I can't help but quote
Alan Booth on this:
Geishas, the coffee-table books and up-market glossies and
thoughtful TV documentaries never tire of telling us,
have no truck whatever with crude fleshly pleasures.
They are highly skilled entertainers who specialize in
shamisen ballads, exquisite dances, elegant repartee,
party games with matchsticks, and delicate liaisons
with incumbent prime ministers. To confuse them with
women who grant sexual favors to lesser mortals for
money is to be as ignorant and misinformed as were the
occupying American GIs who, shortly after their
arrival in 1945, are said to have congregated on the Ginza
and set up cries of "We want geesha girls!"
Imagine the indignation of the local populace! Why, these
barbarians wouldn't know a skilled shamisen
performer from a hula dancer! Oh woe, the coarseness
of foreign education! And then, to smooth ruffled national pride,
the more affluent among the populace likely took themselves off
to a hot spring for a bath, a drink, and a fuck.
-- Alan Booth, Looking for the Lost
I think the real misconception is in how
geisha are viewed in
the West: no, not as
prostitutes, but as bizarre sexless
substitutes for
prostitutes. According to this view, the
inscrutable Japanese
don't even need sex, but instead they satisfy themselves
simply through the
esthetic pleasure of watching
geisha
pluck
cat gut and croon
folk songs. How wonderfully
civilized! Even better yet, these life-sized dolls are cultivated
like
bonsai trees, to such an extent that their beauty and their
skills cannot even be fully appreciated without a thorough
indoctrination in the Japanese Way.
Why, oh why, can't we in the
West emulate such
exquisite tastes and strength of character? The idolization of
seppuku/
harakiri, with characters in
James Clavell novels
like
Shogun disemboweling themselves without even a grunt while
composing poetry, is much along the same lines.
Behold the Wonders of Japan!
This is not just bullshit, it borders on offensive, and nearly
every book about Japan written by Japanese writers either
laments or snickers about such absurdity.
Fact is, onsen geisha (hot spring prostitutes) and
their ilk have always way outnumbered so-called "real"
geisha. The sex industry in Japan is huge, and it has been
huge for as long as there have been records of it (cf. Yoshiwara).
And why not? Human nature means it's pleasurable to get laid, and
Japanese morality doesn't proclaim extramarital
or commercial sex to be a sin. Even at worst, if exposed to
others, it's only
shameful (hazukashii). Geisha who do not engage in
hanky-panky may exist, and even more may at first claim so in order to
drive up their price, but they're about as common as
asexual escorts.
Although I have to add one caveat: the Western view has become so
ubiquitous that it is starting to affect the geisha themselves.
These days, the average age of geisha is pushing sixty, and many make
their living posing on stage in fronts of crowds of googly-eyed foreign
tourists, acting out what they expect to see. In Kyoto, the largest
geisha center, there are less than 200 geisha left. Like kabuki and
the tea ceremony, geisha have minimal relevance to the vast majority of
the Japanese populace, and even those remnants are rapidly
disappearing -- it's just sad that their last days will be spent as
a freak show for tourists.