Women of the Pleasure Quarters

by Lesley Downer

  But there was never any doubt that the voices raised in outrage against socially recognized prostitution would carry the day. The Anti-Prostitution Law, outlawing public solicitation and management of prostitutes, was passed in 1956—with a year’s leeway before it came into force and another before prostitution became a punishable offense. The women who had supposedly been liberated thus joined hands and lifted their voices in a soulful rendering of “Auld Lang Syne” before going home to pack their bags. Some half a million had to go back to their families, look for other work, or—most commonly—find a new job title under which to operate.

  After 350 years in business, the Yoshiwara and its ilk were to close their doors forever—at least in theory. Respectable, controllable, government-sanctioned prostitution was at an end. The licensed quarters had, for all their faults, been clean, well organized, and safe for both the women and their customers. Hereafter there would only be unlicensed prostitution which rapidly became the domain of the yakuza. Some of the most famous old houses of the Yoshiwara did indeed close. But most simply carried on under another name, setting up signboards advertising themselves as “Toruko” or “Turkish baths.” (Later, after protests by the Turkish ambassador, these became known as “soaplands.”) Despite the illegality of prostitution, the number of prostitutes actually rose in the years following the passage of the act. After all, as Western observers (invariably male) delighted in pointing out, the day on which the bill went into force was April Fool’s Day.

  Geisha, of course, being considered an entirely different profession, were exempt. Yet, for them too, the anti-prostitution law of Showa 33 was a watershed. Despite the many pious words which had been spoken and written to the contrary, there had always been gray areas where the geisha and prostitute worlds crossed. In the poorer unlicensed districts such as Miyagawa-cho and Gion Otsu in Kyoto, geisha houses were side by side with houses where prostitutes lived. Geisha and prostitutes were part of the same community.

  After the bill was passed, the geisha moved several steps closer toward respectability—though they never made it all the way; the ambivalence remains to this day. Prostitutes who had lived in the same areas faded into the shadows. Some went back to their families in the countryside, some became nigo-san (mistresses or “second wives”), while the lucky ones found someone to marry them. Others who were skilled at playing the shamisen stayed on as musicians. Red-light districts developed where illegal prostitution flourished under the vigilant eyes of the yakuza, completely separate from the geisha districts.

  Many women who became geisha before the war had been sold by their parents as children. Long after the bill was passed, such practices continued. Despite the law, as late as the mid-seventies, children from impoverished rural villages were still ending up as maids in geisha houses, attending primary school in the daytime, and cleaning and helping the geisha with their makeup and kimonos in the evening. But attitudes had changed. Such practices were coming to seem more and more unacceptable, and the country’s growing prosperity meant that soon no one would be in such straits that they would need to sell their children.

  Likewise, anyone who had become a geisha in the prewar years had taken for granted that the rite of passage by which one blossomed into a fully-fledged adult geisha was mizuage. After the Showa 33 bill, this too became strictly illegal. A geisha might continue to have one or more danna to support her, but if she did she kept quiet about it.

  The institution of compulsory education up to the age of fifteen also undermined the profession. Before the war, budding geisha had begun their dancing and shamisen lessons at the age of six years, six months, and six days. They became maiko at eleven and had mizuage to become adult geisha around fifteen. But now that they had to attend school, they could not become maiko until the age of fifteen, which meant that their rigorous training as professional musicians or dancers had to be curtailed. Standards, it seemed, were doomed. Could geisha still be geisha when everything that made them unique and distinctive was changing?

  The fourth decade of the rule of Emperor Hirohito, 1965–1975, was when Japan really found its feet economically and surged into the modern world. In 1960 Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda had swept into power, promising to put the economy first and to double the national income within ten years. But long before the decade was out, standards of living had rocketed. By the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which marked Japan’s emergence from the struggle of the postwar years, almost every household could boast the “three treasures”: television, washing machine, and refrigerator. Practically overnight Japan became a modern, wealthy country.

