Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer
Shichiko had come to tell me about taikomochi, of which he was one. Taikomochi, he explained, were the first geisha—and they were men. They played the same music as the females, they danced and, instead of being up on stage like kabuki actors, they were down there chatting with the customers, in every way just like their female counterparts. But, historically, male geisha had been around long before.
The word taikomochi means drum-bearer, in reference to the small hand drum which some of them carried. Back in the seventeenth century, the pleasure quarters supported not only courtesans and prostitutes but an enormous population of brothel-keepers, owners of houses of assignation, cooks, maids, bouncers, cleaners, and assorted hangers-on. The taikomochi were the party masters who kept the fun and games going. They were the ones for whom the term gei-sha (“artiste,” “entertainer” or, literally, “arts person”) was coined. Like court jesters, they sang, pranced, and told jokes and stories. When a bunch of men went out drinking, they would call a taikomochi to entertain them. Taikomochi and saké went together.
“Are taikomochi gay?” I inquired rather boldly.
“Nah,” said Shichiko firmly. “You want to have fun that way, you go to Shinjuku [Tokyo’s famous gay district]. You don’t mess about with taikomochi.”
This was a little disingenuous. Of course, no one ever talked about that sort of thing anymore. Nevertheless, at least until the end of the war, it was taken for granted that any traditional actor’s job involved the selling of sexual favors.
But taikomochi had almost died out. At present, Shichiko told me, there were only five or six left in the whole of Japan. They worked almost exclusively in Asakusa in Tokyo’s East End, which was where I had met him.
Some weeks later I went to watch him perform. It was at one of the regular dance displays which geisha give; though, this being downtown Tokyo, the atmosphere was very different from a Kyoto dance meeting. The room was crowded with elderly shop-owners and bigwigs, squashed together on cushions on the tatami floor. The plump, prosperous women wore matronly kimonos, while the men were in gray suits. The band—five old women on shamisen and five women singers—struck up and the geisha came out in ones, twos, and threes to show off their skills.
Then Shichiko burst on stage in a maroon men’s kimono, announcing, “We’re male geisha—but we don’t wear white paint!” Balancing a folded scarf comically on his head to imitate a geisha’s wig, he undulated along, pigeon-toed, eyes cast coyly down, then knelt in front of an imaginary mirror and mimed applying makeup, boasting in a fluting falsetto, “I’ve got an important danna who takes care of me.” I had, I thought, worked out what taikomochi were all about. They were stand-up comics, doing mime and impersonations to the accompaniment of shamisen and song.
But then things began to go quite a bit further. In a corner of the stage was a large white folding screen.
“Gay? No, sir, not me,” said Shichiko, back in his own persona now, addressing an imaginary customer—danna—behind the screen. “Absolutely not. I don’t do that kind of thing. I’ve called a geisha for you. She’ll be here any minute.”
By now he had advanced until he was half hidden behind the screen. Suddenly there was a hand on his ear, grabbing at him and tugging him while he struggled fiercely to escape. (It was, of course, his own hand, though it looked as if it belonged to the fictitious danna.) A hand wrapped around his face, then his sleeve was tugged, then his kimono, until he was dragged out of sight behind the screen. He burst out again.
“Danna, wait,” he protested. “Stop, stop! I’m not the geisha.”
Again he was dragged bodily behind the screen by the imaginary danna, again he escaped. Finally he groaned, in tones of exaggerated resignation, “Okay, danna, okay. But just once, okay? From the back?” With that he pulled up his kimono skirts, revealing a pair of blue baggy trousers. He turned to look behind the screen, pointing derisively, scoffing, “What’s that? Is that all? Is that yours?”
Then he turned so that his rear end was concealed behind the screen and proceeded to mime being penetrated extremely realistically with yelps of pain, rolling his eyes in comic anguish. Finally he made great play of wiping himself clean with tissues, an essential conclusion to the sex act in Japan. He even gave the floor a swab.
