The Sunday Gentleman (73 page)

An even more legendary Shimbashi geisha was the beautiful Ghana, who became the mistress of the late Prince Saionji, last of the elder statesmen and intimate adviser of Hirohito. At the time of the Versailles Peace Conference, Prince Saionji took his geisha to Paris with him, and President Woodrow Wilson, charmed by her demeanor, presented her with a pearl necklace. There was considerable embarrassment later, when President Wilson learned of the young lady’s occupation and position. “Today,” said Mr. Kuo, “Ghana is retired. She is abbess of a nunnery near Tokyo. Of course, all our girls aspire to such fame. They all dream of growing up to be another Okichi—you know, like Cho-Cho-San in Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly
.”

Unlike Puccini’s operatic geisha, Okichi was a real person, and her Lieutenant Pinkerton was also real and his name was Townsend Harris. He was the first United States consul general to the Japan which Admiral Perry had just opened to the West. To please the middle-aged Harris, Japanese officials took a leading eighteen-year-old geisha, Okichi, away from her carpenter sweetheart and introduced her to the American consul. Okichi, known for her comeliness and her singing, entranced the American, and she, in turn, found him attractive and eventually fell deeply in love with him. However, when new American officials arrived in Japan, Townsend Harris was forced to send away his geisha mistress ‘ temporarily. As he became busier and busier, she became lonelier and lonelier. Soon, she took to drinking, became an alcoholic, and Harris could do nothing but give her up. Some years after his death in Brooklyn, Okichi suffered a stroke and committed suicide.

“But it is Okichi’s
Madame Butterfly
years that our girls choose to remember and envy,” said Mr. Kuo.

Then, a little teasingly, Mr. Kuo asked me if I had met any of the male geisha. I had not, and I was unable to hide my amazement.

“We have many male geisha, or
hokan
, as we call them,” said Mr. Kuo. “It will surprise you maybe to know we have one American citizen who is an official geisha working for the Asakusa Guild. He specializes in Japanese dancing and even has a male patron!”

After that, we discussed the future of the individual geisha, and Mr. Kuo was cheerful. He said that he lost as many as twenty-five girls a year to marriage. I later learned that this was an exaggerated figure. For while most of the geisha acquired generous patrons, few ever have the opportunity to marry those patrons. Most geisha are resigned to achieving, with good fortune, the role of
mekake
or “second wife.” The best that the average geisha might hope for was ownership of her waiting house—and security.

It was already late, the Sunday afternoon almost gone, and I saw that it was time to leave. I looked at Chock, who had been interpreting for me, and Chock told me that he would like to ask a question of his own.

“I’ve been with a lot of geisha,” said Chock. “Now I want you to tell me a secret, Mr. Kuo. What type of man do the girls like?”

Mr. Kuo answered this one in the stereotyped tradition of the best Hollywood press agent.

“Our girls like decent men,” he said. “They have told me they like men who are clean, who are frank and goodhearted. I say to you that if a very rich munitions manufacturer comes to a geisha and puts all his indecent blood money before her, she will scorn him and turn to more decent men.”

I had a faint suspicion that Mr. Kubo’s reply had been colored by a personal antipathy toward munitions makers.

Mr. Kuo went on. “Our geisha have been with the most brilliant men in the world, so they are more intelligent than the average girls, and harder to please. The patrons of our girls almost fill Japan’s
Who’s Who
. Men of the cabinet like Prince Konoye, Matsuoka, Tojo, men like Mitsui, all have girls in Shimbashi. Politicians, nobility, intellectuals, they are all our customers. Only munitions makers, newly rich—”

There it was again.

” rich on others’ blood, they rarely come a second time, because our girls have nothing in common with them and are cold to them.”

Before leaving, I thought it might be tactful to flatter Mr. Kuo with a few personal questions. So I asked how he got into this unique business.

“After the big 1923 earthquake disaster, I gave up my flour store, and organized several geisha houses,” replied Mr. Kuo. “Today, I work from ten in the morning until eight at night, but I am not paid a penny. It is an honorary job. Some of my employees, however, make as much as 250 yen a month. My own money comes from several geisha houses I own. You may be interested to know, too, that I am a happily married man with five children. Yes, three of my sons are doctors, all of them today serving on the Chinese war front. Two of the sons are now lieutenants.”

