Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer
The answer was to bring the geisha out of the closet. They were, after all, one of the city’s chief glories and, having played such a heroic part in the recent struggle, might finally be considered almost respectable. Some had married the country’s new rulers; they need no longer suffer the stigma of being branded “riverbed prostitutes” by polite society.
So the vice-governor consulted the two most powerful people in Gion: the ninth Sugiura, the owner and direct descendant of the founder of Ichiriki-tei, the venerable teahouse where the ronin Oishi as well as the heroes of the recent revolution had reveled; and Haruko Katayama, the legendary dancer and teacher who, under her professional name, Yachiyo Inoue III, was responsible for establishing the Inoue style as the exclusive dance form practiced in Gion. (The Inoue School might be considered the Bolshoi of the geisha world in Japan; the present principal is Yachiyo Inoue IV, now ninety-six.)
Once a year, they decided, the public should have a chance to see the geisha perform their famous dances. The first public performance of Miyako Odori, “Dances of the Capital” (known as the Cherry Dances in the English-language brochures published for Victorian tourists), took place in March 1872 as part of the second and much larger Kyoto Exposition. They lasted seven weeks and have been repeated in some form annually (increasing to semiannually in 1952) ever since. Two other geisha districts also performed public dances. Gion’s archrival, Pontocho (still rather subdued, having been the quarter favored by the losing side), called theirs the Kamo River Dances, while Kamishichiken, in the north of the city, performed the Kitano Dances.
Until then the geishas’ charms had been reserved for those who could afford to pay for them. Many, along with courtesans, were famous and adored among the populace. Everyone knew their names and might even own a woodblock print pin-up of a favorite; but few ever had the chance to see them close up. Now, once a year, the dancing, which had previously been only for the eyes of a select and wealthy few in intimate tatami-matted rooms, was on display for the general public. It was, of course, rather different. It was large-scale, not small-scale, involving many geisha. In the 1872 performance, there were seven groups each of 32 dancers, 11 singers, 4 hand drum players, 2 flautists, 3 players of smaller drums and gongs, and one player of the large drum, who performed for a week each, 371 performers in all. 2
It was the beginning of a new role for the geisha. They were still regarded with ambivalence. They were still on the outskirts of society, being either the children of geisha, part of a demimonde beyond the pale of the respectable world, or having been sold by impoverished country parents into a sort of servitude. But they were also stars; they had a recognized place in society and an aura of glamour. And every year crowds flocked to buy tickets for their brilliant and colorful dance spectaculars.
Thus both Kyoto and the geisha continued to flourish. When, that same year, the Cattle Release Act was passed, geisha stood in line at Kyoto City Hall to buy their two licenses, one for entertainment, the other for sex. The enthusiastic reformers of the young government, out to emulate Western ways, instigated various experiments. For a few years there were compulsory workshops for geisha so that they could learn a skill and, in theory, at least, be equipped to pursue a decent living. There they sat in glum rows spinning and weaving or learning reading, accountancy, dancing, or music. The only escape was when they were summoned to a teahouse to entertain. Eventually attendance was made optional and classes immediately stopped apart from dancing and singing. So began the vocational schools which each geisha district in Kyoto still runs.
The American Millionaire
and the Icy-Hearted Geisha
One spring day in 1902 a world-weary American named George Dennison Morgan, whiling away a few weeks in Kyoto, went to see a performance of the Cherry Dances. A nephew of the millionaire financier J. Pierpont Morgan, he was wealthy enough that he would never have to work. Disillusioned with New York society after a soured romance, he moved to Japan and settled in Yokohama where he started collecting antiques.
No doubt he thought of taking a Japanese concubine. For a Western man it was the simplest of financial arrangements and one Japanese girl was much like another, or so the average Western chauvinist might have thought. But then at the Cherry Dances he saw a geisha so beautiful, so feminine, and so graceful that he had eyes for no one else. Another, only slightly less romantic version of the story is that he met her at a Gion geisha party. In any case, he fell utterly and incurably in love.
