The Real Geisha
"The geisha as we see her at her best is the product of many years of training and culture. She preserves and perpetuates the classic type of female beauty in…
From: 1914 C.E. To: 1918 C.E.
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Japan at First Hand by Joseph Ignatius Constantine Clarke, 1918.
Inasmuch as the wives of Japan are great home bodies, and the grown daughters of private families are very much sheltered from outside influence, not to say adventure, the geisha takes the place in Japanese literature of the adventurous, hence the romantic female. She is the heroine of a thousand stories in which woman's wit achieves triumph over astounding difficulties, in which woman's love endures trial and suffering, even death. The geisha too fills an artistic niche in the modern world little known: she poses for all the modern photographic reproductions of the female form, divine.
The woman in private life would feel herself curiously degraded if her face were put up for sale in shop or store, which is perhaps a sufficing reason for her leaving the task to the geisha. To the photographer, however, it is a saving grace. He secures charm and beauty. Hence when you buy some wonderful Japanese photograph of family life, a tender mother and her baby, a lady of quality in a garden or in a rickisha, a group of refined maidens frolicking under the cherry blooms, it is the geisha who supplies the model, modifying her hairdressing, her garb and her expression to suit the occasion.
Sooth to say the varying of expression for art purposes in women 's faces in Japan is exceedingly limited in range. However the great artists of the colour-print school of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depicted character and calling in the faces of men, even they did little in differentiating the faces of women from the traditional expressionless face of the classical period. And the artists of today do little more. The laughing face of a girl so full of innocent mirth and the joy of living that has sold by tens of thousands in Japan is the snapshot of a geisha.
Some American travellers have told their public how they mistook ordinary tea-house waitresses and even licensed girls of ill-fame for geishas. Unless you dower the tourist with great stupidity such confusion is unpardonable. At any rate, the tourists' prurience is mostly to blame, and not the geisha. Not even the glib and picturesque hanger-on of a Yokohama hotel with all his desire to make a little dirty money debauching the “Western” traveller, will describe any of the women noted above as geishas. Nor will the poorest kurumaya "with varicose veins in his tired brown legs" as one traveller delicately describes his Yokohama rickisha man, try to palm off on a foreigner any ordinary servant girl or woman as a geisha.
The geisha as we see her at her best is the product of many years of training and culture. She preserves and perpetuates the classic type of female beauty in Japan, which is more to the purpose than that they wait wonderfully at table and sing and dance picturesquely. And they spring almost entirely from the poorer classes. Wherever through the islands of Nippon a poor mother bears a daughter an early thought about her is apt to be, is she beautiful enough to be a geisha when she grows up? If she really is a beautiful child, the neighbours have their say and urge the mother not to deny her daughter her chance in life, for at rare times they have wonderful chances and improve upon them. Oftener naturally the geisha draws a blank in the lottery of life. That she has lived a blameless, joyous life of a few years must be the consolation of the geisha most of the time as she closes her geisha career in a humble marriage.
The beauty of a girl when grown up cannot be definitely predicted in Japan before she is twelve years old. Even then the signs often prove deceptive. High cheek bones come out: the oval of the face proves imperfect: the form is disappointing. Generally speaking, however, the promise of twelve to the experienced eye of the keeper of a geisha house holds good. If the mother wishes her daughter to be a geisha she must sign a hard and fast contract of apprenticeship that surrenders her own rights in her daughter, and obligates the keeper of the geisha house to feed her, lodge her and clothe her, and teach her the art and practice of the profession. The terms of these contracts are carefully drawn and meticulously observed.
By all accounts the life of the musume or apprentice geisha or chicken geisha as she is variously called is for two or three years a hard one. In the coldest winter weather they must be up at daybreak and practice on the samisen for hours often with numb fingers. No amount of whimpering relieves them of their task. Then the dancing has to be practised for hours. This, of course, is posturing, advancing, retiring, wheeling, rising, kneeling, gesticulating in prescribed, traditional motions. Hundreds of geisha songs have to be learned by heart and sung as solos or in chorus.
Then the waitress business must be studied and practised with a detail unimaginable to Occidental ideas of the art. Progress is extremely slow, and the criticism consistently severe. Then they must wait on the elder geishas and run their errands. As they grow a little older and learn to carry the beautiful raiment of the geisha, wonderfully embroidered satins and brocades, with something of grace and authority they are occasionally allowed to attend the banquets for an hour or two, giving their touch of exquisite grace and childish innocence to the entertainment as they flit about under strict orders to permit no liberties. At this age they are all very beautiful. Later on, as I have indicated, they differentiate, and seldom carry to maturity a third of the charm they conveyed as children.
