army of Occupation away from its purposes.” 19

  There were plenty of GIs who did not suffer from Gayn’s moral scruples. By April 1946, as his doughty researches revealed, there were 668 known brothels in Tokyo alone, with 8,000 prostitutes who did not, one assumes, suffer from lack of customers. But none could compete with the RAA which, thanks to government sponsorship, offered the prettiest women working in 33 “houses of entertainment.” The most famous was the Oasis dance hall in the Ginza, which featured an “army prophylactic station” in a Nissen hut. The RAA ran two hospitals for its women and had a network of agents recruiting through Japan.

  Gayn also investigated the International Palace, a large ugly factory on the outskirts of Tokyo which had started life producing clocks and watches for the Seiko corporation, then became a munitions plant, and after the war, on the advice of the Tokyo Police, was transformed into “the world’s largest brothel.” Five concrete-walled dormitory buildings which had housed workers now functioned as brothels. The women Gayn interviewed there told him they had lost their families in air raids, though there were also some who described themselves as geisha. All, he noted grimly, had been forced to buy clothes and cosmetics from the company and were heavily in debt.

  Kafu Nagai too went to see this new pleasure quarter (which he knew as the Tokyo Palace) and told a rather different story. It was populated, he reported, by whores from Kameido, one of Tokyo’s unlicensed districts, who had packed their bags and moved in en masse. At first the main clientele had been American soldiers; but from October 1946 onward the American traffic stopped and the only customers were Japanese. Painted across the walls were large signs in English reading “Off Limits—VD.” He noted, in his dour way, that the women seemed more like factory girls and students than bona fide whores. Perhaps the truth fell somewhere between the two versions. 20

  General MacArthur, whose powers were so all-encompassing that the Japanese called him the “last shogu
n,” was determined to clamp down on this dangerous and unhealthy trade. He declared all brothels off limits to GIs and issued a directive banning contractual prostitution. This was followed a year later, in 1947, by an imperial edict, drafted by the Americans as was everything else at that time, outlawing officially sanctioned prostitution. Like the Prostitute and Geisha Emancipation Act enacted by the Meiji government in deference to Western notions of propriety, it was full of noble intentions but utterly unenforceable. Worse, far from ending prostitution, it made life harder for the women.

  No longer publicly recognized and government-sponsored, the Yoshiwara, which had been hastily rebuilt and was operating out of barrack-like shacks, was privatized. The masters and mistresses of the old bordellos became “special purveyors of beverages” and the women became “waitresses.” As freelancers, they received a percentage of the brothel earnings and in theory could leave whenever they wished. The law required that they should all be over eighteen, though many were not. The problem was that the proprietors of the new, illegal Yoshiwara required firm assurances that the women would not run off without repaying their debts. They took to using yakuza—members of the Japanese mafia—to enforce this.

  Added to which, officially recognized red-light zones were only the tip of the iceberg. Besides the unlicensed quarters which had always existed side by side with the licensed ones, the ranks of prostitutes had been massively swollen by thousands of desperate women who had lost their families or were waiting hopelessly for husbands who would never return from the front. These women had no means of supporting themselves except by prostitution. The most visible were the streetwalkers or panpan girls (“bang bang girls,” referring to the speed of the transaction). At their height there were as many as five hundred young women thronging the area around the railway arches near the Ginza and within spitting distance of General MacArthur’s headquarters, grabbing passing GIs, pulling them into the shadows. For payment they begged for cigarettes, chocolate, chewing gum or, most pitifully, food.

  Using a term the GIs could understand, they called themselves “geisha gals.” Among Westerners, “geisha girl” became the catch-all term for anyone of dubious morality, from hostesses at bars, cabarets, and dance halls to the lowliest streetwalkers.

  The authorities, nevertheless, were perfectly aware that real geisha were a different species. They were excluded from the directive and the imperial edict and on appropriate occasions top American officers enjoyed geisha parties. The government discreetly sponsored the Shinagawa quarter which was popular with Americans. They also offered a subsidy to the Shimbashi quarter, though the proud Shimbashi geisha refused it.

  Bars, teahouses, and geisha houses were officially permitted to reopen on October 25, 1945. Little by little, those who had fled to the countryside began to make their way back. Kiharu, once the star geisha of Shimbashi, found herself on a rickety train jammed between scavengers and sacks of illicit rice on their way to Tokyo’s black markets. Once in the city, she found work as a translator for a British journalist and every Sunday took food to her son, mother, and grandmother whom she had left in the countryside. From time to time she appeared at geisha parties. She also began teaching English to young geisha so that they could talk to their foreign guests.