I was utterly shocked. Particularly considering the conservative nature of the audience, this struck me as being outrageous in the extreme. But I was the only one. No one else was shocked in the slightest. The shop-owners and their matronly wives laughed heartily and clapped enthusiastically as if it were a familiar everyday skit, skillfully carried out. The geisha returned to the stage for the second part of their performance. I later discovered that the “gay sketch” is indeed a set piece and a standard part of the taikomochi repertoire (there are other, considerably more outrageous sketches)—a classic, in fact.
Later, when I met Shichiko again, I asked him about it. “It’s just a joke,” he said, impatient at my tedious Western literal-mindedness. “It’s a symbol of how far we’ll go to please our customers, if you like. We treat the customers like kings. Whatever they ask, we can’t say no.” It was just a game, not real life; and in games anything goes.
Jesters in the Pleasure Quarters
Right from the founding of the pleasure quarters in the seventeenth century, there were jesters prancing about, playing tricks, doing risqué sketches, and singing ribald or melancholy songs to the accompaniment of the shamisen. They kept the mood upbeat and the jokes coming. The canny old brothel-keeper Jinemon Shoji, the founder of the Yoshiwara in the great city of Edo, was particularly fond of one of these talented young men and allowed him to wear his crest. He is said to have been the first to dub them geisha.
There were jesters of all levels of distinction, from serious musicians and accomplished dancers to nodaiko (talentless taikomochi), useless hangers-on who boosted the numbers in a merchant’s retinue so that he could appear important and who lived off tips and scraps from his table. Talented or talentless, they were an important and popular feature of the quarters and their numbers increased steadily over the years.
The instrument that marked out the geisha, male or female, was the shamisen. A three-stringed banjo-like instrument, introduced from the tropical kingdom of Okinawa in the mid-sixteenth century, the body was of red sandalwood, mulberry, or quince wood. Originally it was made with snake skin stretched taut as a drum over the sound box. Snake skin being hard to find in the colder climate of Japan, it was replaced with dog or cat skin which is used to this day. Traditionally the best shamisens are made from the immaculate soft white pelt of a young female virgin kitten which has yet to be mounted and has therefore not been scratched by a tomcat. Played with a large plectrum of wood or ivory, the instrument makes a melancholy sound, perfect to accompany plaintive love songs. The shamisen became the definitive instrument of the pleasure quarters; it was said that its sound could stir erotic yearnings where none had existed before.
Initially the courtesans too entertained with the shamisen. But after a while it became such a commonplace skill that the higher ranks began to leave it to the lower orders. Instead of entertaining their clients by singing and dancing, the top courtesans would sit regally in their sumptuous robes surrounded by their entourage of child attendants and junior courtesans. Male geisha and younger courtesans took over the job of performing. Around the end of the seventeenth century male geisha began to specialize. Musicians and dancers kept the name “geisha”; clowns and professional fools were taikomochi or jesters.
Some of the jesters traveled around with troupes of dancing girls, some worked in teahouses, entertaining customers during the interminable wait for the courtesan to arrive, and some joined the entourages of wealthy merchants. Some, like Shakespeare’s fools, were the best friends of powerful men, dispensing advice and flattery along with songs and buffoonery. Others were distinctly tricky.
Kiseki Ejima (1667–1736) was the most famous chronicler of the demimonde of his day. The son of a wealth
Male geisha often feature in his tales of life among the demimonde. In one of his stories, the taikomochi reflect on the hardships of their life: “We jesters have to drink when we’d rather not,” they sigh. “We have to praise the tiresome little songs of our patrons, hear ourselves called fools by real blockheads, force a smile if we’re offended, and tell a roomful of people what even a woman would keep secret. No, there’s nothing so bitter as to entertain for a living. If you happen to please, you may be hired five times and get only one bu [$100 in today’s money] or two at most. In this wide world, is there no country where it rains hard cash?” 3
The Fashionable
Pleasure Quarter of Gion
From the start, it was a hopeless task to try and keep pleasure restricted to the pleasure quarters. For young gallants, there were plenty of places other than the quarters, with their stilted conversation and overdressed courtesans, where they could go to enjoy an evening of witty repartee culminating, with luck, in sex. The most fashionable of these was Kyoto’s glittering and sophisticated quarter of Gion, soon to become famous for its geisha.