Mr. Kuo accompanied us downstairs, and then continued speaking while we pulled on our shoes.

He said to me, “I have enjoyed our talk very much. You will be sure to write they are not prostitutes. And by the way, I have a favor for you. I have one or two special girls. You may take them for a weekend to one of the resorts. They will wear Western-style dress. Usually our fee for a weekend with foreigners is high, but you are a friend—”

I said, “Thanks, Mr. Kuo, I’ll take a rain check on that.”

It’s four years now, and I still have that rain check, I’m giving it to some of my buddies.

They intend to be in Mr. Kubo’s vicinity very soon.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

It was in August, 1940, sixteen months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that I was in Tokyo, researching and writing as a free-lance magazine contributor. I had just completed a fascinating interview, in a resort villa at the foot of Mount Fujiyama with ninety-year-old Mitsuru Toyama, head of a group of extremists and professional assassins known as the Black Dragon Society, and our talk had dealt mostly with the possibilities of war. But once back in Tokyo, I was tired of political interviews, eager to do something frivolous and diverting. I considered trying a story on the institution of the geisha, then decided that too many other writers had touched upon it in recent years. But when Chockalingam told me that the geisha girls had a union, I knew that this was my diverting subject after all, and with Chock I went to see Hidezo Kuo.

I meant to write the story at once, but more topical subjects kept me from it. And then, the following year I was married, and then, after another year I was in the army, and my notes on Mr. Kuo lay untouched in a drawer of my desk. But while I was in the Signal Corps, where every morning I received copies of monitored Japanese shortwave broadcasts, I came across the announcement that the Japanese were considering doing away with the geisha girl for the duration of the war. At once, my interview with Mr. Kuo came to mind, and on my first free Sunday away from the army base, I wrote the story. It appeared in the September, 1945, issue of
Tricolor
magazine, an attractive monthly then produced in New York but since become defunct.

In my story, I had doubted that the Japanese government, despite the pressures of war and austerity, would ever succeed in eliminating the geisha girl. I was proved right. Although the geisha unions were suspended, the geisha girl continued to exist in a limited fashion as one of Japan’s few luxuries throughout the Second World War, and she survived that war and her homeland’s defeat intact. Yet in the postwar years, numerous prophets of doom went on predicting the demise of the geisha, insisting that she would give way before the advent of the emancipated, Americanized, new Japanese woman. In November, 1958, Time magazine headlined a story “The Vanishing Geisha,” which reported that nude shows and more stringent tax laws (that made a geisha party ineligible as a deductible business expense) were lessening the attraction of the geisha, and concluded, “The plain fact is that the stylized coquetry of the classic geisha is no longer fashionable. ‘Frankly,’ said one Japanese businessman last week, ‘they have become a bore.’”

Curious to know if the geisha was on her way out—in fact, curious to know what had happened to the geisha in the two decades since I wrote about her and her improbable union—I began to investigate the situation in Tokyo today, with the assistance of Mrs. Keiko Akamatsu, the translator of several of my novels into Japanese. I am pleased to report that, while the situation of the geisha is not precisely what it was in 1940, she continues to survive, even to flourish, as a part of Japan’s culture. Moreover, she is still unionized, perhaps more strongly than before, and the Shimbashi Geisha Guild has become more powerful than it was when I visited it.

At the present time, there are fifty-two geisha guilds in the city of Tokyo. They are still divided into six classes, and the Shimbashi Geisha Guild still remains in the “first-rate” class. There are 2,216 geisha houses in Tokyo today, half the number I found in 1940, and there are now 4,408 female geisha practicing their art, one-third the number I wrote about at an earlier time.

I learned that my old friend, Hidezo Kuo, the managing director of the Shimbashi Geisha Guild whom I had interviewed in 1940, had stayed on in that job until 1945. There had then been some kind of disagreement between Kuo and his associates, and he had been forced to leave the guild and Tokyo itself. In the years that followed, he managed a single geisha house at To-no-sawa, in Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture, and there he is said to have died in July, 1956.

