The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  Mr. Kuo bristled indignantly. “We have no slavery,” he replied. “There are some cheap districts that give parents 500-yen loans and receive their daughters for five years to work off the loans, but that is mere prostitution again. Here, in Shimbashi, our district is so famous, so wealthy, so well patronized, that girls come to us of their own free will to audition. We study the new girls. Finally, we select fifty a year for qualities of appearance, voice, health, intelligence. Sometimes, we learn of a young geisha in Kobe or Osaka who is very popular, and we buy up her contract. But usually, we depend upon developing new girls. We take them between twelve and twenty-one; most have attended high school some have even gone to college. We teach them singing’ dancing, conversation; we teach them to play the samisen, our traditional three-stringed instrument which resembles your guitar; and we teach them the drums, flute, cymbals.

  “Here, in Shambashi, a geisha need develop only one of these talents well. If she becomes expert in it, she can make a good deal of money.’ I wondered what a good deal of money might be.“To hire one geisha from us for one hour’s entertainment,” said Mr. Kuo, “the customer must pay 4.40 yen, or one dollar in your American money. Out of this 4.40 yen, 79 sen goes to the restaurant where the geisha entertains, 36 sen goes to us here in the guild, and the remaining 3.25 to the geisha herself. If the geisha entertains two hours, her customer pays 6.50 yen—of which 1.30 goes to the restaurant, 42 sen to us, and the remaining 4.78 to her.

  “Thus, if a geisha is well accomplished and popular, she earns from 700 to 800 yen a month. That is about $200 a month American money. An unpopular geisha would earn only one-tenth of that.”

  It wasn’t until much later that I learned how impressive these earnings of a first-class geisha were—by Japanese standards they were fabulous, considering that the average Japanese girl in the cotton mill received exactly $5.88 a month. Mr. Kuo had been mentioning the fees collected by his Geisha Guild, and I thought it time to inquire into the exact function of this guild.

  “First, let me explain how we came about,” said Mr. Kuo. “At the turn of the century, there were five types of places frequented by geisha. There were restaurants, waiting houses, meat markets, fish stores, and houseboats. You have seen the big dry ditches through Tokyo? They used to be canals traveled by houseboats. Then, at the time of Premier Ito, the country was filled with revolt, with terror and assassination. Political refugees fled to these five different types of places, and while in hiding, while discussing and planning their future political action, they were entertained by the geisha. Finally, the government combined these five different places into two—Japanese-style restaurants and waiting houses. And the government established a Geisha Guild to transact all business between the individual geisha, and the establishments and their customers.

  “The Shimbashi Guild is a subsidiary of the main guild. Its purpose is to keep the geisha from being exploited, to create better working conditions and higher wage minimums, to see that the geisha receives proper treatment, and to offer her services to the accredited restaurants and houses. The geisha is not at all mistreated. She has a voice. She can even strike—in fact, has gone on strike.”

  In one of the most incredible episodes in modern Japanese history, the traditional geisha went on strike. On February 26, 1937, Domei, the Japanese news agency, reported the first geisha strike:

  “Declaring they were exploited by their management, which refused them the right to form a new trade union, some eighty geisha girls of Osaka have staged a spectacular walkout unparalleled in Japanese history. Leaving the gay quarters of Osaka, the strikers marched in a body up tortuous mountain slopes to the Gyokuzo Temple, where priests gave sanctuary to the valiant strikers in their little temple…

  “There the strikers issued a manifesto declaring their determination to fight to the death to gain their twin demands—the right to form their own trade union and permission to select their own gentlemen friends. ‘We are not cheap Japanese goods for sale to all comers at bargain rates,’ they proclaimed.”

  By the end of the second day of the strike, the group of eighty geisha grew until it numbered three hundred. All night life in Osaka was halted. After two weeks, the chief of the Osaka police called an emergency conference, and around a table thirty angry employers and thirty triumphant geisha met and argued. In the end, the geisha got their special union, and won the right they still possess to accept or reject male companions offered them.

