Hi. Can you provide a specific explanation of 'Geisha are/were not prostitute', it would be even greater if there are specific factual evidence. Also, was mizuage carried ever accepted or is it a breach in geisha world (even before the ban of Government)? I talked to my Japanese friend this morning, but she denotes that in the past geisha job involved 'baishun' and it is actually no clear line between geisha and oiran as they are all operate in hanamachi.
You know, I have this funny feeling that I’ve talked about this topic numerous times before, but let’s lay it out again, shall we?During the Edo Period (1603-1868) all entertainment and fun stuff was sequestered into certain sections of cities so that the government could keep an eye out on the goings on of its inhabitants and tax them accordingly. This meant that ANYTHING having to do with fun times was there; a short list of some of the entertainment that could be found there included: kabuki, bunraku puppet plays, any music of any kind, geisha, rakugo, and prostitution. Each individual occupation had its own set of rules laid out by the government, and if a person began performing duties outside of their occupation then they were stripped of their licenses, forced to pay a fine, kicked out of the entertainment districts and, in many cases, incarcerated. So, yeah, the Edo government didn’t dick around when it came to jobs and licenses, and most of this came about when geisha became recognized as a legitimate profession. Originally geisha were serving girls in various tea houses, but eventually some of them took up singing or the shamisen, and were called to parties that usually had yūjo (prostitutes) as the entertainers. The yūjo, not wanting the new geisha doing their jobs, petitioned the government to make a law stating that only yūjo could sell sex while a geisha could not, and this lead to the government’s institutions of laws and licenses surrounding professions. It needs to be noted that parties with yūjo are not what you’d expect from prostitutes; a customer didn’t just come to a brothel, have sex, and then leave. They usually came to drink, have their egos stroked, play some games, and at the end of the night they got down to business after shooing everyone else out of the room. The karyukai was a place to have fun, so men usually came in groups to party together as tea houses were often places where business deals went down. Many Japanese companies still have outings like these with their employees, but they’re usually contained to bars and don’t involve prostitution. Traditionally, prostitution wasn’t seen as a bad or dirty thing in Japanese society as it was sex for pleasure, which was not something that your wife was expected to give to you. As long as you still performed your “marital duties” then you could hang out with as many prostitutes as you had the money for.As for the mizuage thing, that’s an issue of a word having multiple meanings within the same area, the karyukai, as a whole. For a yūjo/oiran/tayū the mizuage was the ritual in which a virgin was deflowered, thus marking her official entry into the profession, ‘cause it’s kinda impossible to have a virgin prostitute. Their mizuage was sold to the highest bidder, and said funds usually went to trying to pay down a girl’s debt for her debut, which were astronomical and very few ever managed to pay off this debt. Their mizuage price usually then dictated how much they could charge as a working member, and those with the highest mizuage usually became the oiran (these same girls were raised to hopefully take on that role anyway, but a person taking interest in an apprentice usually ensured their future as being an oiran or taking on a lower position).For geisha, a mizuage was (and still is) the total amount of money made within a single year. This amount of money translates into working hours, which then becomes the basis for the yearly rankings. Geisha and their apprentices are paid the same rate per hour, so the best are the ones with the most hours worked. Unlike the yūjo/oiran/tayū, the geisha in the olden days had fairly fixed wages, although apprentices used to be paid half of what a geisha made (current laws now make this illegal). When it comes to the education system, Japanese public schools are severely lacking in education about the karyukai. They barely register as a blip on the radar of any high school kid and aren’t really taught about at all. Recently, some schools have invited maiko to perform and give a small lesson on what they do and how their profession came about, but this has yet to become a common occurrence. So, sadly, most of Japanese society is still not aware of what it is that geisha do, and the old notions that “geisha and prostitutes worked in the same areas, therefore they must have had the same jobs” is still rampant. I mean, it really is a stupid line of thought when you break it down though; wait staff and chefs both work in restaurants, but should you expect your wait staff to actually cook your meals and chefs to bring them to you? No, they’re separate jobs within the same sphere; just because they work together doesn’t mean that they do the jobs of others, and this is no different in the karyukai. Geisha still exist because prostitution was made illegal in 1958, but their job was never about sex to begin with. They’re simply highly skilled entertainers who entertain with dance, music, and wit.
