What is a Geisha ?

Today, "Memoirs of a Geisha" was broadcasted on french TV. I had never seen this film before although it was very famous. The weather was bad, so I decided to postpone the outing to the zoo until tomorrow and then watched this film.

I found it moving and well directed. And it made me curious about the lifestyle of geishas.

So, here are informations I got about them.












They are female traditional entertainers whose skills include performing various Japanese arts such as classical music and dance. Geisha always wear kimono.

In the early stages of Japanese history there were female entertainers: saburuko (serving girls) were mostly wandering girls whose families were displaced from struggles in the late 600s. Some of these saburuko girls sold sexual services, while others with a better education made a living by entertaining at high-class social gatherings.


Traditional Japan embraced sexual delights and men were not constrained to be faithful to their wives. The ideal wife was a modest mother and manager of the home, by Confucian custom love had secondary importance. For sexual enjoyment and romantic attachment, men did not go to their wives, but to courtesans.

These pleasure quarters quickly became glamorous entertainment centers, offering more than sex. The highly accomplished courtesans of these districts entertained their clients by dancing, singing, and playing music.

Gradually, they all became specialized and the new profession, purely of entertainment, arose. It was near the turn of the eighteenth century that the first entertainers of the pleasure quarters, called geisha, appeared. The very first geishas were men, entertaining customers waiting to see the most popular and gifted courtesans (oiran).

The geisha who worked within the pleasure quarters were essentially imprisoned and strictly forbidden to sell sex in order to protect the business of the Oiran. While licensed courtesans existed to meet men's sexual needs, machi geisha carved out a separate niche as artists and erudite female companions.

World War II brought a huge decline in the geisha arts because most women had to go to factories or other places to work for Japan. The geisha name also lost some status during this time because prostitutes began referring to themselves as "geisha girls" to American military men. In 1944, everything in the geisha's world, including teahouses, bars, and houses, was forced to shut down, and all employees were put to work in factories. About a year later, they were allowed to reopen. The very few women who returned to the geisha areas decided to reject Western influence and revert back to traditional ways of entertainment and life.

There are many misconceptions over what a geisha truly is because the tumultuous past of artisans, prostitutes, and pleasure quarters in Japan. Prostitution was legal in Japan until 1958, which is another reason that people may be misinformed about geishas not offering sex to customers. The two became especially confused after many of the professional prostitutes who catered to the occupying soldiers after World War II styled themselves as "geisha"; at a time when few true geisha were able to work, the counterfeit geisha usurped the meaning of the word in the eyes of many foreigners.

Modern geisha still live in traditional geisha houses called okiya. Geisha still study traditional instruments: the shamishen, shakuhachi, and drums, as well as learning games, traditional songs, calligraphy, Japanese traditional dances, tea ceremony, literature, and poetry.

Geisha are often hired to attend parties and gatherings, traditionally at tea houses or at traditional Japanese restaurants.
In 2007, the first Caucasian geisha debuted under the name of "Sayuki", in the Asakusa district of Tokyo.

 I hope I've told you something new today ;)