Gion was not walled in; neither was it officially sanctioned. Unlike Shimabara and Yoshiwara, it was not the result of an administrative decision to keep prostitution in one place. Instead it had been created by free enterprise, operating in response to demand, which made it all the more vibrant and lively.
While the keisei, “castle-topplers,” of the nightless cities were spinning ever more complex webs of romance to ensnare the wealthy and privileged, there were less arcane and more affordable alternatives springing up outside the gates. Wherever people gathered there was a never-ending supply of unlicensed prostitutes. At coaching inns along the post roads linking city to city, at inns and taverns in the post towns, at the bustling points where the highways entered the cities, at bathhouses and in hot spring resorts—wherever there were men in search of pleasure, there were women to serve their needs.
As in medieval Europe, people tended to gather at places of worship—temples and shrines. They would go to pray and then stay on to have fun and take refreshment. As it was for Chaucer’s pilgrims, visiting a holy place or going on pilgrimage was the closest anyone in those days ever got to going on holiday. There was certainly no requirement to be solemn or earnest about it. Under the peaceful and prosperous rule of the Tokugawa shoguns, entrepreneurs began to build stalls and shops in and around the shrine precincts to serve the needs of pilgrims.
Gion grew up around Yasaka Shrine, on the opposite side of town from Shimabara. Dedicated to a local deity who took particular care of cotton merchants, the temple was one of the most famous and popular in the country. When nouveau-riche travelers arrived from rough and ready Edo to the east to sample the sophisticated delights of Kyoto, they would lighten their purses there first.
Screen paintings of the time show a sprawling complex of large and small shrine buildings with delicate vermilion pillars supporting sweeping cypress shingle roofs, with a squat red pagoda behind. Visitors would arrive on foot or by sedan chair, passing through the enormous torii, the red-painted wooden gateway, shaped like one of the monolithic Stonehenge portals, which marked the entrance. The grounds were the scene of much merriment. Paintings show pilgrims dancing exuberantly in circles, flourishing fans, accompanied by drummers and shamisen players and groups of people playing shuttlecock, while women conducted tea ceremonies among the trees and palanquin-bearers snoozed. Flanking the main gate of the shrine were tile-roofed stalls where smiling women in kimonos, their long hair looped into loose coils, brewed tea and steamed round white dango (skewered rice flour dumplings).
These were the first teahouses. Gradually they took to serving stronger beverages and more substantial food and the women began to sing and dance for their customers. They also provided other, more personal services, though this was strictly illegal. But the name “teahouse” (ochaya) remained.
There was never any lack of candidates among local women to be cha-tate onna, tea-brewing women. Apart from women of the town, there were also shrine maidens, who officiated at Shinto ceremonies and petitioned the gods. Such maidens had to be virgins. Once they had lost their virginity, they were ritually impure and quickly found themselves unemployed. The obvious course for an ex–shrine maiden was to betake herself to one of the burgeoning teahouses in search of work.
Under the shoguns nothing could get far without official permission. Teahouses, like brothels, smacked of the salacious and had to be licensed. The first teahouses in Gion appeared in 1665 but it was not until 1712 that the authorities sanctioned their establishment and officially designated the area a teahouse quarter. Teahouses now began to mushroom throughout the entertainment zone that stretched between Yasaka Shrine and the River Kamo. The whole area was given over to pleasure with side shows, street dancing, acrobats, and peddlers along the lantern-lit streets and games, music, and singing within the teahouses.
