In the old days, said Shichiko, before everything came to an end in 1958, the Yoshiwara had been a thriving place where geisha lived side by side with prostitutes. Many of the old geisha, including his own shamisen teacher, had gone there for lessons from dance and music teachers who were considered the toughest and best, if not in the city, at least in the East End. In those days, to have studied at the Yoshiwara gave a working-class geisha kudos. But that was then.
Then around a corner we spied a large ugly plaster tanuki, the stylized badger which carries a flask of sake, wears a straw hat, and a friendly grin and adorns shops and homes. It might be compared to a garden gnome in the West except for its enormously distended testicles which reach to its ankles and are believed to bestow fertility. Here Shichiko was on safer ground.
“My ancestor,” he cried, going up to it and flinging his arm round it. Remembering his outrageously priapic act which had shocked me so much when I saw it, I took a picture of the two of them, grinning, side by side.
Willow Bridge
The party at the riverside house is over, the lamplight dim;
The crowd of painted ladies, tipsy, is departing now.
Their delicate hands have trouble opening snake-eyes umbrellas—
On the banks of the Ryogoku Bridge the rain is mixed with sleet.
Yodo Yamauchi (1827–1872) 2
Of all the Tokyo geisha districts or flower towns, Yanagibashi, “Willow Bridge,” most seemed to preserve the romantic aura of old Edo. I had caught glimpses of its tile-roofed geisha houses and teahouses clustered around the mouth of a narrow canal where it gave onto the River Sumida, its lanterns and softly lit rooms reflected invitingly in the water. In the past mendicant musicians used to row right up to the Yanagibashi gardens, strumming their shamisen and singing romantic ballads.
For years the teahouses of Yanagibashi had been the prime place in the entire city to see the magnificent summer fireworks display that took place along the river. People made reservations to dine there years in advance, but unless you were a top-ranking politico or chairman of a major corporation and, furthermore, known to the teahouse, you had no chance. (Unlike the Kyoto teahouses, which serve only drinks and, if asked for food, order it in from outside caterers, the Tokyo ones—which are called ryotei, high-class Japanese restaurants, rather than ochaya, teahouses—serve expensive traditional haute cuisine.) To be in a Yanagibashi teahouse on fireworks night marked you out as a member of the ruling elite.
But as the city spread westward, the river, which had once been at the center of life, was pushed off to the eastern edge and Yanagibashi was left high and dry. Politicians looked for their entertainment closer to home, in the Akasaka geisha district on the doorstep of the Diet, the parliament building. Company chairmen and business magnates gravitated to Shimbashi to enjoy the urbane conversation of the geisha there. Few people bothered to go to the eastern reaches of the city any longer. Then came the economic boom of the 1980s. In the frenzy of building that engulfed the country, glass and concrete buildings sprouted around the old wooden teahouses and geisha houses and the banks of the River Sumida were encased in concrete. The Yanagibashi gardens disappeared.
Almost as soon as I arrived in Tokyo I began to hear bad news. Not so long ago there had been a hundred geisha in Yanagibashi. Now, said a businessman who was a devoted patron of the geisha world, he had heard there were twenty left and at most two or three teahouses. But it was worse than that. It was not until I talked to geisha themselves that I discovered the full story. As recently as January 1999 there had been six flower towns in Tokyo: Shimbashi, Akasaka, Kagurazaka, Yoshicho, Asakusa and, most venerable and gracious of all, Yanagibashi. Now there were five. It boded ill for the others.
In the end, only the Inagaki ryotei had been left in Yanagibashi, with thirty geisha working there. Gradually it became harder and harder to make ends meet. A teahouse cannot exist in isolation. It needs a community of geisha and a family of customers. Finally the owner sold out. The elderly geisha who took over decided to close for good.
Nevertheless I wanted to see for myself. Perhaps I could find Inagaki and talk to the old woman who had owned it or at least absorb the atmosphere of this most romantic of flower towns. So one day when I was in the east of the city I made a detour to Yanagibashi.
