Geisha

This is part one, of three, on the subject of geisha. Geisha are female Japanese entertainers in the traditional arts. Before the era of karaoke, Kohaku Uta Gassen and Hamasaki Ayumi, geisha were the favored form of entertainment for men who liked to go to tea houses after work to unwind.

This simple introduction does the courtesan, the geisha, no justice. To simply refer to these women as 'entertainers' is incorrect and inappropriate. To my mind, they inhabit a secret world and within that world, they belong to a mysterious order. Religious, political and magical, this sisterhood recruits, trains and then presents individuals who perform the arts. No, that is no better than the first paragraph. Geisha are art. They are the embodiment of artist, art and performance housed within a beautiful frame and clothed in silk and white facepaint.

There is a hierarchy within the geisha community: the Mai-ko (apprentice geisha), the Gei-ko (the adult geisha) and the Oba-sama (literally 'grandmother', with the same reverence one calls an honored matriarch, she is a retired gei-ko). Oba-sama is not used anymore as typically geisha who retire give up the title geisha forever. And the houses, virtually self contained estates, where the geisha live don't exist anymore. The Gion geisha registry office which used to administer geisha affairs, particularly fees and taxes, now houses a travel agency and a chain English school. Part of the Allied Occupation Forces realignment of Japan's governmental system, prostitution and thus the entertainment districts in Japanese cities was abolished. The customs practiced by geisha since the middle of the 18th century when the first geisha appeared are now illegal, and they wouldn't have been used anyway since modern attitudes would have deemed them unacceptable.

The Japanese National Tourism Office, JNTO, now governs the geisha as tourist attractions. Though most geisha adhere to the traditional codes of the geisha, what is formally understood of the traditions has been erased. There are conflicting statistics to the number of officially licensed gei-ko but the accepted figure is around eighty. With the same disclaimer, the number of mai-ko is somewhere around a dozen. For all of Japan. Take into account there were probably six or seven hundred geisha in Kyoto alone at the end of WWII. And there were thousands at the turn of the century.

Geisha are a relatively new phenomenon in Japanese history but like the samurai and imperial rule, they are on the point of extinction, if only barely preserved by a handful of purists who struggle against the rising tide of the future. You see, Japan is a land of water, both literally and figuratively. With interests as fluid as those of contemporary Japanese, soon there won't be enough geisha to pass along the traditions to keep the art alive. Very soon, that world will pass into the mists of memory and eventually will be remembered in misunderstood and misinterpreted representations that will never reflect the truth. Somewhere there is an echo of the geisha world, where beautiful women with white faces deftly pour sake into men's cups or play lilting tunes on a koto but the nuances are lost, the proper element of nihongai will be missing. All that is left is what TV scriptwriters can drudge out of their imaginations before the 2PM deadline or what the Western novelist who needs a theme for his romance novel.

Part two, 'Memoirs of a Geisha'