Playing the Geisha Game In Present-Day Japan!

TOKYO – During the 1600s in Edo (Tokyo) a special class of women entertainers who were skilled at playing the shamisen, singing, and dancing gradually came to be known as geisha (gay-ee-shah). Gei means art and sha means person.

The geisha performed for private individuals and parties in the country's large redlight districts, and in ryokan (rio-kahn) inns and ryotei (rio-tay-ee) restaurants. Because of their association with the courtesan quarters, and because prostitution was also commonly practiced in ryokan and ryotei, the geisha came to be regarded by many as a just another category of prostitutes.

However, as the decades of the Edo era (1603-1868) passed, the profession of the geisha grew in stature. Their training became more formalized and strict. Famous courtesans regularly hired geisha to help them entertain their high profile customers.

Although geisha did not work as prostitutes it became customary for them to form intimate liaisons with affluent men who patronized them regularly and treated them more or less as mistresses. Some geisha had more than one regular patron at the same time, but they were not for hire for indiscriminate sex, and having more than one patron simultaneous was frowned upon.

With the deterioration of the licensed gay quarters following the downfall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1867, the social status of prostitutes began to drop and that of the geisha to rise. Their training was expanded to include lessons in etiquette, grace, flower arranging, the tea ceremony, and in how to be stimulating conversationalists, making them among the most accomplished women in the country.

Within a few decades the position of prostitutes and geisha had completed reversed. Geisha were the most elite of public women, and prostitutes the lowest. Wealthy businessmen and high-ranking politicians began to vie with each other to make the most famous geisha their mistresses.

It was, in fact, common for men of wealth and power to marry their geisha mistresses, with one notable example being Hirobumi Ito (1841-1909), who played a key role in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 1860s, became the chief architect of Japan's first constitution, and served as prime minister four times.

Given a social system in which wives did not participate directly or publicly with men in business or in politics, and therefore could not act as hostesses for their husbands under any circumstances, geisha came to perform valuable functions, not only dressing up business and political meetings held in ryotei inn restaurants but helping to make sure the meetings ran smoothly.

As late as the 1950s, Tokyo alone had over a dozen large so-called geisha districts, which consisted of clusters of ryotei that called in geisha nightly to serve their customers. Some ryotei had live-in geisha, but most of them lived in separate housing, and went to ryotei only when they were called. The services of the geisha were so costly that only wealthy businessmen and high-ranking politicians and government bureaucrats could afford to patronize them.

Then the rapid transformation of Japan into an economic super power from the 1950s to the 1970s saw the equally rapid rise of thousands of cabarets and night clubs that featured hostesses as drinking, dancing and conversational companions, with fees far below what geisha inns charged.

The far less expensive cabarets and nightclubs attracted huge numbers of middle-class men from every walk of life, for business as well as personal reasons. During the heyday of this era, over half a million young women were employed as hostesses.

The more attractive the hostesses, and the more skilled they were in entertaining men, the more they could earn. This naturally attracted some of the most beautiful and socially talented young women in the country. Hundreds if not thousands of these remarkable women became millionaires. Like the geisha of an early day, many of them married well. One married the then president of Indonesia, Sukarno, and became an international celebrity.

The reign of the huge businessmen-oriented hostess cabarets and nightclubs ended in the late 1980s when Japan's economic bubble begin to deflate, but they were quickly replaced by dozens of thousands of dance clubs and other types of entertainment spots that catered to newly liberated, and affluent, female clientele as well as men.

The geisha survived the economic fallout, although they are now on the fringe of Japan's entertainment world. In Kyoto, in particular, there are well-known geisha districts, with many of the women in the trade being third and fourth generation geisha.

In the evenings in Tokyo's Akasaka district, which borders the country's government center, one can still see geisha being delivered to ryotei and ryokan in rickshaws pulled by men wearing traditional Edo age garb.

Most geisha now voluntarily enter the profession when they are in their late teens. Their training is less formal and less comprehensive, often as little as a few weeks, as opposed to years in earlier times.

But to the foreign resident or visitor, today's instant geisha are just as fascinating, just as entertaining, if not more so, than their predecessors. And they are almost always more attractive because today their popularity and success is more dependent upon their looks.

Few things are more satisfying than spending an evening in a ryotei restaurant in the company of geisha, participating in their games and experiencing a sensuous-charged atmosphere that has not changed for centuries.

Copyright © 2007 by Boye Lafayette De Mente
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boye Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan, Korea, China and Mexico since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on these countries, including the first books ever on the Japanese way of doing business: Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, first published in 1959, and How to Do Business in Japan, published in 1961.

To see a complete list of his titles [each one linked to Amazon.com’s buy page], go to his personal website: http://www.phoenixbookspublishers.com/.