  Mr. Kuo said that his own guild tried to improve the quality of geisha. Of course, he admitted, there was not much time for guidance and schooling. The girls often worked from six in the morning until nine at night at private parties in restaurants, and then from nine to midnight at the waiting houses. But every afternoon, the guild conducted a three-hour instruction period. If a girl had the time, she could attend daily, at a fee of only one yen a month. These classes could help her improve her classical dancing, or teach her to converse with more intelligence on politics and sports.

  “Also,” added Mr. Kuo, “once a year at our private theater, the Shimbashi Embujo, we put on a show. It gives visitors a chance to see how some of the girls have improved, and gives new stars publicity. The most popular hundred and twenty in this show receive diplomas of accomplishment, which you can see framed on the walls of the rehearsal rooms downstairs.”

  “Who are some of your most famous geisha?” I inquired.

  “Generally, they are all famous,” Mr. Kuo answered with a flash of levity. Then sobering, “We have one famous one, Kiharu, who speaks English.”

  I said that I had met her.

  “Yes? She is charming. Don’t you think so?” said Mr. Kuo. “Her father was a physician. He died and left his family poor. So Kiharu, who had studied singing and languages, became a geisha to support her family. She is twenty-six now, and the Foreign Office uses her always to entertain you American visitors. I now have five or six other young girls all studying English, so they can take care of American and British parties.”

  Mr. Kuo recalled some of the other famous Shimbashi geisha. There was Okoi, who had had a stockbroker and a wrestler for her lovers, and a Kabuki actor for a husband until he deserted her. Eventually, Okoi’s talents attracted Prince Taro Katsura, Prime Minister of Japan, and he took her for his mistress. Throughout the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, Okoi was the confidante of the prime minister and his advisers. When the prime minister fell into disfavor after the war, his geisha mistress was equally condemned, and had to go into hiding. After Katsura died, Okoi retired to a nunnery, where she herself died in the mid-1940’s.

  An even more legendary Shimbashi geisha was the beautiful Ghana, who became the mistress of the late Prince Saionji, last of the elder statesmen and intimate adviser of Hirohito. At the time of the Versailles Peace Conference, Prince Saionji took his geisha to Paris with him, and President Woodrow Wilson, charmed by her demeanor, presented her with a pearl necklace. There was considerable embarrassment later, when President Wilson learned of the young lady’s occupation and position. “Today,” said Mr. Kuo, “Ghana is retired. She is abbess of a nunnery near Tokyo. Of course, all our girls aspire to such fame. They all dream of growing up to be another Okichi—you know, like Cho-Cho-San in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.”

  Unlike Puccini’s operatic geisha, Okichi was a real person, and her Lieutenant Pinkerton was also real and his name was Townsend Harris. He was the first United States consul general to the Japan which Admiral Perry had just opened to the West. To please the middle-aged Harris, Japanese officials took a leading eighteen-year-old geisha, Okichi, away from her carpenter sweetheart and introduced her to the American consul. Okichi, known for her comeliness and her singing, entranced the American, and she, in turn, found him attractive and eventually fell deeply in love with him. However, when new American officials arrived in Japan, Townsend Harris was forced to send away his geisha mistress ‘ temporarily. As he became busier and busier, she became lonelier and lonelier. Soon, she took to drinking,
became an alcoholic, and Harris could do nothing but give her up. Some years after his death in Brooklyn, Okichi suffered a stroke and committed suicide.

  “But it is Okichi’s Madame Butterfly years that our girls choose to remember and envy,” said Mr. Kuo.

  Then, a little teasingly, Mr. Kuo asked me if I had met any of the male geisha. I had not, and I was unable to hide my amazement.

  “We have many male geisha, or hokan, as we call them,” said Mr. Kuo. “It will surprise you maybe to know we have one American citizen who is an official geisha working for the Asakusa Guild. He specializes in Japanese dancing and even has a male patron!”

  After that, we discussed the future of the individual geisha, and Mr. Kuo was cheerful. He said that he lost as many as twenty-five girls a year to marriage. I later learned that this was an exaggerated figure. For while most of the geisha acquired generous patrons, few ever have the opportunity to marry those patrons. Most geisha are resigned to achieving, with good fortune, the role of mekake or “second wife.” The best that the average geisha might hope for was ownership of her waiting house—and security.