A geisha house is not generally a large establishment—six or seven to a dozen geishas and half as many musumes make it up. The mother or keeper is generally an old geisha, often a once celebrated dancer and entertainer, as one may guess from the many middle-aged or aging men who will sit down beside her and swap stories with her about merry old times of other days. The geisha houses, rather humble, certainly unpretentious abodes, group themselves in certain quarters, and the hiring of the girls is done methodically through a central office at a very strict tariff. The hiring should be accomplished by the restaurant keeper or by the housewife as early in the afternoon as possible, but not after six in the evening unless absolutely unavoidable. For the preparation of the geisha is an elaborate affair from the wonderful coiling and adorning of her hair to the fit and sit of her white, heelless shoes. They are taken in rickishas to the house of entertainment and carried home in the same way when all is over.
The clan spirit is strongly developed in them, but it is strictly local: that is the geishas of a certain fu or prefecture will hold themselves superior on one point or another of geisha accomplishment to the geishas of another neighbourhood. It furnishes them with conversation for hours, the mother geisha encouraging it by all means, often going to great expense in the way of gorgeous costumes, gold embroidered and what not, to "down" a rival prefecture.
The municipalities and even the central government use the geishas from time to time for public display. Nothing is more popular than a procession of geishas through decorated streets on festival days. The geishas of the rival parishes vie in splendour and stateliness and are received along the route with applause. In Tokyo and above all in Kyoto geisha exhibitions are held in large public halls, and these district rivalries as to number, splendour and complexity of the dance figures are the great popular feature. Of late they have been used in public fetes that had long been closed to them.
At bridge openings they are in demand. They are always building bridges in Tokyo, and every new bridge calls for a local celebration. The first over the bridge must be the oldest married couple in the district, and then come the mayor and other officials and a score of geishas, wonder of wonders, wearing tights instead of the superb flowing robes of their usual garb of ceremony. If a mere man may have an opinion in such delicate matters I would say that the young men of Japan have better shaped legs than the young women. This I attribute wholly to the exercising of the young men, and the flattening of the limbs from the prolonged squatting of the young women of leisure.
As may be supposed the morals of the geisha are a great trouble to foreigners. One thing is very certain, those who control the geisha take the greatest care to preserve them from the temptations that may come their way. The random meeting with well-to-do men a little flown with sake when the geisha serves at banquets cannot be without its dangers, but the geisha has a long-taught fund of cynicism to fall back upon regarding the sheep's eyes thrown at them across the dinner tray, and their simple creed that all compliments are theirs by sheer right of cultivated grace and beauty save them from all—well, nearly all—the dangers of flattery.
It would be difficult to praise a geisha beyond her own concept of her attractions. Their whole schooling, in fact, is a preparation against the delighted appreciation on the other side of the dinner tray. Never did a mother hen gather her chickens under her wing with more insistent cluck than the clerk in charge or the mother geisha herself, as one or other collects the girls at the feast's end and shoos them home in good order. It is the condition of the business that the girls live good lives.
As to the young apprentices they are really watched over with maternal care for their own gentle sakes no less than for the good of the house, and the profit from the full-blown geisha in years to come. It is in fact a hard worldly wisdom they are taught, without illusions, if largely dissociated from what is narrowly called virtue. They are taught that decent conduct makes for self-respect and health. They are not allowed to dissipate as that lowers their geisha value. That the system, like most of the social systems that date back to feudal Japan, answers and has answered its purpose, speaks volumes. The aim has been to keep intact a large company of young women of beauty and cultivation bringing them nightly in more or less perilous contact with slightly inebriated men of more or less means and yet keep the ranks whole and the girls safe. It is a system of bringing the pitchers to the well with a minimum of breakages.
I recall a case on the other side of the world of many years ago showing how want of some such system betrayed a steward of handsome young women. It struck a great London restaurateur that when the Exposition Universelle opened the following year in Paris he would astonish the world visitors with a great London bar a hundred feet long and attended by fifty of the biggest, finest and blondest barmaids in the United Kingdom. He was as good as his word. Never was there such a display of big, plump, beautiful, rosy-cheeked, muscular, blonde-haired women presented in a line before—nor since. It was before the days of peroxide, and a blonde was a blonde. As they towered in their mountainous filmy muslin waists above the counters, and with great round arms bare to the shoulder drew golden floods of bitter beer from the ivory beer-pump handles, Paris held its breath, and then made a rush for glass after glass of the foaming flood. The steward was in ecstasies.
