Information on Geisha/Oiran

[tsuridasu]

So my library has great books on geisha and geisha culture, but I don’t want to check them out every time I want a post idea for Kiyoha. As a general note, all of these things pertain to geisha, not oiran unless specified otherwise. However, there isn’t much literature in English about oiran instead of geisha, so I fudge things a bit so I actually get to, you know, play.


Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer

• Terminology
  
  • shikitari: "customs, practices, the way of doing things"
    
  • shirabyoshi: An early precursor to geisha. They were dancing women and cross-dressed in white male clothing and manly court caps.
    
  • ukiyo: "the floating world," once a Buddhist term, referring to the transience of all things. "Life is transient, so what better way to spend one's time than in the pursuit of pleasure, like a gourd bobbing lightly along the steam of life."
    
  • ukiyo-e: "pictures of the floating world," the famous woodblock prints
    
  • zegen: the pimps that brought girls to the brothels
    
  • otokoshi: the male staff of okiya
    
  • okasan (or, okaa(-)san): the proprietress of an okiya
    
  • minari: "learning by observation," the stage of apprenticeship where the apprentice just sits around and watches geisha work
    
  • taikomochi: male geisha. They're somewhere between courtesans and kabuki actors
    
  • odori-ko: "dancing girl," a predecessor to geisha
    
  • iki: casual, effortless chic (for geisha only)
    
  • tsu: a sophisticate, connoisseur (circa 1770)
    
  • yabo: boor, usually samurai
    
  • hanka-tsu a half-baked tsu, a charlatan
    
  • erikae: "changing of the collar," the ceremony that takes place when a maiko becomes a geiko
    
  • gaman: "endurance," "getting on with things," "putting up with things." The attitude of geisha that bad things aren't something to dwell on.
    
• History
  
  • Ono no Komachi is a sort of predecessor to the Japanese courtesean. She was a Heian noble, but a femme fatale sort of woman. Her legend is in Noh plays and legend-She was brilliant, accomplished, powerful, and tough-minded, as shown in these two waka poems:
    On men's fickleness:A thing which fades
    With no outward sign
    Is the flower
    Of the heart of man
    In this world
    On her sexual passion:This night of no moon
    There is no way to meet him.
    I rise in longing-
    My breast pounds, a leaping flame,
    My heart is consumed in fire
    
    One of the most famous legends involves a lover that came to her house for a hundred nights and slept outside before she considered his courtship. And he died on the 99th night. Oops. Ono no Komachi lived to one hundred, dying an old, ugly and penniless crone.
    
  • The heirarchy of Tokugawa was strictly classed:
    
    • hinin (nonhumans): beggars, lowest class of people
      
    • kawaramono (riverbed folk)Popular entertainers: grand courtesans, dancers, tea-serving wenches, sake servers, and itinerant prostitutes to actors, minstrels, musicians, jugglers and jesters.
      
  • Confucianism is what led to the rise of pleasure districts; because of how love, marriage and sex were separated, there was no disgrace in visiting these districts. In fact, it was encouraged, since it was a show of standing and wealth.
    
  • Geisha's roots also come from kabuki theatre. Originally, women performed (and then often were prostituted to admirers) on the stage, but the popularity and scandal of one female performer caused women to be banned from the stage for 250 years.
    
  • The popularity of pleasure quarters is also attributed to the rise of the middle class in the Genroku period. Aristocracy severely limited what merchants could show and spend their money on, and would occasionally find some pretext to take their riches. So merchants spent their fortunes in pleasure districts so that they never had too much wealth just sitting around.
    
  • Yoshiwara (yoshi wara: "reed plain") was built in 1656 about an hour's journey from Edo.
    
  • The popular promenade and hairstyle for tayuu/oiran came from one famous tayuu: Katsuyama. She worked at a bathhouse and became famous for her dancing there, but when the bathhouse was closed, she was scouted by the brothels of Yoshiwara. There, for her promenade, she did an elaborate kick of her feet, the now famous "figure of eight" walk and wore a distinctive topknot hairstyle. Now know as the "Katsuyama gait" and "Katsuyama knot"
    
• Customs
  
  • A Geisha song: I bathed my snow skin
    In pure Tamagawa River.
    Our quarrel is loosened slowly,
    And he loosens my hair.
    I am all uncombed.
    I will not remember him,
    I will not altogether forget him,
    I will wait for Spring.
    
    
  • Another song: I know she is light and faithless,
    But she has come back half-repentant
    And very pale and very sad.
    A butterfly needs somewhere to rest
    At evening
    
    
  • Contraception:
    
    • Geisha use condoms, but they're not Christians, so they're not bothered about being single mothers. However, condoms were not used before the 1920s and there was no native form of contraception.
      
