Women of the Pleasure Quarters (14 page)

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.
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There were illegal red-light districts all over Edo but Fukagawa had the most, seven in all, known as the
oka basho
(hill places). It was a kind of suburb, conveniently outside the jurisdiction of the city magistrates, lined with wharves and warehouses belonging to the wealthy timber merchants who also had villas there. A famous big-spender named Bunzaemon Kinokuniya had a mansion there and, when he was not busy taking over the entire Yoshiwara for the night, he often enjoyed sampling the local talent.

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.
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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.

The female geisha were an instant success. Unlike the courtesans and prostitutes of the pleasure quarters, they were independent, smart women who made a living by their skills and their wit and who were not bound by traditions that forced them to behave in certain ways. They did not have to engage in endless formality and could take sexual partners as and when they pleased. They were women of the world. And although the geisha quarters were clustered in particular parts of town, they were not walled in. The women could come and go freely. They were not caged birds.

While Shimabara quickly embraced the new trend, the Yoshiwara held out against it for a decade. At last, finding their business threatened by the popularity of this new breed of woman, the brothel-keepers there started to hire freelance female geisha to compete with the dancing girls, geisha, and
geiko
outside the gates. These geisha worked as entertainers, like the male geisha, in the Yoshiwara, on one condition: they were not allowed to steal the courtesans’ clients by sleeping with them. The geisha of the “hill places” had no such restrictions.

The first geisha in the Yoshiwara was recorded in 1761. Called Kasen of the Ogiya house, she was a prostitute who had earned her freedom and set up in business as an entertainer. Thereafter the number of female geisha swelled until they completely overwhelmed the male geisha. In 1770 there were 16 female geisha in the Yoshiwara and 31 men; in 1775, 33 female geisha but still 31 men; and by 1800 there were 143 females as against 45 men. By that time the word “geisha” primarily meant a woman, not a man. As the last of the grand
tayu
courtesans disappeared, the geisha moved center stage.
⁶

Times were changing. The peak of prosperity had passed, the Genroku period—when one commentator wrote of the pleasure quarters that “their splendor was by day like Paradise and by night like the Palace of the Dragon King”—was over.
⁷

Two classes, in particular, suffered: the peasants, who were largely dependent on a single crop—rice; and the samurai, who received their fixed stipends in rice, which then had to be handed over to the merchants in exchange for pitiful amounts of cash. While the townsmen hoarded rice, the samurai declined into genteel poverty. The economic malaise was made all the more oppressive by a calamitous barrage of natural disasters. Fire leveled the flimsy wooden structures of Edo again and again. There were storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and a string of bad harvests leading to devastating famines in which half a million peasants died. The mood of the country grew darker.

The townsfolk, however, were not suffering at all. In fact, they were growing ever wealthier. Many profited from the misery by lending money and selling their goods at extortionate rates. Sporadically the shogunate tried to clamp down on ostentatious spending. There were regular edicts that “Townsmen and servants may not wear silk,” “Townsmen may not wear cloth mantles,” “Townsmen may not live extravagantly,” and “Townsmen may not give lavish entertainments.” Those who were too obviously prosperous also ran the risk of having their riches confiscated and redistributed into the shogun’s coffers. In any case, affluence was no longer a novelty. Many merchant families had enjoyed prosperity for several generations and no longer needed to flaunt it.

The result was a new aesthetic of restraint. Townsfolk, nervous of having their fortunes impounded, took to wearing sober robes with a sumptuous lining, only visible when they flung off their jacket, and spent their money on tiny but inordinately expensive items such as intricately carved
netsuke
toggles of wood or ivory, tobacco pouches, and the like. They lived in homes with austere external walls concealing a sumptuous interior, like the beautiful Sumiya teahouse which stands to this day in Shimabara. By the mid-1700s, the courtesans of the pleasure quarters, in their showy kimonos, were beginning to seem rather passé. They continued to have their aficionados. But modern young men about town were starting to prefer the more understated attractions of the geisha.

