Women of the Pleasure Quarters (18 page)

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 working 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 malaise. 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.

Okichi, the Foreigner’s Concubine

As they depart,

Passing the sampans and spreading their eight sails,

They think of beloved Shimoda

And let their tears fall.

Whilst along the river side

The dirty water flows from the hovels,

Behind the doors the sound of the prostitutes’ voices rises:

“Oh! how grateful we are to the honorable foreigner

Who gives two dollars for the one-dollar whore.”

Shimoda boatmen’s song
³

The key had been turned and the Western boot was firmly wedged in the door. Across the Pacific, a man named Townsend Harris (1804–1878) saw an opportunity to make his name and, with any luck, his fortune too. As the Americans saw it, the 1854 treaty signed by the shogun provided for a consul general to take up residence on Japanese soil. Harris petitioned the American president to give him the post. In August 1856 he arrived at the newly opened port of Shimoda. He raised the Stars and Stripes above Gyokusenji, a beautiful old disused temple, and settled in there with his interpreter and secretary, Henry Heusken. His brief was to conclude a proper commercial treaty.

The weeks and months that followed were filled with wrangling, interspersed with long periods of inactivity while the Japanese negotiators awaited instruction from Edo. Often ill and with only Heusken for company, Harris needed some way to alleviate the gloom. The red-blooded young Heusken knew the answer. What they needed was women.

Heusken lodged the request for “nurses” with the burghers of Shimoda. Perfectly natural, they all agreed once he had left. But where was the woman of whom they could ask such a sacrifice? Who would ever voluntarily consent to be fondled by a hairy barbarian who reeked of meat and butter? (The Japanese ate no meat or dairy products and referred to foreigners as
bataa-kusai,
“stinking of butter.”) Who would want to take on the stigma of being a
rashamen,
“foreigner’s concubine,” a word whose alternative meaning was “sheep”? The visits of Perry’s American sailors and a Russian fleet had resulted in a rash of pale-skinned babies, all of whom had been clandestinely disposed of in a graveyard in an isolated little valley.

Heusken had asked for a geisha named Okichi whom Harris had noticed as she was walking home from the bath, looking fresh and comely. Seventeen or eighteen, an adult by the standards of those days, Okichi was a beautiful and popular young woman, famous for her sweet voice and in particular her unforgettably lovely rendition of “Raven at Dawn,” a plaintive ditty about a Yoshiwara courtesan. She has become a legendary heroine in Japan, revered, practically deified—there is a temple dedicated to her in Shimoda—as the first lamb to be sacrificed on the altar of foreign relations.

Naturally she was reluctant to take on the assignment but the town elders were insistent. On June 13, the consul’s large black-lacquered palanquin, specially made to fit his long legs, arrived to carry her to his residence at Anegasaki. She jolted off on the shoulders of the bearers, escorted by equerries and samurai who cleared a way through the crowds. As she sat inside, hidden behind the bamboo window blind, she could hear the townsfolk jeering, “Here comes a sheep for the consul!”

The crossroads at Madogahama was the point of no return. Shimoda children still sing a ditty evoking the fear and indecision which Okichi must have felt:

Shall we go to Anegasaki?

Shall we return to Shimoda?

Here is Madogahama. We must decide!

Harris had had carpenters in to turn the disused temple into a Western home, throwing away the rice straw tatami matting which had become infested by American beetles from the Black Ships and replacing it with Western carpets and furniture. To Okichi it must have been unimaginably alien, full of strange and repellent odors—woolen carpets instead of the familiar new-mown-hay smell of tatami, the whiff of polish on the heavy wooden furniture and, worst of all, the reek of searing animal flesh from the kitchen. Then there was the consul himself with his big, hairy, smelly body; though in the end there was not much difference between what he did on the large uncomfortable Western bed and what other men had done to her in the past.

After three days Harris discovered that Okichi had a suspicious skin eruption and told her not to visit again until it was cured. She carried on receiving a sizable allowance. But even after the sore had disappeared, whenever the subject of a visit was broached, Harris always decided he was unwell. Two and a half months later he terminated the contract.

For Okichi the experience must have been utterly traumatic. She had had to sleep with an old and repugnant barbarian, she had had to abrogate her right as a geisha to choose her customers, and then she had been publicly humiliated and found wanting. On top of all this, as her widowed mother pointed out in a letter to the town council, she was ruined. Having been polluted by the touch of the barbarian, no Japanese man would ever touch her again. Not surprisingly, she turned to drink. She became a beggar and years later drowned herself in the river.