  But astonishingly, the geisha continued to flourish. The postwar decades were a boom period for the geisha. The number never returned to their 1920s peak but by the mid-1970s there were a healthy 17,000.

  For the men who ran Japan, the geisha world was something they had grown up with. To support a beautiful and famous geisha was still a measure of a man’s success. Industrialists and politicians took it for granted that after a hard day at work, they would spend the evening at a familiar teahouse which was practically their second home. There they could get a feminine perspective on the events of the day by talking them over with their favorite geisha in an atmosphere of intimacy and trust. Their wives, who lived in a much narrower domestic world, bounded by home and children, could not understand such things, they felt, whereas geisha were used to mixing on equal terms with powerful, articulate men. Lesser men might use bars and hostess clubs for the same purpose. But the top men of the nation had earned the attentions of women who they considered the nation’s most sophisticated and accomplished. Teahouses, in fact, were very much akin to the gentlemen’s clubs of the West, luxurious, ruinously expensive, and closed to all but the elite.

  The evening sessions at the teahouse were also where movers and shakers would deepen their bonds with their colleagues, wrangle over business or political matters, and conclude deals which had been barely broached in the formal daylight meetings in the boardroom. When there was a guest to be impressed, rewarded, or entertained, they would call the teahouse, secure in the knowledge that the highly professional geisha would ensure that the party went without a hitch.

  Two great scandals shook the 1970s and 1980s—the Lockheed scandal, which culminated in prime minister Kakuei Tanaka’s disgrace when he was indicted for accepting more than $2 million in bribes from the American Lockheed corporation; and the Recruit Group shares-for-influence scandal, which involved government officials profiting hugely from the sale of stock acquired before public listing. Many of the key meetings between the plotters took place in the teahouses of Shimbashi and Akasaka where discretion was guaranteed.

  But society was changing. Japan was entering the modern world at an unprecedented pace. The men for whom geisha were an essential part of their lives were growing older. A new generation was coming into power which no longer understood or appreciated the gracious old ways. Gradually the numbers of geisha began to fall.

  The oil crisis of 1973 was probably the beginning of the decline. Thereafter, although Japan’s economic fortunes rose again, the country had changed beyond all recognition. Instead of showing off their connections and limitless expense accounts by hosting teahouse parties, powerbrokers took to entertaining in French restaurants or glitzy hostess clubs in the posh Ginza district or inviting their colleagues for a weekend of golf at a private golf club where the membership alone cost far more than weeks of teahouse parties. In the new world of big money, fads, fashion, schoolgirl prostitution, host clubs, and a bacchanalian world of sexual titillation, the geisha retired deeper and deeper into the shadows, jealously guarding their ancient culture.

  In 1945 Shigeru Yoshida, soon to become prime minister and a towering figure of the postwar years, was released from house arrest, where he had been kept in the last days of the war for advocating peace talks with the Allies. He went straight to Shin Kiraku, the famous geisha restaurant in Shimbashi, to see his mistress Korin and stayed there for several da
ys. At the time, such behavior was not even worthy of comment; it was to be expected. Within the Yoshida family, the great man’s relationship with Korin was completely open. When he died in 1967, she was an official guest at his funeral. But by then everything was changing. Yoshida was the last politician who could afford to be so splendidly insouciant about his affairs.

  The Short, Fat Prime Minister

  Who Wanted to Save Money

  In June 1989 a woman who described herself as a former geisha sold a kiss-and-tell story to the Japanese media. Her name was Mitsuko Nakanishi and she had, she revealed, had an affair with the short, fat, jowly prime minister, Sosuke Uno, while she was working as a geisha in the Kagurazaka district. He had kept her as a paid mistress for a few months, then ditched her.

