The Sunday Gentleman (72 page)

“In no other great city can ladies go through such a quarter in the sure knowledge that they will meet with no insult, and see no immodesty or vulgarity…Vice is here robbed of its viciousness, for it is dignified, and, in the final analysis, a civilized handling of a universal problem.”

I saw a nightful of this “civilized handling.” We walked through the narrow streets, none more than six feet wide, flanked on either side, endlessly, by the miniature houses. Sometimes, I could observe the young ladies reading or sewing indoors. Other times, they stood at their windows and called “Ha-ro,” a corruption of “Hello.” Most of the girls were decorous, only a very few obscene.

We went into one of the larger houses, down the wooden corridors, past the sliding partitions. I met four or five of the girls. They were all in ruthless bondage—but all resigned to it. Most came from farms. There were frequent bad seasons on the farms, and if a father wished to survive, he would borrow perhaps $300 from the men of Yoshiwara, and turn over his fifteen-year-old daughter as security for the loan. The daughter would work off this debt with her body. After four or five years, the debt might be repaid, and then the daughter could return to the farm. But usually, she just remained.

Chock assured me, however, that the Yoshiwara was not the real sex story of Japan. The most important part of the story, he said, was the geisha. Everyone talked so much about the geisha that the subject was considered a cliche. “But no one’s really covered it,” he said. “And when you realize the geishas have one of the most powerful unions—”

“You mean they’re organized?”

Chock nodded. “Best union in Japan. And I know the head man. His name is Hidezo Kuo, president of the Shimbashi Geisha Guild.”

So I went with Chock to see Mr. Kuo.

Hidezo Kuo was a slight, grayish, immaculate man attired in a Palm Beach suit. He was bald except for a thin semicircle of hair. He wore metal-rimmed spectacles and a quiet mustache. He was sixty-five years old.

He sat, in the best Little Napoleon manner, behind a massive, aseptic walnut desk. His large office contained two fat safes, three busts of Japanese war heroes, an old gramophone. Also, there was a microphone and switch. “It is our speaker system,” Mr. Kuo explained. “It connects me with each of our four floors.”

Mr. Kubo’s sanctum was on the second floor of the guild’s four-story modernistic building in the heart of Tokyo. From this office, Mr. Kuo, possessing the world’s strangest and perhaps in ways most enviable job, controlled the daily doings of 280 first-rate geisha houses in the Shimbashi district of the island’s capital. Mr. Kuo was, indeed, the middleman to end all middlemen.

In Tokyo, there were three million males. The love life of most of these males consisted largely of visiting the 13,793 geisha girls residing in 4,526 geisha houses located in Tokyo’s fifty-four geisha districts—of which the most expensive and exclusive was Mr. Kubo’s Shimbashi district.

Actually, Mr. Kubo’s guild was a clearinghouse in sex.

Whenever a male, or a group of males, desired female companionship, they phoned Mr. Kuo or any one of his eighty office employees. Then Mr. Kuo, in turn, advised his geisha to be prepared for visitors at their
machiai
or waiting house that evening, or ordered them to be on hand at the
ryoriya
or restaurant.

“But, I must make one thing clear to you,” said Mr. Kuo from behind his walnut desk, “and it is important. In fact, it is why I wished to see you even on a Sunday afternoon. It is that our geisha girls are
not
prostitutes—and our Shimbashi district is not a red-light district!”

I started to comment on this point, but he was just beginning his educational discourse. His spectacles wavered on his nose as he spoke.

“Oh, yes, it is unfortunately true,” he continued, “that some of the third-rate geisha, in cheaper districts, who are unaccomplished in the traditional arts, have lowered themselves by becoming mere prostitutes. These cheap geisha have given all geisha a bad name with foreigners.

“I do not say that every one of my eight hundred girls here is a virgin. After all, their virginity is a private matter, just as It is with American entertainers like your movie actresses in Hollywood. From what I have heard about your movie actresses, I would venture to say that our geisha use their bodies far less for purposes of advancement.

“The main point is this—our geisha do not make a living by romancing with guests. They make a living purely from reciting songs, dancing, playing the samisen, conversing wittily. Just last week, there was a professor here from one of your big American universities. He spent one night with our girls and left convinced they were not prostitutes.”

I asked the professor’s name. Mr. Kuo started to tell me, stopped, then wagged his head.

“No, I’d better not tell. Anyway, if the professor could be convinced, maybe you too will go home and help correct the impression in America that the geisha are prostitutes. In keeping with the New Order in Japan, and to lift the unfair stigma attached to the word geisha, we in the guild are planning to call our girls by a different name. Maybe that will help.

The geisha have had a long history in their struggle to rise above prostitution. In 1761, retired courtesans became the first geisha. For almost a century, they were nothing more than expensive
filles de joie
. Finally, in 1830, the samurai, the specially privileged feudal-brutal knights of Japan, began patronizing and defending the geisha, and thus gave them respectability. After that, the geisha themselves made a fight to break away from outright prostitution. Those who preferred the life of the red light disappeared into Yoshiwara, while those who preferred to be entertainers enlisted in the rapidly rising Shimbashi. By 1890, the geisha were considered so chaste that if one of their number permitted herself a bed partner on company time, she was driven from the district, while her best kimono was taken from her and hung in disgraceful display from the center of the waiting house for all to see.

Mr. Kuo informed me further that there were six classes of geisha. His own charges fell into the upper two brackets. The first class was called
jimae
, and its young ladies owned their own private houses. The second class was called wake, and it included the young ladies who divided their incomes fifty-fifty with the house owners. In the third class were the girls called
schichisan
, who kept three-tenths of their earnings.“The rest,” said Mr. Kuo, “are the lower-class geisha, who give us a bad name. We nickname them the pillow geisha. I do not have to explain.”

All this anti-prostitution talk left me honestly befuddled, and still skeptical. I had been to three expensive geisha parties, two sponsored for me by the Japanese government, and another, quaintly enough, sponsored by the Japanese-American Friendship Society. Each of these parties ended with my friends, stimulated by potent sake, wandering off for the night with their respective first-class geisha.

But I suppose such activity, as Mr. Kuo insisted, was purely extracurricular. I recall reading a book, Geisha Girl, written by Mr. Aisabuto Akiyama, published in Yokohama. One passage explained:

“The geisha may be taken for an independent artist unique in nature providing her chastity be kept intact. It is, nevertheless, a deplorable fact that she is often deprived of her virtue by wanton guests who lay manifold nets over her in a way that makes it practically impossible to escape.”

I asked Mr. Kuo if it was true that most girls were driven into the career of geisha because of economic necessity. “In this respect, I’ve heard it’s just like Yoshiwara,” I said.

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.