It was a story which was to set tongues wagging and newspaper presses whirring furiously on both sides of the Pacific. To this day, if you ask a Kyoto geisha to name the most famous geisha of all time, she will say, “Oyuki Morgan.”
O-yuki (Honorable Snow) was at the height of her career, an exquisite young woman of twenty-one. In photographs she looks like a porcelain doll, with a long strikingly aristocratic face, fine nose, delicate mouth, tapering almond eyes, and a disdainful lift to her eyebrows. She is the eternal feminine, woman personified, remote, aloof, and mysterious. As far as Morgan could see, she was completely perfect.
In fact she was not at all aristocratic but the daughter of a Kyoto swordsmith. There being less and less call for swords in the bright new Japan, the family business had gone disastrously into decline when she was in her teens. For a good-looking young Kyoto girl, it was the most natural thing in the world to go and work in Gion to help her family out. Missing out the trainee maiko stage (she was too old for that), she went to live at a geisha house run by one of her relatives.
George was thirty-one, not handsome but impeccably groomed and rather stolid in appearance, with a faintly lugubrious spaniel air. He wore his hair with a neatly combed center parting, in the fashion of the time, and had a bristly mustache which covered the sides of his pursed, rather stubborn mouth. His deepset eyes were a little sad, his nose slightly bulbous.
To Western eyes he looked unremarkable enough. But in the Kyoto backwoods, where Westerners were a rarity, the round-eyed long-nosed foreigner seemed like a visitor from another planet. When Oyuki was summoned to the teahouse to entertain him, she was shocked and repelled by his pallid skin, coarse compared to silky Asian skin, and colorless hair. Maybe he wooed her through an interpreter, maybe he had picked up a few words of barbarically accented Japanese. In any case, at the end of the evening he asked the maid of the teahouse to arrange for him to spend the night with her. Oyuki was aghast.
“Sleep with a foreigner? I’d rather die,” she exclaimed in the privacy of one of the teahouse’s back rooms.
But George had no intention of giving up. Even though she rejected him, he gave her an outrageously extravagant tip—20 yen, at a time when a one yen tip was unheard of and a ticket for the Cherry Dances cost 10 sen (one tenth of a yen). So Oyuki, having a family to support, accepted him as a regular customer.
She had other financial pressures too. As it happened, she was in love with a student named Shunsuke Kawakami. One of the customs among geisha until well into the modern era was to invite university students to have fun at the teahouses after hours without charging them hana-dai, “flower money,” the geishas’ fee; they only paid for their drinks and sometimes not even for those. After midnight when the formal geisha parties were over and the customers had been packed off home to their wives, the dashing students of Kyoto’s Imperial University would pile into the teahouses to chat, drink, and carouse.
The geisha loved the company of these handsome young gallants. They also knew that one day they would undoubtedly be among the country’s elite. The first universities had only recently been founded and the gilded young men (it was only men) who succeeded in entering were guaranteed positions among the country’s movers and shakers, whether in the financial, bureaucratic, or political spheres. When they were rich and powerful, they would automatically continue to patronize the teahouses where they had been so kindly treated as students. Japanese society worked (and still works) on the basis of loyalty. Once a man had set up a relationship with
Thus Oyuki had met her student. She also, very secretly indeed, broke all the rules by sleeping with him when she got the chance. Shunsuke had promised to take her out of the geisha world and marry her when he finished his studies. But in the meantime he was struggling to find the money to pay his fees. George, knowing nothing of all this, persisted in his suit. By now, he wanted more than just a night of sex. He wanted to possess this exquisite creature; he wanted to marry her. Night after night he went to the teahouse and asked for Oyuki to entertain him then plied her with gifts and tips. Oyuki smiled her cool mysterious smile, icily played her shamisen and the antique bowed kokyu, danced with grave but unmistakable eroticism and accepted his money, most of which ended up in Shunsuke’s pocket. Beyond that, she kept poor George at arm’s length.
