Geisha

On of the hardest things about looking at the Japanese and Memoirs of a Geisha is that we think in a Western way. Arthur Golden is a Western man who is trying to share the story and life of a Geisha. Whether he means to or not, he puts a Western twist on the entire story. The position of Japanese women is one that is very respected. The Japanese women are “more firmly in control of the family budget, less threatened by marital violence or dissolution than American women, and enjoying unprecedented increases in life expectancy and leisure time, Japanese women may also be the beneficiaries of a culture that is, as Kazuko Tsurumi expresses it, more “woman-oriented” than Western culture” (Boocock, 552). For the American society, this is not at all true. The men in our culture are the dominant, even though women are able to live independently.

The Chairman is unlike most Japanese men. In Memoirs of a Geisha Chiyo is crying in the street and the Chairman stops to give her a handkerchief. She shares, “Ordinarily a man on the streets of Gion wouldn't notices a girl like me . . . he certainly wouldn't speak to me . . . Yet . . . this man had spoken kindly . . . For a flicker of a moment, I imagined the world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness” (Golden, 110). This helps us to see the authoritarian, hierarchical, and patriarchal aspect of Japan. This fact that the Chairman does not wear kimono and instead he wears western-style business suit, we can see that he has been Westernized. This could be why he is unlike most Japanese men. He is also a self-made man, the epitome of the American Dream.

It is interesting to see how women figure change their lives. The journey with the Chairman to the United States also shows Sayuri's personal journey to her own independence. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Sayuri's life in the United States is “even richer in some ways than in Japan” (Golden, 426). The Japanese and Geisha believe strongly in horoscopes and astrology. I wonder if Sayuri looked at her horoscope before she took her journey to with the Chairman to the United States.

The Japanese use symbiotic relationship between individual lives and nature. We see this in Memoirs of a Geisha by the statement of, “We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course” (Golden 105-6). This also helps to show the astrological belief system Geisha develop. The journey with the Chairman shows that Sayuri chose her new course of travel.

Women in America believe that they get where they get by what they do. American women do not wait on nature or horoscopes to choose what they will do. Usually, women in America do what they want and sometimes pay the consequences after they have done what they do.

Americans do not have anything that constrains them to one specific area. “The geisha is, on the one hand, constrained by feudalistic rules of propriety, by blinding obligations to senior members of the “sisterhood,” by the discipline required to master highly exacting music and dance forms, by the very kimono and wig which are the uniform of the trade” (Boocock, 554). The ironic thing is that most geisha that are chosen have an independent style to them. They are “independent-minded enough to resist powerful social pressures to marry and have children, and to choose an occupation that is beyond the pale socially” (Boocock, 554). This goes against what we learn that geisha have to do. Masuda in her own biography shares that “she was expected, even forced, to have sex with her Donna and other clients, as were other geisha” (Palmer). In America, if a woman is forced to have sex, that is considered rape. There is no “acceptance” to the right for a man to make a woman have sex. American women are taught to speak out while Japanese women are taught to bite their tongues and obey.

If the geisha have such a hard time and are forced to do anything, why is a geisha something that is good for women in Japan? Dalby says that even though the Geisha are restricted, “geisha are among the very few Japanese women who can claim economic independence, freedom from conventional family ties, and solid professional accomplishments” (Boocock, 554). This is ironic because even though geisha can claim economic independence and freedom, they are still bound to certain regulations. They must continue to sleep with men and they usually have to have a donna in order to gain their independence. Sayuri had to repay her debts to the house in order to gain this independence.

Geisha represent aspects such as romantic or sexual appeal, conversationalists, and artistic for malls. To the Japanese men, these are items that are no necessarily owned by their wives. This is completely different than the American view. The wife for Americans are companions, lovers, and mothers all in one. For the Japanese, these traits a man could desire from any number of women, not just one. Americans look for a “whole” woman while the Japanese look for a “single” woman.

“For most Westerners, the work geisha conjures up a vague fantasy of a sex worker crossed with an artist, perhaps similar to the European courtesans of the last century” (Palmer). Westerners do not separate the difference between geisha and prostitutes the way the Japanese do. We see that geisha sell themselves for money, thus they are prostitutes. The problem is that geisha are entertainers and artists as well. The Geisha had to go through a lot to distinguish themselves from prostitutes. Since the Geisha and prostitutes sometimes worked in the same areas, the developed regulations “prohibiting geisha from sleeping with prostitutes customers. . . or from wearing the same tupe of kimono or hair ornaments, suggesting the difficulties of maintaining professional boundaries” (Boocock, 554). We also see this in Memoirs of a Geisha with the difference between the sections of the city that Chiyo and her sister are taken to. It is also noticeable when you look at the attire of the geisha versus the prostitute. The geisha's bow is tied in the back while the prostitutes bow is tied in the front for quicker access for clients.

The geisha's life changed dirastically when World War II came around. “The economic devastation caused by the war and ensuing United States occupation put an end to the tradition” (Palmer). The impact of Americans was devastating to the traditional Japan. There were trinkets being sold to Americans for money, so that people would be able to live. The Americans were found to actually be kind, and the rumors of Americans raping Japanese were false, bringing the cultures crashing together. The Americans also felt that they had to be kind to the Japanese due to the atomic bombs we put out. “American GIS also helped change the image of Japanese, especially as many married Japanese women” (Pye). This brought the cultures together, but even then, Western views diminished the Japanese traditions.

Memoirs of a Geisha share the differences between Americans and Japanese. Golden combines “a focus on one of the pillars of Western exotic imagination, quasi-academic discourse of the world of geisha and an implicit valorization of West over East” (Topping, 319). Westerners begin to try to change cultures they don't understand.

Works Cited
Boocock, Sarane Spence. "Japanese Women: Shadow or Sun?." Contemporary Sociology 13.5 (1984): 551-556.
Golden, Arthur. “Memoirs of a Geisha.”
Palmer, Kimberly Shearer. "Geisha reality." Women's Review of Books 20.12 (2003): 14-14.
Pye, Lucian W. "America's Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy." Foreign Affairs 86.2: 181-182.
Topping, Margaret. "Writing the Self, Writing the Other in Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème and Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha." Comparative Critical Studies 1.3 (2004): 309-322.