by Ian Buruma
But kata come in more modern guises too. A Japanese cook, unlike a Frenchman or an Italian, does not as a rule invent his own recipes. Instead, after years of imitating the movements of his master (quite literally, for Japanese cooking is more a question of skilful cutting and slicing than of mixing different ingredients), he learns the kata of his trade. Preparing raw tuna is essentially learnt in the same way one learns, say, karate kicks: by endless mimicking of patterns.
Kata, whether they are a matter of cutting fish, throwing a judo opponent, arranging flowers or indeed social acting, should ideally become second nature. Karada de oboeru is the term for this: to learn with the body, just like a child learns to swim, or even to bow, when it is still strapped to its mother’s back. This sometimes goes together with considerable bullying by masters and seniors, which is considered a kind of mental training in itself, rather like fagging in old British public schools. Only a pupil who can stand this for a very long time can ever aspire to being a master. Naturally an apprentice cook who has spent three years of his life learning the perfect way to slap a ball of rice into his left hand will be the last one to debunk this laborious method of learning: he has been through the mill too long and too rigorously.
Conscious thought is considered to be an impediment on the way to perfection. A Japanese master never explains anything. The question why one does something is irrelevant. It is the form that counts. One constantly sees businessmen on crowded station platforms practising the motions of a golf-swing, or students endlessly repeating a baseball throw, just the movements, that is. Baseball and golf are hardly traditional Japanese arts, or very spiritual activities, but the way they are learnt is entirely traditional. The idea is that if one perfects the prescribed motions, one will, as if by some mystical force, hit the ball automatically, just like the famous Zen archer hitting the bull’s eye with his eyes closed, after having spent years just straining his bow. One is almost tempted to say that ideally the form masters the individual instead of the other way round.
A well-known Japanese cultural critic has made a clear distinction between this type of kata culture, which he calls the ‘Way of Art’ (geido), and a more playful, popular culture, stressing content rather than form. The ‘Way of Art’, according to this critic, is ‘strongly religious and suffused with the aristocratic mentality of the warrior class. The other type, at the peak of its development, escapes from religion and is based on the playful spirit (asobi no seishin) of the common people.’
A similar distinction could be made in most countries, but is it really valid? The answer must be: only partly. There is obviously a difference between aristocratic Art and popular ‘play’. But the two traditions do influence and feed off each other, and it is doubtful whether it can truly be claimed that one is the art of form and the other of content. It is certainly striking how the Japanese remain bound to the rules of kata even in their most popular and playful pursuits.
6
The Art of Prostitution
The clearest case of life and theatre overlapping is the greatest doll-woman of all time, that much misunderstood symbol of Japan: the geisha. She is surely the ultimate human work of art. An art that is – or was – popular and playful, as well as highly aesthetic. And as such she is symbolic of the Japanese sense of beauty. Everything she does is stylized according to strict aesthetic rules. Her ‘real self’ (if there is such a thing) is carefully concealed (if that is the word) behind her professional persona. Like Kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers she usually bears the name of some illustrious predecessor; and even her facial features are hardly recognizable under a thick layer of make-up, as white as the rice it is made of.
The traditional geisha still exists, but fewer and fewer girls are still prepared or economically forced to put up with the rigours and restrictions of the geisha life. As an institution its significance has gradually diminished to the point that only a tiny minority of Japanese males has ever seen the inside of a traditional teahouse. Like so many classical arts geisha asobi, literally ‘playing with geisha’, has become a very expensive hobby for a small number of people who can afford it: mostly politicians and business tycoons who use the teahouses as discreet places in which to divide the spoils of the Economic Miracle.
I was once told by an ex-geisha in Kyoto that most customers don’t know the rules of geisha asobi any more. Geisha who have been trained in traditional repartee – rather stilted at the best of times – get blank stares, making the whole thing rather a one-sided affair, like an Elizabethan costume play performed for incomprehending football supporters. What started as a theatricalized version of life has now become pure theatre. The mannerisms that were once quite de rigueur are fixed for ever in a ghostly fashion show. It is as if geisha parties are preserved as living reminders of the traditional past, like costly time-machines. (They are in fact very costly indeed; a visit to a geisha party, after the necessary introductions – otherwise one would not even get through the door – could cost more than $500 a head.)
The fate of the geisha party is much like that of the Kabuki theatre. In the olden days, the popular theatre audiences, thoroughly familiar with both the actors and the plays, knew exactly when to shout encouraging and often ribald witticisms at the stage. For this too was bound to rules, to kata. Nowadays every theatre employs an official claque, strategically placed amongst the audience, to shout out the actors’ names at the appropriate climactic moments. This is to create a semblance of the old atmosphere. Meanwhile visiting groups from the countryside try to follow the plays with recorded explanations plugged into their ears. Still, the fact that these institutions have lost much of their vitality is beside the point. The mentality that helped to shape them is still there, albeit in an often vulgarized version.