Besides Gion the authorities also licensed two other teahouse quarters, both of which would later become famous geisha districts. One was Pontocho, a straggle of teahouses alongside the River Kamo, on the bank opposite Gion. There, in summer, merchants and samurai lounged on platforms set above the river, drinking saké, flirting with the waitresses, and enjoying wonderful views of the tree-covered Eastern Hills. The other was Kamishichiken, up in the northwest of the city at the entrance to another great shrine, Kitano Tenmangu. More than a century earlier, in 1587—at the height of Elizabeth I’s reign in Britain—the then-ruler, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, had presided there over the biggest tea ceremony of all time, inviting the entire population of the city to celebrate his decisive defeat of the last of his great rival warlords.
Kamishichiken was rather exclusive; it drew its patrons largely from the silk merchants who lived in the same area. But Gion, the most famous and fashionable, welcomed any men wealthy and stylish enough to know how to enjoy themselves there, be they Osaka merchants, Edo parvenus, or Kyoto playboys.
The Dancing Girls of Edo
While the tea-brewing ladies and dancing girls of Gion rapidly turned into courtesans every bit as accomplished and seductive as the caged birds of the licensed quarters, Edo, the “City of Bachelors,” was developing its own breed of freelance prostitutes. And it was in Edo, in a rather disreputable section of town called Fukagawa, where prostitutes and courtesans did business out of small wooden houses along the side of the River Sumida, that the first woman to call herself a “geisha” appeared. It was around 1750. Her name was Kikuya and she was a prostitute who had made a reputation for herself with her shamisen-playing and singing and decided to make entertaining her full-time profession.
Fukagawa (Deep River) was to become the most renowned of the unlicensed pleasure quarters, famous for the stylish bravado of its women. Back in 1683, three decades before the first licenses were issued for teahouses, it was already thriving. That year a poet and author named Mosui Toda (1629–1706) wrote a guidebook to the Edo of his day entitled A Sprig of Purple. In this he described a shrine to the god Hachiman in a place called Eitai Island, shortly to become known as Fukagawa.
Like Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto, this was an important place of worship in a rather remote part of town. In fact it was so out of the way that it might have had to close for lack of business were it not for the fact that the authorities “took mercy and tempered the stringency of the law” against unlicensed prostitution. By Mosui’s time the approaches to the shrine were occupied entirely by teahouses, each employing “ten women of remarkable beauty” who were more than happy to “comfort the pilgrims.” As a result, the area bloomed and became prosperous. 4
There were illegal red-light districts all over
Some time in the 1680s—the last decadent years of the Stuarts in the West—some daimyo and upper-crust samurai began hosting parties at which dancing girls—odori-ko—were hired to perform before the guests. For the lower orders this offered a great opportunity to obtain gainful employment for one’s daughter or, with luck, settle her in a position in a good household. So townsfolk started sending their daughters off for dancing classes.
A few decades on, the dancing girls had expanded their repertoire. By then Edo—and in particular the outlying district of Fukagawa—was overflowing with young women who called themselves odori-ko but were really prostitutes. Every now and then the authorities would swoop down on unlicensed areas, round up working girls, and send them off to the licensed quarters, where they would be forced to work for three years without pay. Some were out of their teens, too old to be odori-ko, which literally means “dancing child.” These older odori-ko began to call themselves “geisha,” after the male geisha of the pleasure quarters. 5
The first female geisha, Kikuya, must have been one of these—and she must have been a star, for her name has been remembered through the centuries, though nothing is known of her beyond her reputation as a brilliantly accomplished singer and dancer. Around the same time that she was strutting her stuff around the teahouses of Fukagawa, across the country in Kyoto, in the walled city of Shimabara, the first female drum-bearer sauntered in to a party. She was referred to as a geiko, “arts child,” which is still the word used for geisha in Kyoto. Soon geisha were all the rage. Tea-brewing women, dancing girls, and drum-bearers took to calling themselves “geisha,” insisting that they were not mere prostitutes but artistes. A new profession was born.