Willow Bridge itself was still there, linking the two sides of the canal, though it was no longer a delicate wooden construction that geisha tripped across on wooden clogs, sheltering under their parasols. Now it was a swathe of steel girders. From the other side of the Sumida I could make out the tiled roofs of a gracious old house peeking above the concrete wall which edged the river, half-hidden behind overgrown foliage and dwarfed by giant developments. Close by, the little canal was still romantic, with willow trees along each bank and wooden houseboats moored there—though it required eyes which had been trained in the Japanese way of looking, filtering out the high-rises all around, to see it. There were a couple of boathouses but behind the willow trees, where restaurants had once stood, lights twinkling in the water, was a blur of concrete.
When I asked for Inagaki, I was directed to an old house hidden behind a forbidding wall topped with old-fashioned curved tiles, utterly out of place in that landscape of concrete. The heavy wooden doors were locked, bolted, and immovable, as if they had not been opened for a long time. I had been told that I might find the owner in the housing block which loomed beside it. But that door too was locked.
A few days later I met up with a Shimbashi geisha I knew, and told her my sad tale. What had become of those last Yanagibashi geisha, I wondered.
“One started teaching calligraphy,” she told me. “Another was a very good shamisen player. These days it’s a real problem to find good shamisen players, so I invited her to Shimbashi. But she didn’t want to come. They were old. They wanted to retire.”
Teahouse Politics
The demise of Yanagibashi left five flower towns in Tokyo: the high-powered joints of Shimbashi and Akasaka; the hilly lanes of Kagurazaka, blazing with neon at night; Yoshicho, which was quietly declining; and down-to-earth Asakusa, in the city’s East End. Until two or three years ago it was a matter of dispute which, of Akasaka and Shimbashi, was the classiest of them all. Both had their histories, aficionados, and siren queens.
The country’s rulers—the politicians and the bureaucrats—preferred Akasaka. A couple of minutes’ purr by limousine from the Diet, it was like having a pleasure quarter in the heart of Capitol Hill, or a stone’s throw from the White House. Hidden behind high dun-colored earthen walls and heavy wooden gates amid the bustle and neon of the Akasaka entertainment district, with its nightclubs, cabarets, discos, bars, and tiny restaurants run by ex-geisha, Akasaka’s ryotei were every bit as grand and exclusive as Shimbashi’s. If, however, you had the right connections and were invited to step inside, they had the reputation of being less expensive and formal. Akasaka geisha were said to be mediocre dancers and not quite as classy as the Shimbashi geisha. But then again, they were younger and prettier. That was ample compensation.
The Akasaka teahouses were the scene of much wheeling and dealing. In Japan there is an enormous gulf between surface and reality, daytime and night-time. In the daytime politicians would stand up and read out prepared speeches in the Diet or ask questions which had been submitted a couple of days in advance so as to allow plenty of time to prepare an answer. Businessmen meanwhile would be whiling away the day in board meetings at which nothing was ever decided. It was largely theater, promoting the appearance of democracy.
But night-time was when much of the real business and the real politics took place. With ties loosened and faces flushed, people put inhibitions aside and said what they really thought. In Japan nothing could be done in the way of business or politics or anything that mattered at all without face-to-face contact. Executives and politicians had to know and like the people with whom they were intending to do business. They had to eat together, drink together, get drunk to
gether.
At the topmost levels of society, geisha were a key part of that evening activity. It would not be an overstatement to say that geisha parties were essential to the running of the country. In the Akasaka ryotei—as exclusive as elite private clubs, akin to the Harvard or the Yale Club—Japan’s political rulers, the Liberal Democratic Party, would discuss matters of state and make deals after unwinding over a meal and several flasks of saké. The geisha, women they had known as friends or lovers for years, knew instinctively when to keep the tone light and when to slip discreetly out of the room. Sometimes the older and wiser among them might join in a conversation or add their commonsensical view to help unravel a knotty problem. It was a little like going home and talking things over with the wife—except that was something a Japanese man, of that generation at any rate, would never do.