  It was already late, the Sunday afternoon almost gone, and I saw that it was time to leave. I looked at Chock, who had been interpreting for me, and Chock told me that he would like to ask a question of his own.

  “I’ve been with a lot of geisha,” said Chock. “Now I want you to tell me a secret, Mr. Kuo. What type of man do the girls like?”

  Mr. Kuo answered this one in the stereotyped tradition of the best Hollywood press agent.

  “Our girls like decent men,” he said. “They have told me they like men who are clean, who are frank and goodhearted. I say to you that if a very rich munitions manufacturer comes to a geisha and puts all his indecent blood money before her, she will scorn him and turn to more decent men.”

  I had a faint suspicion that Mr. Kubo’s reply had been colored by a personal antipathy toward munitions makers.

  Mr. Kuo went on. “Our geisha have been with the most brilliant men in the world, so they are more intelligent than the average girls, and harder to please. The patrons of our girls almost fill Japan’s Who’s Who. Men of the cabinet like Prince Konoye, Matsuoka, Tojo, men like Mitsui, all have girls in Shimbashi. Politicians, nobility, intellectuals, they are all our customers. Only munitions makers, newly rich—”

  There it was again.

  ” rich on others’ blood, they rarely come a second time, because our girls have nothing in common with them and are cold to them.”

  Before leaving, I thought it might be tactful to flatter Mr. Kuo with a few personal questions. So I asked how he got into this unique business.

  “After the big 1923 earthquake disaster, I gave up my flour store, and organized several geisha houses,” replied Mr. Kuo. “Today, I work from ten in the morning until eight at night, but I am not paid a penny. It is an honorary job. Some of my employees, however, make as much as 250 yen a month. My own money comes from several geisha houses I own. You may be interested to know, too, that I am a happily married man with five children. Yes, three of my sons are doctors, all of them today serving on the Chinese war front. Two of the sons are now lieutenants.”

  Mr. Kuo accompanied us downstairs, and then continued speaking while we pulled on our shoes.

  He said to me, “I have enjoyed our talk very much. You will be sure to write they are not prostitutes. And by the way, I have a favor for you. I have one or two special girls. You may take them for a weekend to one of the resorts. They will wear Western-style dress. Usually our fee for a weekend with foreigners is high, but you are a friend—”

  I said, “Thanks, Mr. Kuo, I’ll take a rain check on that.”

  It’s four years now, and I still have that rain check, I’m giving it to some of my buddies.

  They intend to be in Mr. Kubo’s vicinity very soon.

  WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

  It was in August, 1940, sixteen months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that I was in Tokyo, researching and writing as a free-lance magazine contributor. I had just completed a fascinating interview, in a resort villa at the foot of Mount Fujiyama with ninety-year-old Mitsuru Toyama, head of a group of extremists and professional assassins known as the Black Dragon Society, and our talk had dealt mostly with the possibilities of war. But once back in Tokyo, I was tired of political interviews, eager to do something frivolous and diverting. I considered trying a story on the institution of the geisha, then decided that too many other writers had touched upon it in recent years. But when Chockalingam told me that the geisha girls had a union, I knew that this was my diverting subject after all, and with Chock I went to see Hidezo Kuo.

  I meant to write the story at once, but more topical subjects kept me from it. And then, the following year I was married, and then, after another year I was in the army, and my notes on Mr. Kuo lay untouched in a drawer of my desk. But while I was in the Signal Corps, where every morning I received copies of monitored Japanese shortwave broadcasts, I came across the announcement that the Japanese were considering doing away with the geisha girl for the duration of the war. At once, my interview with Mr. Kuo came to mind, and on my first free Sunday away from the army base, I wrote the story. It appeared in the September, 1945, issue of Tricolor magazine, an attractive monthly then produced in New York but since become defunct.

