Part 3

Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West
by Lesley Downer

(Page 3 of 3)

Sada told the story thus: "My adopted mother, Kame Hamada, used to serve as a maid in a nobleman's mansion, so she had very high standards. Count Hirobumi Ito and other great men were her patrons. I was brought up very strictly, as if I were her own child. I was an uncontrollable tomboy. I wore boys' kimonos and straw sandals just like a boy. Every day I ran off to the ruined mansion where the Meiji Theater is now. I climbed trees, played tag, jumped around, and played with the boys."

It was a struggle to tame such a wild and willful little girl. But Kamekichi had high ambitions for her. She sent her off to teachers to learn the skills that would make her a star geisha without quenching her spark and spirit. Little by little the child began to absorb the coquettish tones of the Edokko geisha. She learned how to bewitch a man with a heavy-lidded sidelong glance, how to comport herself with languid elegance, how to chat flirtatiously and glide seductively in a kimono. She picked up the secrets of geisha makeup and coiffure. She learned etiquette and how to behave at banquets and weddings. She practiced the games that are played at teahouse parties and memorized the words and melodies of the ditties, love songs, and ballads of the geisha repertoire. She studied the musical instruments geisha play-the small lacquered shoulder drum, the larger hand drum, and the banjolike shamisen, which is the geisha's characteristic instrument. She also learned to perform tea ceremony elegantly and to make exquisite flower arrangements.

But what Sada really loved was to dance. Every day she went to classes. When she got home, Kamekichi would make her demonstrate what she had learned. She practiced for hours. She had natural poise and grace. She learned to move crisply, to strike a dramatic pose with precision, and to express feeling through the most disciplined and economical of gestures. She learned the different solo dances that form the geisha repertoire, many of which are taken from kabuki plays. Thus she became adept at telling a story through gesture and body language. It was a discipline as exacting as studying ballet.

By eight or nine Sada was attending banquets, tapping her little hand drum with childish solemnity, and filling the drinkers' sake cups to the brim, spilling not a drop. In her butterfly-bright kimono, with her dainty gestures, precocious chitchat, and pretty face, she was the most delightful little creature imaginable. Among those who were charmed was Count Hirobumi Ito, a regular customer at the Hamada House and one of the most powerful men in the realm.

In the winter of 1883, at the age of twelve, the child celebrated her debut as an o-shaku, literally "a sake pourer," an apprentice geisha. She also received her first geisha name. From now on she was to be Ko-yakko or Little Yakko, named after a geisha named Yakko who had been one of the most adored in Tokyo. Kamekichi felt sure that Little Yakko would grow up to be as brilliant a star in her turn.

But she was still a child with energy to spare and a wild tomboy. As she put it in later years, "even then I carried on playing with boys whenever I had the chance, and messed about and didn't really concentrate on learning the geisha arts."

The playwright Shigure Hasegawa remembered her thus: "She had a certain refinement which came from her samurai parents and this quality was nurtured by living in the Hamada House. She also had an innocence that was rare in the geisha world. She was straightforward and very focused. In fact she was a typical Edokko. She learned all that from her adopted mother and, with her support, by the age of fourteen was one of the most famous geisha in the city."

In those days geisha were the heart of high society in Japan. An evening's entertainment would not have been complete without a bevy of geisha to bring sparkle and glitter to the occasion. At theater openings and first nights, geisha were always invited.

The role of a man's wife was entirely different. Her job was to be the matriarch, to stay at home and take care of the family and children. Decent women were not expected to be brilliant conversationalists or witty companions. They had no idea how to flirt; that would have been most unseemly.

It was accepted, however, that men needed charming companions to be seen on their arm at public occasions and for private amusement too. That was where the geisha came in. Many powerful men of the new government who had started out as rough provincial samurai had broken with convention and married their geisha lovers; and all of them had geisha mistresses. Count Ito, for one, was married to an ex-geisha named Umeko; when he later became prime minister, she was first lady of the realm. This gave the geisha a considerable degree of social cachet and at least the appearance of respectability.

The geisha in fact posed very serious competition to the faithful wife. As Alice M. Bacon, an American who lived in Tokyo, wrote in 1899, "Without true education or morals, but trained thoroughly in all the arts and accomplishments that please-witty, quick at repartee, pretty, and always well dressed-the geisha has proved a formidable rival for the demure quiet maiden of good family, who can only give her husband an unsullied name, silent obedience, and faithful service all her life. The problem of the geisha and her fascination is a deep one in Japan."

Kamekichi's plan for Sada-or Ko-yakko, as we must call her now-was that she should be the crème de la crème, the first among this elite group of geisha, groomed to be the brilliant companions of the country's most powerful men. But in order to do so she would have to learn more than just the traditional geisha arts of dancing and singing.

In those days women's education was in its infancy. The first school for women had opened in 1870, and that was only for noblewomen. The idea of an ordinary woman-let alone a geisha-learning to read and write was outlandish. No matter how many powerful men they kept company with, geisha were still classed as the lowest of the low; romantic though they were, the geisha districts were effectively ghettos, separated from respectable society. For years after Ko-yakko's time, right up until the end of World War II, many denizens of the entertainment industry-geisha and kabuki actors-were illiterate. Only the highest levels could read or write a billet-doux or compose a poem.

