While geishas have become a fixture of popular media, kabuki dance master Hanayagi Isaburo dispelled myths about their lives and revealed the hardships that they face last night.
As part of the annual two-week Cherry Blossom Festival, the Center for East Asian Studies and the Japan-American Society of Greater Philadelphia co-sponsored a discussion about the traditional Japanese entertainers.
"The geisha world has a potent spell that is cast on us today," Japanese Studies professor and discussion moderator Linda Chance said. "I am going to argue it is a potent spell of misunderstanding."
Geishas are widely misunderstood even by Japanese youths, who get their information from movies and "don't know much more about it than [Americans] do," Chance said.
Hanayagi Isaburo, raised in an okiya, or geisha house, since birth and trained in dance since age 3, described the difficulties of becoming a geisha.
Girls must forgo having families, he said, because they begin training very young. Maikos, or geishas in training, start between the ages of 15 and 21.
Future geishas must spend most of their time practicing. Maikos practice in groups of around 15, five days a week, with weekends consumed by other work.
Geisha dances are very complicated and it is challenging to master all the steps, he added.
"Ordinarily, it takes about a month to learn a single dance," Isaburo said.
Once a geisha has completed her training, her goal is to entertain men in a chaste manner.
"The work of a geisha is to make men think they want to meet her above all others," Isaburo said.
According to Isaburo, the contemporary Western representation of geishas as objects of lust is false.
"I'd like you to understand the difference between making men happy selling your art and selling your body," Isaburo said.
The film Memoirs of a Geisha, which was released last year, short-changed some of the true geisha ideals, Isaburo said.
"The mother in the film was very strict about money. But in geisha houses, they are strict about art," Isaburo said.
