JAPAN: To Please a Guest

JAPAN To Please a Guest Like Connecticut schoolgirls on Commencement Day, the geishas of Japan gather together on the Day of the Seven Herbs at the end of Japan’s New Year feasting to receive their awards for a year well spent. Last week, as the fragile and mannered geishas of Gion, one of Kyoto’s most famed geisha districts, trooped into the auditorium of their two-story training academy for the annual ceremony of a new geisha year, the balconies were ringed with the faces of teachers, music masters and teahouse madams smiling as benignly at their charges as any proud parents.

“Unfortunately,” the 70-year-old academy president cried in his high voice at the commencement address, “the general public has the mistaken notion that we of the geisha world are one of the main targets of the current antiprostitution law, and it is up to you. the true geishas, to dispel this conception. The true geisha’s life is her art. Study hard and always strive for its perfection.” Soon afterward, the school star pupil, vivacious, 19-year-old Mariko, was awarded top prize for the year for having earned some $5,300 in declared income and an estimated $14,000 more in tips from satisfied customers.

Power & Plutonium. Though G.I.s may at times have been confused (or misled), to old-school Japanese, even the thought of comparing a.geisha to a prostitute is abhorrent. With the collapse of old traditions and the adoption of new standards in democratic Japan, the tightly cocooned and tradition-encrusted world of the geisha (whose name means literally “person of art”) has undergone some drastic changes and constantly faces the threat of more. A good geisha today must be able to play not only the ancient mandolin-like samisen and the plaintive flute but an adequate 18 holes of golf as well, in case her patron wishes her to accompany him on a country-club weekend. She should be able to discuss not only the classic poets but also atomic energy, a subject now taught at the geisha academy. Her dancing should be at least as up-to-date as the mambo and the cha-cha-cha. (“Very handy when you’re saddled with an obnoxious guest whom you don’t like touching,” said one geisha of the mambo.)

But if the manners have changed to some extent, the geisha’s true function has not. In essence, it is to be all that a wife should be if she didn’t have to wash the dishes, bear the babies, clean the house and grow old and tiresome. To casual guests at a party or to the patron she hopes will one day claim her permanently, the geisha must be tireless and fascinating, solicitous and flattering, soothing and delightful, ready to make conversation, play a game or listen to pompous discourse at the whim of her customer. “A good geisha,” said a member of Kyoto’s geisha association last week, “is one who the guests say is good. Not only is the guest always right, but he must always go home knowing it.”

Kimonos & Golf Scores. In recent years the number of fully qualified geishas has dwindled markedly. In Tokyo there are only one-third as many as before the war. New laws forbidding the sale of children have cut down the source of supply. Trade-unionism among the geishas themselves has put added restrictions on the teahouse owners who run their business. Compulsory education laws have cut into the necessary training time (ten years minimum before the war), and as a result the standards of behavior have fallen. “Today a geisha will not send perfumed notes, folded with calculating carelessness and full of allusions to nature, via a trusted messenger,” mourned one teahouse proprietor. “Instead she’ll just pick up a phone and dial.”

But although their numbers and standards may have suffered, the average geisha in Japan last week was making more money than ever. In Tokyo alone, the average take was 75,000 yen ($200) per month. Many girls in Kyoto are booked weeks in advance. Few modern geishas object seriously to the changes that have taken place in their profession.

“My golf score?” giggled one of them last week. “Don’t ask me that; I can’t count so high. But it’s very good for the health, even though I do look better in a kimono than in slacks.”