By now the story of the fabulously rich foreigner and the icy-hearted geisha had become big news. The Osaka Daily News published a series of sixteen articles under the title “The Lovelorn Foreigner,” reporting breathlessly on events as they unfolded and padding the story with colorful details, some true, some distinctly dubious. 3
George became more and more desperate. He also, say Japanese sources, whiled away the time by visiting other teahouses and even became the danna of a Shimabara courtesan named Hinamado whom he set up in a house with her mother. He was, after all, only a man. But although he found sensual satisfaction with others, his heart was Oyuki’s.
Then Shunsuke graduated and took himself off to Osaka where he immediately got a fast-track job in a bank. Suddenly his love for Oyuki evaporated. The last thing an ambitious young man wanted was a scandalous relationship with a geisha, let alone a geisha as notorious as Oyuki had become thanks to George’s much-publicized attentions. As for marrying her—that did not even bear thinking about. When she went to see him in Osaka, he offered to pay back the money he owed her.
For Oyuki it was a terrible shock. Suffering the pangs of rejection, she was also overwhelmed with remorse at the way she had exploited the lovelorn foreigner on behalf of this perfidious lover. It seemed like karmic retribution for her cruelty to him. Even while she had been using him, she herself was being used. George had been so constant in his devotion no matter how cruelly she treated him; surely the proper thing to do was to give him what he wanted and marry him.
So she did. The 40,000 yen story pops up at this point too. George, it was said, handed over this outrageous sum—enough to start a bank—to Oyuki’s family for the privilege of marrying their daughter. George himself denied any such rumors, as did Oyuki’s family. But even American papers reported that he had paid $25,000 (equivalent to $440,000 in modern currency) “according to Japanese tradition.” 4
In 1904, the year that the Russo-Japanese war began, the couple had a very quiet wedding in Yokohama. Shortly afterward they boarded a steamer for New York. During the voyage, he taught her a few words of English and explained how she would be expected to comport herself as a member of one of America’s most powerful and snobbish dynasties.
George’s immediate family was on the quay to meet them, together with the American press, buzzing with curiosity about this outlandish match. The family, his stepmother was reported to have said, was far from happy with George’s choice. The woman was, after all, Japanese and not even a Christian. In those days Westerners were unabashedly chauvinist when it came to other races. No matter how clever their fans and pretty their kimonos, the Japanese were still nonwhites and therefore inferior; it was only after the Japanese armed forces had shot a few Russians in the ongoing Russo-Japanese War that, as one Japanese diplomat commented with heavy irony, the West began to concede that they might be remotely civilized. 5
The prodigal son and his Madame Butterfly bride who could barely speak a word of English found themselves ostracized not only by the Morgans but by all of New York polite society. There were no invitations to Mrs. Astor’s balls or to soirees with the Vanderbilts or dinner with the Goulds. After a few uncomfortable months, the couple set sail for Paris. By 1906 they were back in Japan, with the intention of settling there. But in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, antiforeign sentiment was running high. The “slut” who had given herself to a “barbarian” was far from welcome. Finally they took a house on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, a city both relaxed and bohemian enough to welcome a wealthy American and his geisha wife into chic society.
There they lived happily for a decade. Madame Morgan, famous for her porcelain-like Oriental beauty, learned French, studied the piano, and was regularly seen at the salons of the top couturiers. She was never dressed in anything less than the height of Paris fashion. With an ample purse at their disposal they visited Oyuki’s family in Japan several times, though when George had to go to New York to settle financial matters, he went alone. Still, his family, who summered in Europe and there spent time with George and his wife, gradually came round to the marriage.
Then came the First World War. In Japan it was a distant war in far-off countries whose main effect was to provide bottomless markets for Japanese munitions, ship-building companies, and other industries. Foreign businesses having tied up all their resources in the war effort, it was an unprecedented opportunity for Japanese companies to gain the edge—a bonanza, in fact.
George and Oyuki, however, were caught up in the middle of it. When war broke out, George was in New York where he had gone to deal with family affairs. Trying to get back to Paris, he discovered that the direct route was impassable because of German submarine warfare. So he boarded a ship for Gibraltar. After a long and circuitous journey he was traveling overland toward Paris when he died of a sudden massive heart attack. It was 1915 and he was 44.