Meanwhile, his Shimbashi Geisha Guild, closed down with all others toward the end of the war, was fully resurrected along more modern and enlightened lines in 1951. Kubo’s old guild, I learned, had not been entirely devoted to the interests of the girls, had been “conspicuously feudalistic in character,” and had existed “mainly for the convenience of its police contacts.”

The new guild, headed by Mrs. Haru Shirohara, eighty-six years old, and Miss Shizu Nagai, an active and much desired geisha who would not give her age, is devoted strictly to the welfare of its 400 geisha girls who belong to seventy geisha houses in the district. The guild is strong, since it possesses an agreement with the Japanese Restaurant Association that permits only guild girls to work at parties in the
ryotei
or restaurants in the area.

The new guild manages almost everything for its girls. Before the war, parents sold their girls into the geisha world. This is now forbidden by law. Today, a potential geisha of twenty (eighteen years old, if she has her parents’ permission) need only apply to the mistress of a geisha house that belongs to the guild. If she seems promising, she is trained in the arts of entertainment for one year, instead of the prewar minimum of ten years. If she passes an examination at the end of the year, she agrees to pay the house mistress 25,000 yen, and then she is a full-fledged guild geisha, ready to work at union minimums.

The modern geisha usually spends her mornings sleeping, her afternoons perfecting her skills in the traditional songs and dances or in acquiring modem skills such as golf, ten-ms, bowling. Western dance steps, or reading for background in order to converse with male customers interested in discussing the Common Market, the New York Yankees, Red China’s nuclear advances, or what not. In the evenings, the geisha works, spending time with customers in the private room of a restaurant from six o’clock until somewhere between ten o’clock and midnight.

The new guild sees that its member houses obtain proper employment for each girl. But it also takes care of each girl’s continuing education, health, tax problems, social security insurance. Above all, the guild sees that its geisha girl member is not underpaid.

The standard pay for the services of a Shimbashi geisha girl is about 950 yen—almost three dollars—an hour. The greatest part of her income, however, comes from
oshugi
—tips—and these can often be generous. A really top-flight geisha girl, I am told, can earn 300,000 yen or $800 a month. However, all of this income is not profit. She has many expenses such as her guild fee, house commission, training tuition, and the upkeep of a kimono and obi wardrobe that may cost as much as 300,000 yen.

As before, my Shimbashi Geisha Guild informants were most sensitive about my questions concerning sex and the modern geisha girl. “Much to our bewilderment and regret,” a guild official said, “foreigners are still often apt to mix up geisha and prostitutes. Even in 1940, few people went to visit a geisha merely to satisfy sexual desire. If a man wanted a girl, he would go to a
Kuruwa
, a licensed prostitution quarter like Yoshiwara, and enjoy an
oiran
, a high-class prostitute. Often, when a man visited such a prostitute, he would call a geisha to entertain him with dance and songs before he went to bed with the prostitute.”

In 1956, I learned, the Prostitution Prohibition Law went into effect. The prostitute was outlawed, and 60,000 women were put out of business, as were 16,000 keepers of brothels. Since there are no longer any licensed prostitutes in Japan, and since the geisha is not supposed to traffic in sex, I wondered where the single Japanese male or errant married man found his illicit pleasures. Presumably, I would guess, he found them where his American counterpart found them, among emancipated single or married women, who also wanted pleasure, and not pay.

Still, I was not satisfied with what I heard. Did or did not any geisha have anything to do with professional sex? “That is a very delicate question,” I was told. “But it can be said that many of the ‘third-rate’ geisha with poor artistic accomplishments were and are apt to degrade themselves easily under the name of love. There is a Japanese expression, ‘
daruma-
geisha,’ to indicate that some of the geisha are very easy to roll over like a
daruma
—a traditional round-shaped doll. Yet, having a geisha as an object of such desire would be so expensive that most males might better enjoy playing with girls or hostesses of cabarets or saloons.”

When I asked Mrs. Akamatsu, my translator, what she thought the future of the geisha to be, she replied:

“The problem is that the first-rate geisha is expensive. In prewar Japan, there were quite a number of customers who enjoyed and patronized geisha and their arts as such, and not for physical love or desire. Today, such customers are fewer in number, while there are an increasing number of wealthy people who have no eye or ear for traditional dances and music, and utilize the geisha only for business entertainment.