Geisha, of course, would never give direct advice. Japan is a country where the ex-geisha wife of a business magnate is much admired for being, as people say, “clever enough never to let a man realize how clever she is.” The essence of the feminine ideal is to make a man think that he is the one who has the brilliant ideas. But a geisha might well prod even the finance minister in one direction or another, cooing something along the lines of “You were saying you might raise the interest rates. How clever of you to think of that!”
Bernard Krisher, a veteran American journalist who has lived in Japan for forty years, put it bluntly. “Most Japanese men can’t converse with their wives,” he said. “But they find that they can with geisha. That’s why the geisha system has survived so long. It’s more than sex.
“Many people look down on geisha, but they are the only people who can talk on an equal level to the prime minister. They can tease him and joke with him. No one else can do that. They’re like cats—dignified and totally independent. They demand your love. You have to take care of them and feed them. But you can’t get them to jump on your lap if they don’t want to.”
Krisher’s take on geisha was simple. “They are mistresses,” he said, “like a Japanese version of the Colette story.
“What foreigners can’t comprehend is that someone will spend two thousand dollars and not even try to take a geisha home. Japanese get embarrassed, having to tell a visiting foreigner that it’s just not going to happen. They’re not programmed to sleep with someone for money. But if you ask someone five or six times for something, on five or six occasions, finally you can get what you want. The more often you go to a geisha house, the more chance there is that you can probably sleep with someone. I did that a lot in the sixties. I didn’t pay. For them too it was a novel experience. They’re also human beings and they’re women. But it would be on that basis—love, not payment.”
But in the end the partying had to stop. Being too closely tied to the country’s wheelers and dealers proved to be Akasaka’s downfall. The problems began in the mid-nineties when the Ministry of Finance—until then an impregnable bastion of faceless bureaucrats who effectively ran the country—found itself under fire, under suspicion of incompetence and corruption.
For years the MOF had controlled the country’s financial institutions, feeding vital information to banks and wielding control over everything from the opening and closing of bank branches to the uniforms the female clerks wore. There were executives at each bank whose job was to wine and dine the relevant MOF officials, often at vast expense, at classy restaurants, exclusive clubs, golf links, and teahouses. But with the Japanese economy on the skids, the public prosecutors decided to take a good look at the MOF’s affairs. At the beginning of 1998 they breached the gates of the fortress, took away lorry loads of papers, and arrested four officials, accusing them of accepting bribes from the financial institutions they were paid to oversee.
None of this was directly to do with the geisha. But the Japanese tabloids, scenting blood, took to hanging around the places politicians and bureaucrats were known to frequent, on the lookout for more stories of big spending and, better still, sexual improprieties. Once upon a time such behavior would have been taken for granted and not considered worthy of note. But now it sold papers. And the obvious place for a stakeout was the Akasaka teahouses.
Suddenly the once thriving geisha district became very quiet. When politicians got together, they did so in the more anonymous surroundings of a hotel restaurant or a golf links. In Akasaka business went into a steep decline. Rumors flitted around the small world of the geisha. Business was so bad that one previously famous Akasaka geisha, it was said, was called to teahouses at most twice a month. She had been reduced to appearing on television in kimono fashion shows and had had to move from her palatial apartment to one so cramped it lacked even its own toilet. From 300 geisha in the sixties, the numbers fell to 90, working in 13 ryotei; of those, only a few had regular work. Effortlessly Shimbashi floated back to the top of the hierarchy.
The Sophisticated Ladies
of Shimbashi
Butterfly
Or falling leaf,
Which ought I to imitate
In my dancing?
