Women of the Pleasure Quarters (10 page)

One young man to whom I taught English in London some years ago took it even further. He was a high-flier, a handsome twenty-nine-year-old executive in a major Japanese trading company who had been seconded to the London office. We used to meet in grand London restaurants and converse in English. The snag was that his favorite topic of conversation was his exploits with prostitutes. English whores were dirty and diseased, he told me; Japanese colleagues who had been around for a while always advised newcomers to steer well clear. The approved alternative, it transpired, was to take regular holidays in Spain.

He chose to disclose this in a Soho restaurant where the tables were uncomfortably close together, making it virtually impossible not to be overheard. He was just back from his first Spanish holiday.

“How was it?” I asked, all innocence.

“Ah, the señoritas! So lovely! So wonderful!” he cried ecstatically. Despite my pleas that we change the subject or at least switch to Japanese for this particular part of the conversation, he spent the rest of the meal regaling me with his sexual adventures.

“You’re a good-looking young man,” I said. “Why don’t you get a girlfriend? Then you could have all the sex you wanted without having to go to prostitutes.”

His argument was perfectly logical.

“If I had a girlfriend, she’d be hassling me all the time to get married,” he explained. “I’m very busy with my career. I don’t have time for that sort of thing. Prostitutes are much easier. You get enjoyment, you pay your money, and that’s it. After you get married, that’s when you have a girlfriend. Then they can’t hassle you.”

The most unbridgeable cultural gap was that he did not see anything wrong, shameful, or even embarrassing about going to brothels and paying for sex. It was just one of those things that men did, not much different from going down to the pub with the lads.

Even in modern Japan, a Japanese man took it for granted that he had two different spaces in which to operate. Both contained women with whom he had relationships. In the world of home there was the wife, in charge of the household, the children’s education, and the purse strings. He gave her his salary, and she gave him money with which to go out and have fun. The other world, the world of the evening, was populated by very different sorts of women—geisha, hostesses, entertainers, some of whom he had also known for years.

Between them, all these women made sure that he was taken care of from morning to night. Wife, concubine, mistress, geisha, and hostess were all expert at mothering a man, smoothing away his problems, stroking his ego, and ensuring that he always thought he was the boss. He was wrong, of course, to think so. All these women—wives, mistresses, and geisha—were adept at wrapping him around their little fingers and he was supporting all of them.

They also knew each other. There were times when the two worlds met. When a man died, the geisha whom he had supported were often in evidence, pillars of strength, helping the wife take care of the funeral arrangements.

Across the River Kamo in Kyoto, a few minutes’ walk from the geisha areas, there was a narrow backstreet lined with warehouses from which emanated the powerful odor of vegetables pickling in rice bran. The owner, an urbane fifty-year-old who had studied for his MBA in the United States, was a scion of an old Kyoto family which had owned the pickling plant for generations.

When he was a child in the fifties, he told me, there were always geisha and maiko around the house. They were like aunts who came to help his mother when she had important guests to entertain. She would put envelopes of money and small gifts into the little boy’s hand and say, “Give this to the
geiko-san.
” (
Geiko,
literally “arts child,” is the Kyoto term for geisha.) He knew many of the top geisha of Kyoto. Some were like aunts to him, others he had grown up with.

It was normal. The wife had her role, the geisha had theirs. His father had supported geisha and his mother had not been jealous; though, he confessed, he sometimes heard huge rows in other houses.

“In those days,” he said, “a wife knew that as her husband became more powerful, he would go and ‘play’ in the geisha quarters. That was a sign of his success. My mother would tell my father, ‘Off you go!
Asobinasai!
Go and play!’ ”

Jealousy

It is very clear that we do not marry for love. If a man is known to have broken this rule, we look upon him as a mean fellow, and sadly lacking in morality. His own mother and father would be ashamed of him. Public sentiment places love for a woman very low in the scale of morals . . . We place love and brutal attachment on the same plane.

