Modern-day geisha charts new territory

KYOTO:  Just eight years ago, Komomo was a Japanese teenager living in Beijing. Now she is a geisha in Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, a proudly elegant member of a centuries-old but fading profession of female entertainers celebrated for their beauty, skill at traditional dance and music, and witty conversation.

Unlike the old days when girls would become geisha through personal connections, 23-year-old Komomo (Little Peach) took her first steps towards the vocation by e-mail. 

As Komomo recounted in A Geisha’s Journey, a book of essays and photographs by Naoyuki Ogino due out in May, she had no way of learning about the remote and secretive geisha world until she found a website run by Koito, a Kyoto geisha who also ran an okiya (geisha house). (http:www.e-koito.com). “I was so excited that I e-mailed Koito-san right away, telling her my dream of becoming a maiko, an apprentice geisha, but that I didn’t know how to begin,” she wrote.   

The two corresponded for three years, until Komomo graduated from junior high school. Shrugging off the opposition of her parents, who wanted her to take a more conventional path of university and marriage, the 15-year-old headed for Kyoto.
Komomo moved into Koito’s okiya in Miyagawa-cho, a cluster of narrow, stone-paved streets lined with wooden  houses.

Her first weeks were spent learning to greet people with polite bows, wear kimono, and speak in the soft Kyoto dialect.   

Each demanding day begins with lessons in dance, singing, tea ceremony and music, and continues with parties — the geisha’s real work — from six until midnight.   

She declined to say what she earns, but she owns a house, and its main room boasts a huge flat-screen TV and new model Macintosh computer. Even so, she confessed to worries about the future.

There are no pensions for geisha and they are not permitted to marry, though in the past some were supported as mistresses. Some even became single mothers.   

Though Komomo says she wants children, she has only been a geisha for two years and hasn’t thought about the future yet. Of greater concern is the fate of the geisha world itself. Geisha numbers in Japan peaked at 80,000 in 1928, but now only 1,000 are left. One of the six geisha districts in tradition-bound Kyoto has folded due to lack of business.

The economic woes of the 1990s slashed the expense accounts of business executives who were once the mainstays of geisha, while politicians now shun lavish spending after scandals. A dinner with a geisha present can cost around 80,000 yen ($785) a person, depending on the venue and the number of geisha.

Another problem is that men today tend to prefer less formal entertainment like karaoke or hostess bars. Komomo says the geisha world needs to open up more, and the Internet is an ideal tool.