Geisha song 3
Tokyo’s flower and willow world is not a clearly delineated geographical area, visibly separate from the real-life world in the way Kyoto’s is. I had passed Kanetanaka for years without ever realizing that its sand-colored walls and enormous gates concealed not the palatial private home of a minor prince or the heir to an industrial fortune but one of the most venerable teahouses in Shimbashi. I had been to kabuki performances in the Shimbashi Embujo without knowing that it had been built for the Shimbashi geisha to perform their annual dances, which took place in May. I had walked down innumerable tiny alleys near the Tsukiji fish market without having the faintest idea that some of the shabby facades with potted plants lined up outside hid geisha houses. And if I saw a woman in a kimono flitting down one of these streets, I would never have guessed she was a geisha. The geisha of Tokyo were far more discreet and circumspect than their Kyoto counterparts.
Here, one day, I was sitting in the coffee shop of a hotel which I had never realized before was in the heart of the geisha world, talking to a glamorous young woman. It had been a matter of the right connections. I had phoned up and dropped a rather weighty name. I was amazed at the alacrity with which she said, “Let’s have lunch.”
“Did you know we still have rickshaws in Shimbashi?” she asked in a soft, musical voice, after we had placed our orders. “There are two and two rickshaw men. When I go from one ryotei to another I sometimes call them. But I worry what will become of us in the future. Japan has changed; it’s not like the old Japan. Lots of Japanese have never been to a geisha party; they think we’re doing something bad. These days it’s very difficult. If I was doing this for the money I would give up.”
Anyone looking at her might have taken Shuko for an executive in the fashion industry or the young wife of a wealthy man but certainly not a geisha. Dressed in an exquisitely coordinated beige suit topped with a floaty jacket, an outfit which had clearly come from a Paris or Milan couturier, she wore her long hair loose and tumbling around her shoulders. She had a pale, refined, pretty face, softly oval, with a sensuous mouth which curved into a provocative smile, and almond eyes brought out with just a hint of makeup. She was lovely in a feminine way rather than intimidatingly beautiful.
But it was less her appearance than some indefinable presence that set her apart. She was poised, confident, funny, and charming. She would, I imagined, be any man’s perfect woman—sexy yet motherly. To me, as a woman, she had another face. We talked girl to girl, though she still gently, so that I hardly noticed, made sure that my glass was full and that I had everything I wanted. I was perfectly taken care of, in fact. She spoke earnestly, seriously, yet managed at the same time to keep the conversation light, interspersing her remarks with smiles and silvery laughter.
The Shimbashi geisha, she told me, prided themselves on their “wifeliness.” Within the Tokyo flower and willow world, that was the Shimbashi flavor. The
Akasaka geisha were more overtly sexy. They wore more makeup and brighter kimonos. The Shimbashi geisha, conversely, were the embodiment of good taste. Their kimonos were sober and modest, their hair swept into simple buns and their makeup subtle, more suited to the sophisticated and wealthy customers they entertained.
Shuko regularly spent her evenings in the company of some of the country’s most powerful and brilliant minds, men who headed industrial conglomerates, banks, financial institutions, and major corporations. To prepare herself, she kept up to date with the news, read the latest books, and went to exhibitions. Not that the guests expected intellectual conversation. They were there to relax, not to have their minds taxed. The geisha party was the one place where a man could let slip the mask which social convention required him to wear. There the company chairman who bore a huge weight of responsibility from morning till night and made mammoth decisions which affected millions of yen or millions of people could, if he wanted, play the fool or be babied by geisha who called him not Mr. Suzuki but by some cozy nickname like Su-chan, as if he were a child. At work he might be a god; but at the geisha party he could have an entirely different face.
But the most important quality was confidentiality. No one would ever have a political or business discussion in a hostess club, where the guests at one table could easily overhear the conversation at another. In a teahouse, each banquet took place in a separate room and the guests never knew who else was present in the teahouse that night. When a guest wanted to go to the toilet, the geisha made sure that he never bumped into a guest from another party on his way; the corridors were always empty. And if a guest happened to be part of two parties on the same evening, when he arrived the second time the geisha never gave the game away. They always greeted him with “How are you, sir? We haven’t seen you for such a long time!”
Women of the Pleasure Quarters Page 26