Tout Paris took up the story. Well, you know what Paris is, or you have heard what it was. The prodigal sons and uncles and nephews and possibly the prodigal grandfathers of the world were in town. No mother geisha was there to round up o’ nights the blond ladies from London. So at the end of a week, while the steward stood wringing his hands beside his deserted beer pumps or telegraphing to London literally for help, the Bois de Boulogne was reeking with broughams and barouches and victorias filled with great English blondes escorted by little dandy Frenchmen or fierce Russian lords or South American senors of ferocious aspect, all gloating over the new sensation. The great London restaurateur thereafter tried a plainer and more elderly type of attendant at his shrine of bitter beer. The geisha does not always escape such dangers, but she is taught a very worldly lesson thereanent: it is that she is an extremely costly article to the outsider, and it is suspected that when the call for her good graces is insistent, the advice of older heads than her own must be taken.
The first advice of these older heads is that she must henceforth be doubly careful in her life and play absolutely for honourable marriage if the man is single. Many marriages with that beginning have taken place, and geishas so have risen to marked social heights. There is, however, another side, as, for instance, a case that found its way into the papers, and is a fair sample of the costly geisha. The indications are of a Shimbashi geisha, named Saito Yoshi, a queen of her class ''enjoying the protection of a high dignitary" and contracting with a Mr. G. M. C. da Silva of Yokohama for the purchase of a diamond necklace worth $42,500! The story came to light because Mr. da Silva, exacting advance money to the amount of $7,500, placed an order for the necklace with a German firm which went bankrupt and never supplied the jewels. Saito Yoshi San sued for the return of the $7,500 and despite the jeweller's plea that his contract was with Prince Iwakura, won her case in flying colours, and more, Mr. da Silva 's counter-charge of defamation of character was dismissed.
Finally, from one point of view the geisha is most interesting. She long stood in Japan for the only class of women earning money in a purely honest calling, and, as far as she really pleased, mistress of herself and her emotions and affections. If she obeyed the rules of her house she was quite free. It gave her a certain independence long ahead of her sisters. Today woman earners exist by the hundred thousand in Japan, but still she holds a certain eminence as the Lady of Romance.
Among the sisterhood when they meet in the afternoons for tea their theme is romance. Admired and petted by the rich and the highly placed they have learned to turn a deaf ear to compliments coming in the way of business, but when they walk abroad on their little clattering geta or gather on a night off duty to see a favourite actor in a favourite play they look around with selective eyes. They fall in love and fall out again as woman it appears may. Many is the story told of a geisha in love with a poor student helping him through his classes from her earnings. It may be a young artist to whom she joins her dreams and her cash. I once was pointed out a florist who had been the protege and was then the husband of a former geisha. Indeed, as I said heretofore, her fancy leads her to marriage generally with a good-looking struggling man, but as a rule she is the one who selects and woos. Then is she blessed in her generation.
Her fate, on the contrary, if she remains single and passes on to the maikon stage is not enviable. To sit thrumming a samisen in the background for a small wage with no better prospect is not alluring if "sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things." It is quite characteristic of the geisha that as far as the theatre is concerned she has turned her back on modern plays. The problem play with its harsh-clashings of individuality with convention, of the working out of unusual social combinations, does not appeal. The call upon her limited brain is too much. Her education has sharpened but not broadened her. On the other hand the racial tragedy of sacrifice, of utter devotion, of unceasing struggle to right a great wrong or avenge a foul crime appeal to her through every quickened fibre of her being. She weeps copiously at the play.
As young "Western" men adore the actress with a wonderful calf-love, so the geisha adores the best actors, whether they play men's parts or women's. I have heard of a couple of clever actors, not at all the great ones of the stage but great favourites of the geisha, who were so beset with invitations to dine with these sentimental young ladies that they actually set a tariff on their compliance. It cost the geisha twenty yen in addition to the price of the dinner (whose quality was laid down) for the boon of the actor's company at the repast. That was a pretty high tide of romance for the little flowers that make the festal life of Japan beautiful with their grace and colour and motion.
But do not mistake the attendant girls at tea houses for geisha. Above all do not wrong the fair geisha by confusing her with the class of women who sell themselves. The latter are quite willing to be mistaken for geisha, will indeed on small provocation claim the distinction in presence of the ignorant, but not to native Japanese. In America what types of brazen dissipatedness ''admit" in police courts that they are "actresses." Hear a geisha declaim on similar "admissions" by their unfortunate sisters!
Clarke, Joseph Ignatius Constantine. Japan at First Hand. Dodd, Mead and Company. 1918.
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