Naomi Tamura (1904)
¹¹

I was forever hearing that wives saw their husbands more as children than as partners and were happy if they strayed, just so long as it was no more than that. Nevertheless, there was a whole tradition of stories in Japanese literature dealing with the fearful power of jealousy. It is considered a force so terrifying that to this day when Japanese women get married, part of the traditional bride’s costume is the “horn hider,” a stiff white headdress which engulfs her head like an enormous cocoon. Supposedly it conceals the “demon horns of jealousy” and immunizes the new husband against them. When the marriage code was first set down in the early years of the Meiji period, the late nineteenth century, one of the seven grounds on which it was ruled that a man could divorce his wife was jealousy. (The others were sterility, adultery, disobedience to parents-in-law, larceny, severe disease, and talking too much.)

One day I was sitting with a couple of women. One was an elderly ex-geisha, the other the wife of a powerful businessman who herself came from the kind of family where, in the old days, geisha would have been a part of life. The two had known each other for many years. They were gossiping about the way attitudes had changed over the decades.

“Relationships have changed a lot,” began the wife. “There’s not the same feeling of responsibility.”

“That’s right,” said the geisha, shaking her head. In her mid-seventies, she had a thin little face with a pointed chin and big eyes. She was dressed in a plain kimono with her hair pulled back into a tight gray bun. “In the Meiji period, if a man had a geisha girlfriend, his friends would make sure she was all right after his death. But by Taisho [1912–1925], things were different.

“I remember hearing about a Shimbashi geisha who was the mistress of a very successful man. She was like a second wife to him. But although they were together for a long time, she never had any children. Then his wife died. He took the geisha into his household as his new wife but his children—the children of the first wife—wouldn’t accept her. When he died too, his son threw her out of the house! It was shocking. The ironic thing was, the son carried on just like his father. He had a Shimbashi mistress too; he even had a child by her. His behavior was the mirror image of his father’s but he still didn’t take care of his father’s geisha. Everyone was appalled.”

“I remember years ago, when I first got married, my father-in-law had a geisha,” said the wife. “His wife was so jealous. Poor thing! She used to prepare the most exquisite meals every night, just like a top-class restaurant, and she was always dressed really beautifully. But no matter how hard she tried, he would say he just wanted tea and rice, then rush off to the teahouse to eat. I felt so sorry for her.”

“Then there was that husband who took his geisha with him everywhere like his wife,” reminisced the geisha. “The wife was disfigured, I think she was scarred or handicapped; anyway, she couldn’t appear in public. The geisha was beautiful and the wife agreed that she should be her husband’s public consort. But when he died, the wife kicked her out immediately and took everything. It was terrible, she was like a demon. The geisha was destitute. I remember his friends were all discussing what to do and how to take care of her.”

It was not surprising that wives should sometimes be jealous—they were human, after all. But despite the pain it might cause them, most accepted the Faustian pact. As the wife, they occupied a position of great respect in society. In Japan no one was “just” a housewife. Taking care of the house and rearing the children were seen as jobs essential for the well-being of society. Wives knew that within the household they were all powerful. If they wanted to buy a new car with the housekeeping money, there was no need to discuss it with their husband. With the husband as the breadwinner and the wife taking care of the house, it was a very efficient division of labor.

When they married, they expected to lead a life very separate from their husband’s and many preferred it like that. As the old saying goes, the ideal husband is “healthy and not around.” They also knew that while they could not expect love or fidelity, they were assured of financial security. To this day divorce rates in Japan are still far lower than in the West.
¹²

Instead of trying to fulfill her husband’s every fantasy so that he would never need to look elsewhere—to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, a lady in public, and a whore in the bedroom, as a Western wife might—Japanese wives accepted that one woman was usually not enough to fulfill a man’s needs. Just as there were two worlds, so there were two sorts of women to populate them. Wives and geisha were complementary, two sides of the same coin, two faces of womanhood.