  In Japan such a story was far from newsworthy. Everyone knew that politicians, along with any other man who could afford it, kept mistresses. Newspapers scrupulously refrained from scrutinizing such matters. “There’s no personality below the navel,” went the saying; in other words, what goes on beneath the navel is a man’s private business and nothing to do with his public persona. But Nakanishi—who by now had a lowly job in a law office and was short of cash—persisted. The editor of the Mainichi newspaper finally decided to print the story, arguing that in the late twentieth century the public ought to know about the peccadilloes of its leaders.

  As well as the Mainichi article, Nakanishi also appeared on television to hold forth in excruciating detail on their relationship. The story was blazoned across the Western press, thrilled to be in on Japan’s first-ever sex scandal. At last, wrote Western journalists, traditional attitudes were changing. Japan was falling into line with the rest of the world (or at least the American and British part of it) in condemning men who had extra-marital affairs.

  In reality, though a few women Diet members and vocal representatives of women’s groups made great play of Uno “treating women as pieces of merchandise,” what shocked and amused most Japanese was his meanness. He had paid her, Nakanishi complained, the paltry sum of 300,000 yen ($2,300 at the exchange rate of the time) per month when the going rate had been a million yen. Then she had phoned him on the night that he became prime minister and suggested he pay her to keep her mouth shut. Ten million yen would have shown proper respect. Instead, he gave her three. Infidelity on a grand scale showed that a man was a man; mean-mindedness was the very opposite.

  In the geisha world there was fury not against Uno but against Nakanishi, who had brought shame upon the profession by speaking out. Obviously she was not a real geisha, for no geisha with an ounce of self-respect would dream of breaking the fundamental code of silence; indeed, it transpired, she had not done the geisha training and had worked in the Kagurazaka district for only a few months. Uno was guilty not only of meanness but of having had an affair with a geisha so low grade that she would talk about it.

  The Japanese take on the business was instructive. It was clear that Uno was incapable of managing his women. And if a man couldn’t manage his women, how could he be expected to manage the country? If a man did not take care of his geisha properly, he was not to be trusted. It was 1989, but among the movers and shakers who ran Japan Inc., attitudes were still firmly entrenched in the old Never-Never Land of Edo; that old Japanese-ness was still in place.

  From time to time since then, geisha scandals have broken in the press. One very famous geisha is renowned for having had an affair with a louche Japanese heartthrob. But in general the geisha world remains secret and impenetrable.

  But these women are still the stuff of romance in Japan. They still shape the Japanese self-image. Novels, films, and television soap operas re-create the romantic age embodied by the geisha, when it was better to die rather than be dishonored and men paused regretfully at the Willow of the Backward Glance, at the boundary of the Yoshiwara, before returning to the real world.

  chapter 9

  a dying tradition

  A dream of springtide

  When the streets

  Are scattering

  Cherry blossoms.

  Tidings of autumn

  When the streets

  Are lined with lighted lanterns

  On both sides.

  Koji Ochi (seventeenth-century poet);

  inscribed on the Great Gate of the Yoshiwara 1

  À la Recherche

  Not long after I got back to Tokyo from Kyoto, I met up with Shichiko, the male geisha. It was the dog days of summer, so hot and oppressive that it was difficult to move. He was in baggy checked Bermuda shorts, long striped white socks, and an oversize T-shirt. With his modish Henry V haircut and wicked grin, the outfit made him look like a naughty schoolboy—not inappropriate, it seemed to me, for a taikomochi jester. We sat in his small apartment—his wife and daughter were out—chatting languidly, fanning ourselves.

  Shichiko lived in the rundown East End of the city, a long way from the glittering shops of the Ginza, the imperial palace, and the posh business addresses, and round the corner from the Yoshiwara, which had been established as far as possible from the parts of town where respectable people ran their businesses and kept their wives and children. Early in the evening, when the heat was a little more bearable, we decided to take a stroll.

  There was something irresistibly alluring about the Yoshiwara. After Japan opened its doors to the outside world, everyone who had arrived in the great city of Edo, starting with the Victorians, found an excuse as soon as possible to sneak off for a visit. Even though it had been closed down, in theory at least, in the great cleanup of 1958, I was curious just to tread the streets which had seen so much drama, passion, pain, culture, and poetry.