Utterly shocked by his death—he had never even been ill before—and all alone in a foreign country in the midst of a major war, Oyuki waited as bravely as she could for the body to be sent back for cremation. When the will was read it transpired that George had left enough to support her, in considerable style, on the interest alone for the rest of her life.
The legend of Oyuki Morgan has it that she then returned to New York bearing his ashes where, as his widow, she was more kindly received than when she had been his wife. She settled down there, goes the story, and became a prominent figure in fashionable society, entertaining her guests with her eloquent piano recitals.
A Japanese journalist, however, looked into Oyuki’s life, studied her letters and diaries, and came up with a completely different end to the story. In fact, it seems, she stayed on in Paris where she lived with a French legionnaire who had been sending her love letters from China for some time before George’s death. Oyuki had complained that she was “a widow” even then. So perhaps, ponders the journalist, George, having captured his prey, lost interest and went in search of new lands to conquer. Perhaps he had reasons other than business for going to New York. In any case, Oyuki was only thirty-four when he died, very beautiful still and enormously wealthy, a most eligible prospect. 6
In 1938, the ex-legionnaire (by then an elderly academic) having died, Oyuki decided it was time to go home. She was still such a celebrity in Japan that long before she got there, when her ship docked at Shanghai, Japanese journalists were crowding the quay to get a glimpse of her. Back in Kyoto, she settled near the teahouse where George had first gone to woo her, in the oldest section of Gion north of the Shirakawa stream. By then she was practically a foreigner herself. She could barely speak Japanese and wore her outlandish Parisian hats even inside the house. When the Second World War broke out a few years later, people in Gion joked that they would not be bombed “because Oyuki Morgan lives here.” She died in 1963 at the age of eighty-two. Even before that, in 1961, her extraordinary life had been celebrated in a Japanese musical entitled Morgan Oyuki.
Katoro, the teahouse run by her cousin’s family, is still there on the corner of a quiet cobbled street shaded with willows beside the Shirakawa stream. In th
New Geisha for a New Age
In 1922 the handsome young Prince of Wales, later to rule briefly as Edward VIII, toured Japan on a state visit. At the time Britain was Japan’s staunchest ally and he was greeted with boundless enthusiasm. Wherever he went enormous crowds turned out to cheer him. In Tokyo he reviewed the army, took in an opera at the imperial opera house, and viewed the cherry blossoms in the grounds of the imperial palace.
One of the most memorable celebrations took place on the small rural island of Shikoku. Here, in the city of Takamatsu, Count Matsudaira, a scion of one of the country’s most ancient aristocratic families, had spent more than $45,000 (equivalent to $415,000 in modern currency, a veritable fortune) to provide suitable entertainment for such an important guest. After a feast prepared and served by a staff of three hundred, the climax of the evening came when twelve of the city’s most renowned and beautiful geisha glided demurely into the room. Clad in specially woven silk kimonos with a design of Union Jacks intermingled with the Rising Sun, they performed a series of elegant dances.
Much had changed since a couple of decades earlier when the conservative Japanese establishment had been horrified at the success of Sadayakko and her husband Otojiro—a “riverbed prostitute” and a low-grade actor—on the stages of Europe and America. Having started out as countercultural heroines on the fringes of society, geisha had now reached the acme of respectability, being wheeled out as proud representatives of their country to entertain visiting royalty.
Where once the licensed pleasure quarters had dominated the demimonde, it was now the geisha districts that people referred to when they spoke of the “flower and willow world.” There were still highly accomplished geisha in the Yoshiwara; geisha from all over town went to them for lessons in dancing and music. Nevertheless, in the popular mind the licensed quarters had become little more than red-light districts. For high culture in the traditional Japanese mode, for exquisite shamisen playing, graceful and subtly erotic dancing, and witty conversation, men visited the teahouses and high-class restaurants of the geisha districts. For the geisha it was something of a golden age. At the turn of the century there were 25,000 geisha in Japan, by 1929 close to 80,000. It was a thriving profession. 7