  In my story, I had doubted that the Japanese government, despite the pressures of war and austerity, would ever succeed in eliminating the geisha girl. I was proved right. Although the geisha unions were suspended, the geisha girl continued to exist in a limited fashion as one of Japan’s few luxuries throughout the Second World War, and she survived that war and her homeland’s defeat intact. Yet in the postwar years, numerous prophets of doom went on predicting the demise of the geisha, insisting that she would give way before the advent of the emancipated, Americanized, new Japanese woman. In November, 1958, Time magazine headlined a story “The Vanishing Geisha,” which reported that nude shows and more stringent tax laws (that made a geisha party ineligible as a deductible business expense) were lessening the attraction of the geisha, and concluded, “The plain fact is that the stylized coquetry of the classic geisha is no longer fashionable. ‘Frankly,’ said one Japanese businessman last week, ‘they have become a bore.’”

  Curious to know if the geisha was on her way out—in fact, curious to know what had happened to the geisha in the two decades since I wrote about her and her improbable union—I began to investigate the situation in Tokyo today, with the assistance of Mrs. Keiko Akamatsu, the translator of several of my novels into Japanese. I am pleased to report that, while the situation of the geisha is not precisely what it was in 1940, she continues to survive, even to flourish, as a part of Japan’s culture. Moreover, she is still unionized, perhaps more strongly than before, and the Shimbashi Geisha Guild has become more powerful than it was when I visited it.

  At the present time, there are fifty-two geisha guilds in the city of Tokyo. They are still divided into six classes, and the Shimbashi Geisha Guild still remains in the “first-rate” class. There are 2,216 geisha houses in Tokyo today, half the number I found in 1940, and there are now 4,408 female geisha practicing their art, one-third the number I wrote about at an earlier time.

  I learned that my old friend, Hidezo Kuo, the managing director of the Shimbashi Geisha Guild whom I had interviewed in 1940, had stayed on in that job until 1945. There had then been some kind of disagreement between Kuo and his associates, and he had been forced to leave the guild and Tokyo itself. In the years that followed, he managed a single geisha house at To-no-sawa, in Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture, and there he is said to have died in July, 1956.

  Meanwhile, his Shimbashi Geisha Guild, closed down with all others toward the end of the war, was fully resurrected along more modern and enlightened lines in 1951. Kubo’s old guild, I learned, had not been entirely devoted to the interests of the girls, had been “conspicuously feudalistic in character,” and
had existed “mainly for the convenience of its police contacts.”

  The new guild, headed by Mrs. Haru Shirohara, eighty-six years old, and Miss Shizu Nagai, an active and much desired geisha who would not give her age, is devoted strictly to the welfare of its 400 geisha girls who belong to seventy geisha houses in the district. The guild is strong, since it possesses an agreement with the Japanese Restaurant Association that permits only guild girls to work at parties in the ryotei or restaurants in the area.

  The new guild manages almost everything for its girls. Before the war, parents sold their girls into the geisha world. This is now forbidden by law. Today, a potential geisha of twenty (eighteen years old, if she has her parents’ permission) need only apply to the mistress of a geisha house that belongs to the guild. If she seems promising, she is trained in the arts of entertainment for one year, instead of the prewar minimum of ten years. If she passes an examination at the end of the year, she agrees to pay the house mistress 25,000 yen, and then she is a full-fledged guild geisha, ready to work at union minimums.

  The modern geisha usually spends her mornings sleeping, her afternoons perfecting her skills in the traditional songs and dances or in acquiring modem skills such as golf, ten-ms, bowling. Western dance steps, or reading for background in order to converse with male customers interested in discussing the Common Market, the New York Yankees, Red China’s nuclear advances, or what not. In the evenings, the geisha works, spending time with customers in the private room of a restaurant from six o’clock until somewhere between ten o’clock and midnight.

  The new guild sees that its member houses obtain proper employment for each girl. But it also takes care of each girl’s continuing education, health, tax problems, social security insurance. Above all, the guild sees that its geisha girl member is not underpaid.

  The standard pay for the services of a Shimbashi geisha girl is about 950 yen—almost three dollars—an hour. The greatest part of her income, however, comes from oshugi—tips—and these can often be generous. A really top-flight geisha girl, I am told, can earn 300,000 yen or $800 a month. However, all of this income is not profit. She has many expenses such as her guild fee, house commission, training tuition, and the upkeep of a kimono and obi wardrobe that may cost as much as 300,000 yen.