  Shichiko had donned a pair of chunky orange schoolkid’s sandals. Striding ahead, ice cream cone in hand, he led the way through the backstreets to a wide thoroughfare, lined with unlovely concrete blocks, with cars, trucks, and buses roaring by. Strolling along, we came to a bedraggled willow tree, its leaves pale and grimy. To the left, a road zigzagged around a corner and out of sight.

  I knew exactly where we were. It was the Looking Back Willow—or rather, a sad descendant of it—where lovelorn merchants and samurai had turned to take a last look toward the Great Gate of the Yoshiwara and the glittering streets beyond, before returning to the monochrome world of work, home, and family. The road that zigzagged out of sight had led to the heart of the Yoshiwara, designed so that passersby could see nothing of what lay within. Right where the narrower road met the thoroughfare, the Great Gate had stood, marking the boundary between one world and the other.

  The busy thoroughfare itself had been part of the moat—the Ditch of Black Teeth—which surrounded the walled city of pleasure. On the other side was a quiet backstreet which had once been the Dike of Japan, packed night and day with streams of eager male visitors, jostling along on foot or horseback or, in later years, by rickshaw. Nothing was left. The moat had long since been filled in and the dike absorbed into the warren of streets. Even the name Yoshiwara had been obliterated in the city burghers’ efforts to comply with Western puritanism, though the present-day name still recalled the throngs of visitors who had tramped toward the place: Senzoku, “Thousand Feet.”

  Shichiko and I took each other’s pictures in the shade of the legendary willow and turned down into what had once been the Yoshiwara. At first it looked like any nondescript working-class part of Tokyo, with shabby shops and rows of parked bicycles. But once round the bend we saw what had become of the most famous pleasure quarter on earth. The lower end of the business at any rate had not changed, though it had become a fair bit more sordid.

  The main road and the side roads—the famous Five Streets—were lined with the fantasy palaces with which Japanese love to fill their red-light districts. The grand wooden edifices within which geisha had danced and courtesans entertained merchant princes and the shacks where the lower ranks of prostitutes had carried out their less exalted trade had disappeared. In their place were street upon street
of exuberantly gaudy buildings, bristling with neon and festooned with wires and cables.

  Flamboyant red-light districts are part of the scenery in Japan. What was notable was the sheer number and concentration of the brothels. One was modeled on a traditional Yoshiwara house with eaves and bamboo blinds carefully molded in concrete. In front hung a neon picture of a geisha and the name O-oku (Harem) above a sign giving the price: 20,000 yen ($200) per “bath.” (Brothels are known as “soaplands” and involve complicated activity with a particularly slithery variety of soap.) Another, called True Love, spelt out in red characters on green neon, was a Spanish-effect mock brick “villa.” Others with names such as Love Rose, Acapulco, and Quartier Latin featured snarling stone panthers, Roman columns, or baroque stonework. Mean-looking gangster types with cheap suits and slicked-back hair propped up the walls or lounged outside the doors where the prices and services were listed. There were no women to be seen; presumably they were all inside.

  Shichiko strode along, saying little, giving monosyllabic grunts in answer to my questions. Perhaps he was worried about what I, a foreigner, might think of this rather shameful aspect of his country’s culture; perhaps he was concerned that I might confuse the world of the “arts people” which he inhabited with this tawdry, exploitative place; or perhaps he just took it all for granted and thought there was nothing to say.

  Half a mile further on, clear of the streets lined with brothels, we came to a small graveyard shadowed with trees, with grave markers crammed tightly side by side. Among them were stone images of jizo-sama, the deities who take care of the souls of miscarried and aborted children. At the back was a pond—the Benten pond, said Shichiko, where unhappy prostitutes used to jump in to commit suicide. In the middle, on top of a stony hillock, was a statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy, wimpled like the Virgin Mary, gazing compassionately down on the scene.