The Priest’s Wife

Born and bred in Kyoto, Reiko had had geisha around her since childhood; they were part of the scenery as far as she was concerned. As the daughter of a Buddhist priest and the wife of another, she knew everyone, like a vicar’s wife in the West. She was an insider, as much a part of traditional society as the geisha were.

Over chilled barley tea she asked me how I was getting on with my research, then launched into her own idiosyncratic impressions of the geisha world.

“You know who their main customers are, don’t you?” she asked with a mischievous smile. “I’ll tell you. There are something like three thousand temples in Kyoto. Some of them are small ones like ours, where the priest lives there all the time. But the bigger ones have a revolving system of abbots. The abbots are appointed for four or five years. They come up from the countryside where they live; they usually have a small temple of their own there. The wife and children stay in the countryside, taking care of the temple, and the abbot is here on his own. After a while—you can imagine!—he gets lonely. So off he goes to Gion; or he calls for a geisha to come over to the temple.”

“What about contraception?” I inquired tentatively. It was not a question I had ever dared put to a geisha. But Reiko was so cheerfully uninhibited that I decided I could relax, put all my carefully learned politeness aside and ask whatever I wanted.

“Geisha use condoms, like everyone else,” she replied. “But we’re not Christians so we’re not so bothered about being single mothers. In the past there used to be a lot of single mothers. These days geisha tend to retire and marry when they get pregnant.”

Extraordinary though it might seem, the pill was only licensed for contraceptive use in Japan in June 1999. Until then it was banned as being potentially dangerous to health. As a result Japan was, as Mother Teresa of Calcutta described it, “an abortionists’ paradise.” There were any number of male doctors who profited from this situation, not to mention the priests who presided over temples dedicated to the souls of aborted or miscarried fetuses. One survey revealed that 23 percent of married women had had at least one abortion. The problem was less acute for married couples; women often joked that the main form of contraception among married couples was that after having produced the regulation two children, they stopped having sex. The main people who had to worry about contraception were those providing extra-marital sex.

It did not pass unnoticed that the Japanese government licensed Viagra in February 1999, after a mere six months’ debate and before licensing the pill; there was no problem, it seemed, with a drug which gave men control over their sexuality though there was with a drug which did the same for women.
¹³

But what of the wives, I asked. How did they feel when their husbands went off to the pleasure quarters? Were they not jealous, as a Western wife would be?

In the past, said Reiko, women had taken it for granted that they were inferior and subordinate to men. You brought up even your own son with great care, giving him as much deference as you would your husband and using only kind, respectful words when you spoke to him. In those days, women were taught to assume that if their husband was rich, he would go off to have fun in Gion. It was a high-status activity, something to be proud of, certainly not to complain about. If a man brought home a geisha as his concubine, everything would be fine just so long as the geisha remembered the protocol. Even if the husband slept with the pretty young newcomer and not with the withered old wife, nevertheless the wife was still number one. The geisha always had to remember her place and bow very low when their paths crossed. At the husband’s funeral, no matter how close they had been, she would still take her allotted place low in the ranks.

“Sometimes everyone got on better if there was a nice young wife living there too,” said Reiko. “It kept the husband happy and made everything more harmonious. But if the number one and the number two wives both had children, that sometimes created problems.”

Then she had an inspiration. The best way to understand all this, she said, was to meet one of her old schoolmates who had been the top maiko of her day.

Geisha and Wives

Mrs. Sato was startlingly youthful, little changed from the heart-stoppingly beautiful maiko in the photographs which she brought out to show me. She might have been in her thirties rather than her early fifties. Her face was a delicate heart shape, her skin silky smooth without a trace of a line, and her eyes large, limpid, and set wide apart. Her nose was small and straight and her pretty, laughing mouth neither too large nor too small, just as the ancient canons of beauty dictated. She had the easy confidence of a woman who has been worshipped and admired as an acknowledged beauty for years. When she was growing up, her family ran a teahouse in Gion, so naturally she became a maiko.