Certainly if Ko-yakko was to mix with the highest in the realm, it was a skill she would have to acquire. Perhaps the idea was sparked by Count Ito, a great progressive and an advocate of women's education. Perhaps it was Kamekichi's idea, or perhaps it was Ko-yakko herself. In any case Kamekichi sent her off to a local Shinto priest to be taught to read and to write beautifully with a brush. It was an extraordinary accomplishment. Geisha were expected to be modern, trendsetting women, but such a skill put her well ahead of the crowd.

From the moment when the Japanese set about their quest for Civilization and Enlightenment, they had begun to study foreign ways with insatiable curiosity. A brilliant and handsome young samurai named Yukichi Fukuzawa was the leading advocate of Westernization. Born in 1835, he had gone to the United States in 1860 as an interpreter on the shogunate's very first mission. He then went to Europe in 1862 and was in America again in 1867.

That same year he published a ground-breaking book entitled The Clothing, Food, and Dwellings of the West. It was a manual of Western dress and Western ways. Printed on woodblocks, there was page after page of detailed drawings of shirts, undershirts, long johns, trousers with braces, Sherlock Holmes-style overcoats, umbrellas, and hats with notes explaining what they were and how to wear them. He also explained how to eat Western-style with a knife and fork, described typical Western homes, explained the functions of a washstand, mirror, and chamberpot, and stressed the importance of learning to consult one's watch rather than listening out for the temple bell to check the time as Japanese had always done.

The book was a best-seller and hugely influential. According to the Tokio Times of January 27, 1877, "... in the second and third years of Meiji [1869-1870], the demand for foreign goods remarkably increased. Those who formerly looked upon them with contempt changed their minds and even dressed in foreign clothes. Our males adopted the European style. They put on fine tall hats instead of wearing large queues [topknots] on their heads, and took to carrying sticks after discarding their swords. They dressed in coats of the English fashion and trowsers of the American. They would only eat from tables and nothing would satisfy them but French cookery."

By 1869 trendy Tokyo samurai were rushing to the first Western-style barber in town to have their pomaded topknots chopped off in favor of the fashionable new "random crop" look. Soon no self-respecting man about town would be seen with his hair in a topknot. Gold watches, diamond rings, and Western-style black umbrellas were all the rage. Officials sported beards and mustaches like Western diplomats and in 1872 trousers, frock coats, and top hats became the proscribed mode for courtiers and government officers and standard business attire.

That was the men. Women, too, were gripped with curiosity about the extraordinary "civilized" and "enlightened" clothes of the Westerners. Geisha, being by profession bolder and more flamboyant than other women, were the first to try the extraordinary new fashions.

In the 1860s a geisha from the Maruyama district of Nagasaki created a sensation by being photographed in a flouncy western frock and crinoline. In 1872 a Nihonbashi geisha made news by "pouring sake for customers with her hair in Nanking pigtails and wearing a Western dress."

A bevy of tailors, mainly in Yokohama, turned out lace-trimmed, floor-length gowns with bustles and the padding and under-ribbing, a sort of half-crinoline, required to shape the bustle and hold it in place. There were even corsets produced in Japan to enable a slim Japanese woman to attain the requisite hourglass figure. Soon geisha were to be seen bustling about the teahouses and playing their shamisens in flouncy décolleté gowns with huge bustles, gold earrings, bracelets, and high-heeled leather shoes, which they sometimes wore even on the tatami matting.

Ko-yakko, being an advanced young geisha, often wore Western clothes. As Kamekichi laced her into her stays, she must have yearned for her soft, comfortable, many-layered kimonos. Like other modern women she abandoned the rigid helmetlike pomaded traditional hairstyles and adopted the looser sokuhatsu look, with the hair bunched into a bun on top of the head and framing the face in a flattering way. She continued to wear her hair in this style for much of her life.

Her extraordinary education did not stop at reading and writing. She secretly took lessons in judo, very fashionable at the time. She would summon the hakoya, the boy employed to carry her shamisen, take him along to a grassy, unfrequented area, give him a tip, and then practice her throws on him, barking war cries in the approved judo manner. She also became a dab hand at billiards. Many a wealthy man, entranced by her lovely face poised studiously over the green baize, failed to pot his balls and laughingly conceded defeat. In fact she was the least ladylike of geisha.

At the age of fourteen she began riding. Until the coming of the Western barbarians horses had been only for samurai. Japanese women would never dream of being seen on a horse. When Western women were seen trotting sidesaddle around the streets of Yokohama in their bonnets and long riding skirts, it caused a sensation. Woodblock print artists got their palettes out to depict this outlandish sight.

Ko-yakko learned to ride at the stables in Honjo, the wild moorlands on the far side of the River Sumida. She became an excellent horsewoman. She was particularly skilled at horobiki, a traditional sport in which she would gallop so fast that her long cape flew out behind her like a banner without ever touching the ground (the purpose of the game). A few years later, as the gossip columnists of the day reported with great excitement, she even took part in professional races. It was another mark of how unconventional and progressive she was.

And thus it was that one day, riding across the Honjo grasslands, she met the handsome young student, Momosuké Iwasaki.

Copyright © March 2003, Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Lesley Downer is the author of On the Narrow Road, which was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award; The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan's Richest Family, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of 1995; and the highly acclaimed Women of the Pleasure Quarters. Ms. Downer is also a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal.