Geisha

Kyoto uses its own terms: a fully qualified geisha is a geiko, and an apprentice is a maiko. A girl usually enters after completing compulsory schooling, at around fifteen, and first lives for about a year as a shikomi in an okiya, the house that lodges, trains and manages its women, learning manners, the Kyoto dialect and the basics of the arts. After a short period as a minarai, observing banquets, she makes her debut (misedashi) as a maiko.

Maiko are recognisable by their own hair rather than a wig, the long hanging obi (darari no obi), kimono with long sleeves, tall wooden okobo sandals and ornate hair ornaments that change with the seasons. After several years, typically around the age of twenty, a maiko becomes a geiko in the ceremony of erikae, the 'turning of the collar', from the red collar of the apprentice to the white collar of the geiko. Geiko wear a simpler kimono and, for formal appearances, a wig. Lessons continue throughout a career.

Geisha work in hanamachi, 'flower towns', districts with their own teahouses, okiya, rehearsal stage and school, and an association that sets the rules. Kyoto has five, often referred to together as the gokagai. Tokyo has several smaller districts, among them Shinbashi, Akasaka, Asakusa and Kagurazaka, where geisha are also called geigi. Other cities with living traditions include Kanazawa, with its chaya districts, and Niigata, whose Furumachi geigi are well known.

The streets of Gion, with their wooden teahouses behind bamboo blinds, are among the most photographed in Japan. Many of these lanes are private, and residents and district associations have long asked visitors not to follow, touch or photograph maiko and geiko on their way to appointments.

The ozashiki, a banquet in a teahouse room, is the heart of the profession. Traditionally a teahouse only accepts guests introduced by existing patrons, a custom known as ichigen-san okotowari, 'no first-time customers'; the teahouse settles the bill for the evening with the guest later. Hotels, travel agencies and some district initiatives now arrange dinners or tea gatherings with maiko for visitors without such connections.

The most accessible way to see geiko and maiko perform is at the public dance seasons each hanamachi holds on its own stage (kaburenjo), especially in spring. The Miyako Odori of Gion Kōbu has been performed since 1872. Many hanamachi also join public events such as the Gion Matsuri and the Setsubun ceremonies at Kyoto shrines.

The most persistent misunderstanding is that geisha are prostitutes. Geisha are entertainers and artists; historically they were legally distinct from the courtesans (yūjo, and the high-ranking oiran) of the licensed quarters, whose elaborate costumes, with the obi tied at the front, are often confused with geisha dress. The confusion spread in Western accounts from the late nineteenth century and again during the occupation after 1945, when women who were not geisha at all offered themselves to soldiers as 'geisha girls'. Licensed prostitution in Japan was outlawed by the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1956.

Fiction added further myths. Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) and its 2005 film adaptation presented a sensationalised picture; the retired Gion geiko Iwasaki Mineko, one of the author's informants, took legal action against him and wrote her own account, published in English as Geisha of Gion. Another misconception is that every woman in kimono and white make-up in Kyoto is a maiko: many are visitors who have hired a maiko-style makeover.