JAPAN: The Vanishing Geisha

“There was sake, of course,” reported the disgruntled American tourist in Tokyo last week, “but the girls seemed most interested in plying us with highballs. ‘Let’s dance!’ one of them said, stubbing out her cigarette, and we all cha-chaed to a hi-fi phonograph. When we finished eating, another girl with a horse’s laugh, said, ‘Let’s play baseball.’ So we all got up and pretended to be hitting, catching and running: the object of the game was to bump rumps. Later the girls offered to dance for us. They went out for a few minutes, then came back, twirling hula hoops about their waists while the hi-fi played rock ‘n’ roll. The evening ended after only two hours, and it cost us a fortune. It was the damndest thing I ever saw.”

It was not like old times in the famed wooden geisha houses along the river Sumida. A geisha party before the war meant soft lights from many-colored lanterns, the tinkle of the samisen, a mossy garden with elegant dollhouse trees, a banquet starting with pickled sea-urchin eggs, dried seaweed, bonito entrails, mushrooms, and cuttlefish served with maple leaves and chrysanthemums. Above all, it meant the geisha girls themselves, in lacquered wigs and colorful kimonos, who poured sake from porcelain vases, performed their slow and discreet dances, and sang their sad, seductive love invitations:

A cigarette gives its body, And allows itself to be kissed, Until it becomes ashes All for its master.

As many Americans have learned, all that has passed.

Though Tokyo’s 600 aging geishas still keep up their traditional routine—the three daily sessions in the public baths, the facial massage with costly nightingale dung, the rubbing of the feet with pumice stone—their number is steadily dwindling. Promising nymphets now prefer to take on more explicit and less demanding jobs as cabaret girls; young men in search of kicks favor the nude shows that flourish all over town. To compete with the cabarets, the geishas have taken up such desperate sidelines as juggling and playing the xylophone—a far cry from the haughty geishas who were the quietly indispensable social companions of the rich and powerful.

Last week the geisha trade suffered yet another blow. With the government beginning to look into the once-secret and tax-exempt expense accounts that businessmen used for geisha parties, 20 of Japan’s leading firms issued an ultimatum to their employees: no more parties, except for gullible foreigners. “Japan,” says one oldtime patron of the Sumida houses, “is the land of the vanishing geisha. In the end they will wind up as purely tourist attractions—like the Navajo Indians.” The plain fact is that the stylized coquetry of the classic geisha is no longer fashionable. “Frankly,” said one Japanese businessman last week, “they have become a bore.”