  With the war, the number of geisha had been reduced practically to zero. Now they gradually began to rise again, though it was a long time before the profession returned to its prewar prosperity. In 1947 there were 1,695 geisha in Tokyo and 2,478 in the whole country. 21

  During the seven years in which the American and other allied forces occupied Japan, they revolutionized society in a myriad of ways, some expected, some less so. Their brief was to instill democracy and to bring Japan into line with the modern world, and one of the ways in which the country was way out of line was in its treatment of women. The new constitution of 1947, hastily drafted by American officials, recognized men and women as equal in politics, law, and education, which was, in Japanese terms, utterly revolutionary. It introduced universal suffrage, thereby giving women the vote for the first time. Henceforth women—who had been banned in the late nineteenth century from participating in politics at any level—were to be as free as men to run for parliament. Article 24 stated, even more radically, that “marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes.” The occupying forces also instituted compulsory education for boys and girls up to the age of fifteen and stipulated that all national universities were to be open to women.

  A more unexpected development was the introduction of public kissing, on stage and screen. In Japan, of course, kissing was very much confined to the bedroom; it was one of the most esoteric of the geishas’ repertoire of outré sexual techniques and considered almost as intimate as the sex act. But if the Americans wanted Japan to imitate their ways, imitate they would. The first on-stage and on-screen kisses took place in 1946, to the considerable embarrassment of the actors called upon to perform them. Traditionalists were shocked but audiences were entertained. Kissing, however, was only the beginning. The following year saw another innovation: the introduction of the striptease. What with all these raunchy American imports and the traditional Japanese laissez faire attitude toward such matters, the way was open for Japan to develop a no-holds-barred sexual culture—which, indeed, it has. Could there be a place for the delicate arts of the geisha in such a world?

  Less than a century had passed since Commodore Perry and his men had roughly booted open the door of Japan, exposing its hothouse culture to the cold winds of change. The geisha, who had started out as the stylish queens of a raffish underground, had survived the transition, though, as skirts got shorter and lifestyles wilder in the twenties, they were already beginning to seem like something of an anachronism. Then, in the patriotic years before the war, with traditional Japanese values being reasserted, they found themselves back in favor. Like it or not, it seemed, they were identified in people’s minds with Edo and old Japan. No matter how Western the country became, while that core of Japanese-ness remained they would survive. But how long could it remain, as Japan moved inexorably into the modern world?

  Street of Shame

  After the war two things became stronger—women and nylon stockings.

  popular postwar Japanese saying

  As the clocks struck midnight on March 31, 1958, in the thirty-third year of the reign of Emperor Hirohito (known to history as Emperor Showa), prostitutes and their customers in brothels and bordellos across Japan rose to their feet, linked hands and, swaying rather boozily, broke into the nostalgic strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” known in Japanese as “Hotaru no Hikari” (The Firefly’s Glow). It was one of those moments of exquisite poignancy which the Japanese love to savor. An era had come to an end.

  By then, to general rejoicing, the occupying forces had climbed into their airplanes and gone home. In the aftermath of the Korean War, Japan was thriving again, becoming wealthier with each year that passed. New buildings had sprung up on the rubble of the old. It was a country of worker ants busy rebuilding their economy and their lives. In many ways things had not changed much since the prewar days. Many of the same old faces were to be found running the country and its businesses and hobnobbing in geisha restaurants in the evenings, though they wore modern suits and voiced updated sentiments about democracy and the like. Even so, inside their conservative jackets and ties, those men were serving their companies with the same single-minded devotion with which the samurai had served their feudal lords. That old core of Japanese-ness was still there.

  But there was one legacy of the occupation which could not be shuffled aside so easily. General MacArthur and his cohorts had given women a voice. It would be generations before Japanese women became as independent as Western women, if they ever even wished to do so. But they had the vote and, after the 1946 elections, there were thirty-nine women lawmakers in the Diet, the Japanese parliament. In the early 1950s militant women’s groups, aligned with the Salvation Army, the Japanese Ch
ristian Women’s movement, and antislavery organizations, lobbied tirelessly to bring to an end, once and for all, what they saw as the pernicious, humiliating, and barbaric practice of licensed prostitution. The imperial edict of 1947 had been singularly ineffectual. What was needed, they argued, was a law to abolish socially recognized prostitution and make it as unacceptable as it was in the West.

  Kenji Mizoguchi’s moving 1956 film, Street of Shame, stirred the national conscience and provided powerful ammunition for the anti-prostitution lobby. In it he depicts life in the Yoshiwara as the law is being debated in the Diet. There the rapacious brothel-keeper of Yume no Sato (Village of Dreams) plays the bluff, fatherly old man as he counts his earnings. “We’re social workers,” he argues, insisting that he is doing good, providing a home and work for the girls. But the film also shows the desperate lives the women lead: the aging mother, too old to appeal to any but the most drunk or undiscerning of clients, who has sacrificed herself to support her ungrateful son; the bespectacled wife working to support her sick husband who kills himself when he discovers how she has earned their money; and the young women already hardened in a life of vice, heartlessly fleecing men to set themselves up in business.

  There were plenty of people struggling to maintain the status quo who argued that prostitution was a social necessity. Brothel-keepers hastily got together the All-Japan Association for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases to show how responsible they were and also smuggled sizable amounts of cash into the pockets of Diet members in an attempt to buy their votes. One was arrested for accepting bribes from them. And thousands of women at risk of losing their jobs united to form the Tokyo Federation of Unions of Women Workers.