Nightclub hostesses and bar ladies have taken the place of geisha and courtesans and the traditional ‘floating world’, familiar to admirers of Japanese prints, has become the ‘mizu shobai’, the ‘water business’. Certainly the importance of women as entertaining works of art remains undiminished, socially as well as artistically. In the following chapters I shall deal with the changing image of, for the lack of a better expression, female entertainers. In order to understand their significance in modern society, it is necessary to give a brief sketch of their history. If you are wondering what real people are doing in a book about fantasies, remember that the women of the Japanese water business are fantasies, alive, but still fantasies.
It is not always easy to distinguish between pure entertainers and prostitutes. Even now, one is told, some hostesses in modern nightclubs are prostitutes and others are not. As with so much in Japanese life, it all depends. The geisha certainly is not a prostitute, even though it used to be customary for her employers to sell her virginity for a great deal of money to a particularly favoured client. This is no longer done. The geisha is an entertainer, pure and simple, but she is part of an old tradition in which prostitution plays a vital role.
Prostitutes were popular playmates of Heian nobles in the tenth and eleventh centuries. During the Kamakura period (1185–1333), the Golden Age of the samurai, girls were especially trained in many skills apart from the obvious erotic ones to serve the upper echelon of the warrior class, including the emperor himself, who, one may add, had little else to do but ‘play’ with girls.
It was in the sixteenth century that the military ruler Hideyoshi decreed that prostitution would henceforth be confined to special licensed areas. This marked the beginning of a unique culture which continued to flourish until the late nineteenth century and its influence is still felt today. Never in the history of mankind have prostitutes played such a prominent and important part in the culture of a nation as the courtesans of Edo.
From the seventeenth century onwards the licensed brothels were salons for the richest and most powerful people in Japan, as well as inspiring playwrights, poets, print artists, writers and musicians. Many a song that started in a brothel sounding a plaintive note about the vicissitu
des of a courtesan’s life three hundred years ago is still being performed, most likely by a respectable middle-aged matron with a taste for the classics.
The world of prostitutes was as hierarchical as the rest of Japanese society. There were many ranks between the top courtesan, the tayu, and the common whore, the joro or the yuna, who plied her trade at public baths. The tayu was a highly accomplished woman, though usually of humble birth. A famous tayu called Takao, living in the latter half of the eighteenth century, is said to have been a master of flower arranging, the tea ceremony, poetry, various musical instruments, art, card games, and incense smelling – a highly prized skill since Heian times.1
Not only was the tayu a great artiste, she was also a great work of art. The grand entrance of a famous courtesan in a teahouse, followed by her entourage of jesters, apprentices and sycophants, would be a series of elaborate dramatic poses, rather like an old-time Hollywood goddess slinking her way down a spotlit staircase. The effect was highly theatrical, like a piece of performance art. In the words of the American scholar Donald Shively: ‘The presentation of a customer’s first meeting with a courtesan, its protocol and characteristic banter, is indeed an ultimate refinement of the prostitute-accosting skits popular in primitive Kabuki.’2
From the very beginning theatre and prostitution were intimately connected. Travelling entertainers, often dancers or Buddhist story-tellers, were frequently prostitutes as well. The legendary O-Kuni, the alleged foundress of the first Kabuki troupe, is said to have combined these functions very profitably. She was officially a miko, a shamaness belonging to a shrine; but her performances, dressed as a man, were erotic advertisements for further dalliance after the show.
The authorities, fearing disorder, tried to put a stop to this by forbidding actresses to appear on the stage. The result was that young boys simply took their places in the favours of wealthy patrons. The cynical observer of the Kubuki scene in the seventeenth century, Ihara Saikaku, remarked that ‘truly nothing in the world is more painful than the necessity of making a living under these circumstances. All too closely do the actor and the courtesan resemble each other in their hopeless fates.’3
Reality and fantasy in the pleasure quarters of Edo, Osaka and Kyoto tended to be confused. Real-life intrigues, scandals and tragic love affairs were almost immediately worked into plays performed in the Kabuki theatres. In erotic prints (shunga) famous actors were depicted in amorous poses with equally celebrated prostitutes, though they were rarely recognizable individuals. Rather they were idealized versions of real people, bearing professional names of famous forebears. (This habit is still common, even when there is no connection with the honourable ancestor at all: I have seen third-rate entertainers in sordid variety halls proudly bearing the names of great Kabuki families.)
Prostitutes in the seventeenth century were appraised like actresses by professional critics. The so-called joro hyobanki were critical guidebooks to the various pleasure quarters, with detailed reviews of the accomplishments of their denizens. In concept and design these reviews were very similar to the critical booklets about actors. To be sure, these actor booklets were at first almost wholly concerned with the physical charms of the performers, rather than with their artistic expertise. Even so, prostitutes were definitely regarded as artists, whose entertainment was as theatrical as the theatre they tried to emulate. To quote Donald Shively once more: ‘If Kabuki was unexpectedly erotic, the brothel could be described as a theatre of love, where country girls masqueraded as sophisticated beauties and lowly merchants assumed the airs of men of affairs.’4
People had few moral compunctions about playing this game. As long as men did their duty and provided for their families in a way that would not shame their ancestors, they were free to indulge in sensual pleasures, provided they could afford them of course. A man’s family life and his love life were two different things. After all, his wife was chosen for other than romantic reasons. And sex as such was no sin. Thus, as long as playing with prostitutes remained just that, playing, there was no objection. This, despite the official proscription of prostitution since 1958, is by and large still the case.
