Women of the Pleasure Quarters (19 page)

The young braves on the shogun’s side, meanwhile, spent their evenings carousing in another of the geisha quarters—not Gion but its archrival, Pontocho, on the other side of the river. It would have been far too risky for both sides to have had their plots and secrets overheard by the same geisha, even though the geishas’ code of secrecy theoretically prevented them from ever divulging what they had heard.

One of the leaders of the rebel imperialists, a romantic, driven young samurai called Takayoshi Kido (1833–1877), held rabble-rousing meetings in Gion, where he fell in love with a beautiful and spirited geisha named Ikumatsu. In August 1864, when fighting broke out on the streets of Kyoto, the shogun’s men came hammering on Ikumatsu’s door. She stood in the entrance, arguing with them long enough to give Kido time to sneak out and escape across the tiled roof. By the time they shoved past her, swords glittering, he was gone.

For five days, disguised as a beggar, he hid among the down and outs who lived on the riverbank under Nijo Bridge. Ikumatsu crept out by night to take him rice balls. After that he disguised himself to try and shake off his pursuers. One day he was a shampooer, the next an attendant at a public bathhouse or a porter at a coaching inn on the highway out of town. Finally, with Ikumatsu’s help, he escaped from the city and lived under a false name as a shopkeeper in a country town.

The final push came in 1868. The old emperor had died and been succeeded by his fifteen-year-old son, Mutsuhito, known to history as Emperor Meiji. In Japan the years are named after the reigning emperor; it was Year 1 of the Meiji Era, the beginning of a new age. Kido, Takamori Saigo, and the other rebel leaders, backed by a large military force, seized the imperial palace and declared an end to the rule of the shoguns. Hereafter the emperor would be their titular head and the figurehead of the nation.

On the outskirts of Kyoto, there was heavy fighting. In the evenings the youthful rebels—who now constituted the imperial army—would be back in Gion, relaxing in the teahouses, arguing, singing, and dancing with the geisha. One night a geisha plucked out a rousing tune on her shamisen. A Choshu samurai, Yajiro Shinagawa, composed the lyrics:

Miya-sama, Miya-sama, o-uma no maeni

hira hira suru no nanja ya ya!

Your Highness, Your Highness,

What can that be, fluttering before your horse! . . .

It’s the imperial brocade banner

that attacks the enemies of the court.

We’ll shoot down the scoundrels

who would raise their hands

against the Mikado,

emperor of the firmament.

When the shogunate’s samurai hear the noise

which way will they run?

They’ll throw away their castle and their spirit

and flee eastward.

The next day Shinagawa handed out copies of “Toko Ton Yare Bushi,” as he called his song, meaning something like “To the Death!” or “Go for Broke!,” and the samurai marched into battle singing lustily. It was Japan’s first war song. Seventeen years later, in 1885, it was hijacked in its entirety by W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan to use as the overture and the song of the Mikado’s troops in their operetta
The Mikado,
in which it is sung in the original Japanese.
⁶

From Kyoto the imperial troops marched east, heading for Edo. Shortly afterward the young emperor was installed in the shogun’s palace which would hereafter be the imperial palace. Edo became the new capital and was renamed Tokyo, the “Eastern Capital.”

The young men who had led the rebellion were the leaders of the new government. They settled in Edo and many brought their geisha lovers to join them. Kido, now one of the most powerful men in the Meiji administration, did not forget his brave and devoted geisha lover, Ikumatsu. First he arranged for her to be adopted into a samurai family, a traditional procedure to make a geisha into a respectable woman, essential in a society where marriage was a matter of creating an alliance between families rather than of individual preference. She was given a new name, Matsuko, and shortly afterward he made her his wife. (To this day when a man wishes to marry his geisha lover, he has first to find an older man from a respectable family who will agree to “adopt” her and act as her “father” at the wedding.)

The eminent Victorian Algernon Mitford (1837–1916), grandfather of the celebrated Mitford sisters, met her in 1869 and described her as “a bonny little lady, though eyes less familiar with the custom than mine would have objected to the disfigurement of shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth.” He commented on her “ease and grace” as a hostess and added that as a former geisha she had “none of the shyness which I have usually met with in Japanese ladies.”
⁷

Thus a Gion geisha rose to the pinnacle of Japanese high society to be the woman behind one of the most powerful men of the realm. Many other rebel leaders married their loyal geisha lovers and all of them, from the bull-like Takamori Saigo to Hirobumi Ito, the country’s first prime minister, kept geisha mistresses.

The geisha had proved their mettle and, with their unique ability to span the social hierarchy, were poised to become the leading women of their day. The courtesans in their gorgeous cages and the wives of rich men, trapped in their homes, offered no competition. The years that were to come would be the heyday of the geisha, when geisha were at the forefront of society as trend setters, fashion leaders, and the companions and confidantes of powerful men.

Queens of High Society

For the Edo-ites who turned out in their tens of thousands to watch the emperor’s grand entry into the city in his palanquin, the Phoenix Chair, on November 26, 1868, it must have seemed as if the world had turned topsy turvy. Was the future to consist of rule by country bumpkin samurai married to geisha lovers? It was as if these queens of the counterculture, who had hitherto played at being great ladies so that merchants could play at being gentlemen, had suddenly turned respectable.

Still, business was business. In recent years the Yoshiwara, with its population of imprisoned courtesans, had fallen far behind the times. Fashionable young men about town much preferred the chic geisha of the illegal quarters; it was geisha the new oligarchs married, not courtesans. By now all but one of the Yoshiwara houses were small and low class, offering little more than sex. Still, seeing a new market in the influx of provincial males flocking into the new capital, the Yoshiwara brothel-keepers quickly upgraded 120 courtesans to the top
yobidashi
rank, thus enabling them to charge far higher fees than for a humble prostitute.

The enthusiastic young samurai who ran the new government recognized the needs of the city’s growing populace by giving licenses to six areas which had been semilicensed. Whereas the illegal quarters had sprung up around shrines and temples, the natural gathering places under the shogunate, these new licensed quarters were in the bustling population hubs of the new order, at the points where roads from the provinces entered the city, soon to become railway termini: Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Itabashi, Nezu, and two at Senju.

They also, rather touchingly, attempted to provide for the many foreign gentlemen who were expected to come and work in the city. For despite the slogan “Revere the emperor, expel the barbarian,” it had become apparent not only that the foreigner was here to stay but that he had a myriad of interesting things to teach the fledgling state.

Shortly after the emperor arrived in Edo, he put his signature to a memo from the leading daimyo recommending that Japan abandon the attitude of “the frog looking at the world from the bottom of a well” and resolve instead to learn from the foreigners, “adopting their best points and making good our own deficiencies.” The Japanese forthwith embarked on a love affair with all things foreign. Young Japanese steamed off on P & O liners to the West to study and the Japanese hired foreign experts—British engineers to share the secrets of the industrial revolution, French to teach them law and military affairs, Germans to teach them about their parliamentary system, and Americans to teach commerce, agriculture, and technology.

One of the first of the Meiji government’s projects was a pleasure quarter for foreigners. Named the New Shimabara, after the famous quarter in Kyoto, it opened not far from the imperial palace, near present-day Ginza, in 1869. It operated according to the Yoshiwara system, with teahouses serving as houses of assignation for clients to make appointments for the grander brothels. A total of 1,700 courtesans and 200 geisha, including 21 male geisha, moved in from the Yoshiwara to populate its 130 brothels and 84 teahouses.

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.