  • Hairstyles
    
    • ware-shinobu: ornate, decorated with ribbons, ornaments and silk flowers, with a bagel-shaped rolled knot of hair worn high on the head. A maiko's first hairstyle
      
    • ofuku: A maiko's second hairstyle. Heavily decorated with the knot lower down. Signifies the wearer is no longer a virgin.
      
    • yakko-shimada: a sweeping elegant style worn for the New Year celebrations, decorated with sprigs of dried rice for fertility and good luck
      
    • katsuyama: topknot-like
      
    • sakko: maiko's last hairstyle, which is very ornate. Worn the last month before coming a geiko.
      
    • How the hairstyle is made:
      "With curling irons heated over a portable charcoal brazier, he stretched the hair until it was smooth, shiny and perfectly straight. Then, combing in globs of white pomade and oiling his comb with bintsuke oil (the same oil used to keep sumo wrestler's topknots rigid), he parted and sectioned it. Beginning with the hair at the crown of the head, he tugged ir firmly into a ponytail, tied in a roll of handmade paper to give bulk, and swept it forward to form the central knot of the entire edifice. He sculpted the hair at the back of the head up and over it, coiling it into a stiff loop, with a thin frame of laquered wood to hold it in place. The front of the hair meanwhile was rollered. Then he set to work on the two side pieces, stretching them round, with plenty of binsuke oil, and tying them with string to the central knot so that they formed two wrings, one on either side of the face. He slipped a thin lacquered wooden band like a hairband through the two wings to hold them firmly in place and tucked a wad of artifical hair inside each.
      
      Then he took a hairpiece, a ponytail of coarse black hair from the Tibetan yak, and tied it onto the central ponytail of the maiko's own hair. He combed the whole lot together, folded it forward, looped it back, opened it out and-lo and behold!-there was a bagel-shaped knot. Finally he teased the front of the hair into an arch and attached it too to the central knot. He added a hairpin to conceal the center of the bagel, some pieces of stiff black paper to keep the shape of the wings precise, and a couple of crinkly red ribbons. The whole masterful creation took about forty minutes and the end result was a sleek, shiny coiffure with not a single hair out of place, firm enough to survive a week's working, playing and sleeping."
      
      
    • Wigs cost 500,000 yen (about $5,000) and reseting a wig costs 23,000 yen ($230) a time
      
• Way of Life
  
  • The way the debt works: before even arriving, [entertainers] had already incurred an enormous debt: the ouotlay involved in buying them. Their food and kimono. By the time they start work, the debt was so huge that they had to work day and night in an attempt to repay it.
    
  • Oiran were taught and trained in calligraphy, tea ceremony and music.
    
  • Engagements:
    
    • Tayuu (highest rank)
      
      • Never (or rarely) were clients able to bed a tayuu before their third visit
        
      • Sleeping with a tayuu: 90 silver nuggets (momme) = one and a half golden nuggets (ryo) = $675 in modern currency
        
    • Koshi (second ranked)
      
      • 60 silver nuggets = $450
        
    • Sancha (teahouse waitresses/courtesans)
      
      • 30 silver nuggets = $225
        
    • Hashi (lowest rank)
      
      • 1 silver nugget = $7.50
        
  • Falling in love was strictly forbidden, especially since geisha tended to fall in love with someone young, handsome and poor. And since their love could never be, they would commit a lover's suicide. A playwright, often called Japan's Shakespeare popularized this in his Love Suicides at Sonezaki.
    
  • Kissing is a very private and very erotic activity. The erotic touching of lips was one of the most esoteric of the geisha's arsenal of sexual techniques. This is also shown by the word for a kiss (kissu) being an adopted word. It didn't really exist before 1878.
    
  • Marriage is an odd thing in Japan. Love is very much optional, which again accounts for the popularity of the districts. This exchange that Downer had with a friend shows this:
    Once, when I was fresh to Japan and naive about such things, I asked a Japanese man of my acquaintance, a lecturer at a highly esteemed university, how to say "darling" in Japanese.
    "What do you mean?" he asked.
    "Well, when you call your wife, what do you say?"
    He grinned at me, then bellowed "Oi!" like a sergeant major on a parade ground.
    
    
  • When a client dies, the geisha whom he had supported were often in evidence, pillars of strength, helping the wife take care of the funeral arrangements.
    

Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda

Coming soon

Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale by Nagai Kafu

Coming soon