‘Play’ was perhaps more important than sex per se. One still sees Japanese businessmen spend their companies’ fortunes in Tokyo nightclubs on nothing but risqué repartee with hostesses. This kind of professional social intercourse has a long tradition in the Far East. During the Tang dynasty (618–906) in China, for example, wealthy gentlemen, scholars and poets all surrounded themselves with highly educated courtesans.5
And those who could afford it had at least three or four wives at home. According to Confucian rules of morality it was a man’s duty to keep them all sexually satisfied. But apart from producing children, preferably sons, and running the household, these respectable matrons had little to offer in the way of social excitement. They were, on the whole, illiterate and ignorant of the world outside, isolated as they were in the back rooms of the home. So, for more stimulating female company Chinese gentlemen had to turn to the courtesans, who could hold their own in any conversation, besides being accomplished dancers and singers. The best teahouses were artistic salons, rather than places for sex; one could go to cheap brothels for that, and those were mainly for men who could not afford several wives. The relationship between the courtesans and their patrons was bound by strict rules of etiquette. Even if a sexual liaison did develop – elegant banter could not satisfy everybody all the time – this had to be preceded by an elaborate courtship: the exchange of love poems, rejections, secret meetings and finally, a great deal of money.
One cannot help feeling that the actual sex act must have been something of an anti-climax. For, again, sex was not really the point. It was the elegant flirtation, the refined courtship, in short the ‘play’ between man and woman, romance as high art, that thrilled the rakes of ancient China. The same seems to have applied to the Japanese during the Heian period, lasting from 794 until 1185; or, to be more precise, to the small aristocracy of Heian Japan imitating the elegant lifestyle of Tang China. But then the aristocracy was Heian culture, the rest of the people being far too poor to play any games.
Promiscuity was part of court life. This may seem surprising when one considers that men and women of noble birth hardly saw each other. The ladies were hidden away in the women’s quarters and they would communicate with their lovers through poems passed on by trusted go-betweens. Even when lovers were in the same room, the women would often be sitting behind a screen. And at night, when most trysts took place, it must have been so dark that physical intimacy can hardly have been a great visual experience. Nevertheless, if ‘The Tale of Genji’ or ‘The Pillow Book’, two contemporary chronicles of court life, are anything to go by, Heian aristocrats entertained each other in bed with great frequency and a steady change of partners. But, as in Tang China, the rules of the game were intricate and strict. Everything was done with style and decorum. Also, the game was never allowed to interfere with family duties.
The hierarchy among married women (it was a polygamous society) had to be respected, especially the position of the first wife. Rank and class were of the utmost importance in choosing a marriage partner, for the power of a family was largely a matter of judicious marriages. Marriage was, in other words, a political institution. But, though men and women were much freer to indulge in sensual pleasures than they were to be in later ages, there was no tradition in Japan of courtly love. Love as an abstract ideal, severed from purely sexual attraction, did not really exist at all until recently. Homosexual love is a possible exception.
Ivan Morris has observed:
The absence of any ideal of courtly love involving fealty, protection, and romantic languishing, and the acceptance of a high degree of promiscuity, frequently gave a flippant, rather heartless air to the relations between the men and women of Murasaki’s world. One has the impression that, for all the elegant sentiments expressed in the poems, the love affairs of the time, especially at co
urt, were rarely imbued with any real feeling, and that often they were mere exercises in seduction.6
In other words, it was a game, an asobi, but it was saved from degenerating into something crass and sordid by the dominant part played by taste.7 The emotional high point of a love affair was perhaps not so much the night spent in passion as the obligatory, elegant poem composed according to strict aesthetic conventions the morning after. These extremely clichéd efforts rarely made any references to love or even the loved one. Instead they mentioned tear-stained kimono sleeves at the sight of dawn or the cruel crowing of the cock announcing the time to say farewell. One refined Heian gallant even sent his lady-friend the feather of one of these spoilsport birds, attaching the following poem:
Now he is dead –
That heartless bird
who broke the dark night’s peace with his shrill cry
Yet dawn, alas, will always come
to end true lovers’ joys.8
It was as if people had affairs in order to heave elegant sighs about the melancholy fleetingness of life. Obviously they must have had feelings, but these were largely sublimated by aesthetic ritual and social ceremony. Human passion and its physical expression were not controlled by an abstract moral code, whether of chivalry or sin, but by aesthetics, by decorum for its own sake. Love was a kind of art for art’s sake, an exquisite piece of theatre. Emotions which could not be sublimated in this way were poured into melancholy diaries by court ladies, whose literary elegance has never been surpassed.
The ‘floating world’ of the pleasure quarters during the Edo period was in many ways a continuation of the two traditions described above: the Confucian double standard and the play-acting of the Heian court. The need for professional female company arose from similar conditions to those in ancient China. Although the Japanese were by and large monogamous, the influence of Confucian morality was strong and ‘the cultural accomplishments of the higher class of prostitute far exceeded those of the townsman’s wife’.9