Harris may have forgotten her but the Japanese never did. If you visit Shimoda today, there is a temple dedicated to Okichi Kannon, Kannon being the mother goddess, complete with a sex museum. Here you can see the cliff from where, according to the much embellished legend, Okichi jumped into the sea, having done her bit for international relations.

The First Madame Butterfly

The Westerners who poured in to populate the foreign settlements in the country’s growing number of treaty ports ranged from diplomats, missionaries, and scholars to adventurers, misfits, roisterers, and sailors. They had all heard rumors of the legendary geisha and of the walled city of delights, the Yoshiwara, and were eager to learn more.

In 1885 a languid, rather unpleasant French naval officer who wrote under the pen name of Pierre Loti (1850–1923) sailed into Nagasaki harbor with the express intention of marrying a Japanese wife and writing about it. He had already titillated the world with tales of his exotic love affairs in Turkey and Tahiti. Now, for his Japanese period, he wanted “a little yellow-skinned woman with black hair and cat’s eyes. She must be pretty. Not much bigger than a doll.”

He spent a mere five weeks in Nagasaki, quite long enough to marry, gather the material for his opus, become bored, and leave again. The object of his brief affections was Kiku (Chrysanthemum), a teahouse girl whom he called Madame Chrysanthème and married for a price of 20 piastres a month. They seem to have had a relationship of mutual contempt. Loti described his wife’s irritating habits, the incessant tap of her tiny pipe bowl against her porcelain smoking box, her bored yawns and mirthless laugh. Asleep, at least, he wrote, she did not bore him. As he was making his farewells, he was horrified to find her cheerily counting the coins he had tossed to her and hitting them with a mallet to test that they were real silver.
⁴

Unromantic though Loti’s account was, he had touched a chord. The Western world was thirsty for tales of sweet, gentle Japanese child-women who gave themselves adoringly to Western men, even if the reality was a good deal more mercenary and sordid. John Luther Long’s tragic
Madame Butterfly
of 1903, pining away for the caddish Lieutenant Pinkerton, was exactly the heroine that Victorian readers had been waiting for. The story was immortalized in Giacomo Puccini’s opera in 1904 and the Western myth—or should we say cliché—of the “geisha” was born. As for the real geisha, living their lives out in Japan, they were made of considerably sterner stuff.

Plotters in Gion

Drunk, my head pillowed in a beauty’s lap;

Awake and sober, grasping power to govern the nation.

pre-Restoration popular ditty
⁵

The coming of the barbarians threw everything into chaos. First there was Perry, then Harris, installed on Japanese soil with his interminable and infernal demands, and behind them the menacing Black Ships lurking just across the horizon. What on earth was to be done? As far as the newly installed twelve-year-old shogun, his regent, councilors, and court in Edo were concerned, there was nothing for it but to concede on every point. Rusty samurai swords and antique muskets were useless against the might of the foreigner’s firepower.

It was a matter of national survival. But national pride was also at stake and for the first time in centuries, a sizable proportion of daimyo warlords chose to disagree with the shogun. Some called for war, others argued that the country’s seclusion must at all costs be maintained. The matter was so critical that the emperor himself—normally utterly outside politics—took a stand, in favor of continuing the policy of isolation. The real reason Harris was left twiddling his thumbs in Shimoda for so long was that the emperor refused to sign his treaty.

In the end, under intolerable pressure, the shogun’s regent signed the document and those presented by the other Western powers without the emperor’s consent. It was an action which sparked an explosion of anger among samurai of all ranks and men of other classes too.

Disaffected samurai, particularly from the distant provinces of Satsuma and Chofu, followers of the dissident daimyo and others who opposed the shogunate, began to gather in Kyoto. For centuries the political center of the country had been the shogun’s capital, Edo. But now there were two hubs, not one. Kyoto was abuzz with passionate political debate.

These young blades, mainly in their twenties, united under the twin slogans of “Restore the emperor, expel the barbarian.” Their avowed aim was to oust the shogun and return the emperor to his divinely appointed place at the heart of the nation. For them the natural place to meet, argue, plan, and eventually foment revolution was Gion with its rabbit warren of tiny lanes lit with glowing white lanterns and lined with teahouses and geisha houses. There they could pretend to be wastrels, drinking their lives away. Many also fell in love with geisha who returned their love and were to prove every bit as brave and stubborn as they.