While the courtesans tied their obi in front, geisha tied theirs chastely at the back like ordinary townswomen. Instead of flamboyant multilayered kimonos, they sported plain monochrome ones with the narrow white collar of the under-kimono visible at the throat. Their coiffure was relatively simple, decorated with two or three hairpins and a single comb, rather than an armory of tortoiseshell pins, combs, ribbons, and dangling decorations like the courtesans wore. Some of the understatement which gave the geisha their special flavor was the result of official ordinances. They were forbidden to wear elaborate kimonos even if they wanted to.

By now no one could deny that the geisha were a profession in their own right. The brothel-keepers of the Yoshiwara were becoming more and more worried by their success and popularity. In 1779 a man called Shoroku, the proprietor of the Daikokuya, one of the oldest establishments in the quarter, proposed setting up an inspection station, a
kemban,
to regulate and control them. With the backing of the other brothel-keepers, he promptly retired and appointed himself comptroller. Installed at the Great Gate of the Yoshiwara, he sold 100 permits to geisha. He had a staff of two inspectors and dozens of clerks who processed all requests that geisha be sent to entertain.

The
kemban
took 30 to 50 percent of the geishas’ fees. They also kept an eye out to ensure that the geisha did not engage in prostitution and interfere with the business of the Yoshiwara. Wherever a geisha went, she was accompanied by a man who carried her shamisen. It was also his job to keep an eye on her and make sure she did not try to run away. As for Shoroku, he ended up a very rich man with an enviable collection of fine art and antiques.

Shoroku established rules of conduct to distinguish geisha from courtesans and prostitutes and ensure that they did not steal their customers. Geisha were to be recruited from among the less beautiful women. They were to wear a severe kimono and simple hairstyle. They were to work in twos or threes, never alone, so as to discourage propositioning, and they were not to sit too close to guests. If a prostitute accused a geisha of interfering with her customers, there would be an inquiry. A geisha found contravening the regulations was liable to lose her license for several days or even permanently.

Such constraints only applied to those who wished to work in the pleasure quarters. There was never any doubt that the geisha of Fukagawa, stylish and talented as they were, slept with whomever they liked, whenever they liked. But prostitutes were prostitutes and geisha were geisha. If a geisha chose to enter into a relationship with a client, that was legally classified as misconduct, not prostitution. And such activities were the free choice of the geisha. Prostitution was never something they were forced to engage in.
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The Stylish Geisha of Fukagawa

The geisha of Tatsumi goes walking,

Bare white feet in black lacquered clogs.

In her haori jacket, she’s the pride of Great Edo.

Ah, the Hachiman bell is ringing.

Geisha song
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The Fukagawa geisha—also known as Tatsumi geisha, as in the song—were particularly famous for their sex appeal. Above their plain, understated kimonos they wore a
haori,
a loose, square-cut jacket with huge sleeves originally worn by men. This gave them a raffish air reminiscent of the kabuki actors who played women’s roles and who, on leaving the theater, would toss a jacket on over their women’s costume. The geisha never wore
tabi
(toed linen socks). Even in the dead of winter, they always went barefoot, their red-painted toenails framed against the black of their lacquer clogs peeping out from under the hem of their kimonos. The word for this casual, effortless chic was
iki,
which the Fukagawa geisha—more than any other—embodied.

In those days Fukagawa was by the sea, though nowadays, after centuries of landfill, the sea has been pushed a long way away. Young blades who wanted to enjoy the company of geisha would take a roofed houseboat down the river and along the seashore. There were temptations even before they disembarked. There were boats owned by cut-price prostitutes known, in the slang of the time, as
funa-manju
(boat dumplings), ready to offer their services then and there on board. On land there were
kekoro
(literally “kicks”) and
maruta
(logs) ready to waylay them, and right at the bottom
yotaka
(nighthawks) who carried out their work in the open air; as to exactly what these colloquialisms referred to, that has been lost in the mists of time and will have to be left to the imagination. In Fukagawa the lowest grade of prostitutes were called
ahiru
(ducks), perhaps because they lived near the water; Ahiru became the name of the quarter there.