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- were complimentary. Arranged marriages in old Japan precluded romantic interests, so husbands turned to the geisha to provide for these needs. Wives were for procreation, whereas geisha were for recreation, relaxation and entertainment. The wives were considered sober, serious and modest, while geisha were witty, artistic, fun and risqu�. Geisha provided a release from family life worries and the busy, hectic pace of their work schedule. In the past a wealthy Japanese man rarely appeared in public with his wife and seldom, if ever, brought business colleagues or fellow workers to his home to socialize. It was the geisha who were best trained and equipped to perform the role of hostess, and thus were a key component of evening activities at the top level of society. In many cases the wife was just as happy to have the husband out of the house and not to have to plan such parties. She was devoted to running the household and looking after the children, while a geisha carried no such burdens. The wife usually felt less threatened by her husband�s occasional fling with a geisha than by an actual mistress. Geisha were prohibitively expensive, and few husbands could afford to have geisha mistresses.
Usually the male guest and the geisha had a mutual respect for each other. The geisha were able to make men fall in love with them but the story was rarely the other way around. The geishas had a deep sense of loyalty towards their frequent patrons, especially those who gave continuous magnanimous gifts. Sometimes the geisha would even appear at a regular customer�s or patron�s funeral, raising the eyebrows of the man�s wife and children. The geisha did not care for rude customers and would sometimes refuse to entertain them. Being seen with a sophisticated geisha had a certain �snob� appeal as she was the ultimate luxury item and showed that one was quite wealthy. The fact that one knew his way around the geisha teahouses and was acquainted with well known geisha, was an important asset for an ambitious executive when trying to impress his clients and colleagues.
The poet, Hagiwara Sakutaro, best summarizes the Japanese male attitude to the geisha/wife situation in a journal called The Geisha Reader as follows: �Our wives at home are engrossed in cookery and children, and our conversations with them are quietly serious, mostly concerning household affairs. Outside of this, men need a totally different sort of companion: a woman with whom we can talk about affairs of the world, about the arts, about ideas. We need someone who is entertaining, knowledgeable, educated. This is what a geisha should be.� from Lesley Downer, Geisha, The Secret History of a Vanishing World, page 155.
Modern Geisha of the 20th century
At the turn of the twentieth century, the geisha population in Japan was about twenty- five thousand, and soared to about eighty thousand geisha by 1929. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it is thought the geisha numbers faded to less than a thousand.
The Meiji period (1868-1912) was a golden age for the geisha, particularly in the 1890s when Japan experienced a decade of prosperity. Japan was undergoing a rapid Westernization in the late 19th and early 20th century. Some geisha tried to keep up with the times by briefly experimenting with wearing Western clothes and getting Western hairdos, but then they didn�t seem like geisha anymore. By the 1930s they stopped trying to be the modem mainstream fashion innovators, and rejected Western clothing and went
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