Kawaguchi - Butterflys sisters : the Geisha in western culture

Butterfly's Sisters

Butterfly's Sisters

THE GEISHA IN

WESTERN CULTURE

YOKO KAWAGUCHI

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

For Simon

Copyright 2010 Yoko Kawaguchi

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:

U.S. Office: sales.press@yale.edu www.yalebooks.com

Europe Office: sales@yaleup.co.uk www.yaleup.co.uk

Set in Arno Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kawaguchi, Yoko.

Butterfly's Sisters / Yoko Kawaguchi.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780300115215 (cl:alk. paper)

1. GeishasHistory. 2. Civilization, Western. I. Title.

GT3412.K36 2010

792.702'80952dc22

2010017516

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

>

This book has been many years in gestation, and I would like to thank my numerous friends who have lent me their warm support through the various stages of its development. I am grateful to Dr John Pikoulis for giving me the opportunity at a very early stage to present some of my ideas in the form of a series of lectures for the Department for Continuing Education, Cardiff University. The late Maureen Lawrence also kindly invited me to give a talk for the Friends of Welsh National Opera, at which I became so enthusiastic that I overshot my allotted time by twenty minutes before I got to my first musical example. The encouragement from the many Friends over the years has been very important to me. I would also like to thank my husband's colleagues at Welsh National Opera for the warm welcome and generous help they have always extended to me.

I would like to thank Robert Baldock and Phoebe Clapham, my editors at Yale University Press, London, for giving me the opportunity to write this book, and the editorial department for their patience and expertise in seeing the project through to the end. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Professor Peter Davidson and Professor Jane Stevenson, who generously read through a draft of this book. Their practical advice and emotional support have been invaluable to me, while the intellectual stimulus they have provided has helped to push me to aim towards their own high standard of scholarship. The unflagging support of Mike and Alice Sharland, my agents, has been crucial to me in getting to the end of this project. I would also like to thank Iwata Tatsuji and his family for their warm hospitality in Tky, when I needed to get some vital research done at several major libraries in that city.

I am grateful to the following libraries and their staff for making their resources available to me: the British Library, London; the Bodleian Library and the Bodleian Japanese Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library;the London Library; the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Theatre Collections Reading Room at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Cardiff Central Library; Cardiff University Library; Glasgow University Library; the National Diet Library of Japan, both its Main Library in Tky and its Kansai-kan; Tky Metropolitan Library; saka Prefectural Library; Aichi Prefectural Library; the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum at Waseda University, Tky; and Nagasaki University Library.

My parents, as ever, have given me their unstinting support, and the love and kindness of the extended Rees and Powling clans have seen me over the toughest hurdles. I am extremely grateful to Dr Kamila Hawthorne, Dr Tracy Tye and, above all, Dr Ian Hughes, for restoring to me my health and the precious ability to enjoy life to the full. To my husband Simon Rees, whose inquiring mind, critical insight and relish for language have always been the primary inspiration in my life, I owe my deepest, heartfelt thanks.

As a Japanese girl growing up in North America in the 1960s and '70s, I used to be greatly irritated that the geisha appeared to be one of the chief images associated with Japan and its culture. That mincing, simpering personification of female subservience to the male infuriated me. I was annoyed at the persistence of such an anachronistic image of Japan. I hated, moreover, the insinuation that the Japanese were being disingenuous about the true nature of the geisha's occupation. At the same time, I felt that the geisha was being held up to me as a standard of exotic glamour that I could not possibly hope to live up to.

But then what did I know about real Japanese geishas? What I was reacting against was a western construct a western image of oriental femininity based upon reports (some more accurate than others) of the Japanese pleasure quarters, of which geishas were denizens, and upon western impressions of the Japanese generally, of their culture and their womenfolk, all of which had been brought back by generations of visitors to Japan.

The present book Butterfly's Sisters is about the development of a western cultural image of the feminine east. It will look at how the Japanese geisha has been depicted in a range of popular media in the west since the middle of the nineteenth century, when Japan opened its doors to wider contact with the rest of the world after more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation. Works that will be examined in this book range from painting, sculpture and photography to fiction, drama, musical comedy, opera, dance and motion pictures. I will be considering the reasons why the geisha should have taken hold of the western imagination as she has done, and how certain images of the geisha have come to be perpetuated in the west. I will also be looking at the connection between western images of the geisha and western ideas of other classes of Japanese women.

The geisha's rise to worldwide renown was not as straightforward as might now be imagined. What was known in the west even during the centuries of Japan's isolation, which lasted from the first half of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, was that the social system of that country accommodated a class of licensed prostitutes who inhabited officially sanctioned brothel quarters. Reports of such women appeared in the few accounts of Japan published in the west during that period, mostly by employees of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie), which, along with a small number of Chinese merchants, constituted the only foreign presence in Japan during those centuries. The VOC maintained a trading post on Dejima (otherwise known as Deshima), a tiny, man-made, fan-shaped island off the shore of the port town of Nagasaki, while the Chinese had their own walled quarter on land nearby. Foreigners were restricted to their respective trading posts, and they were only allowed to leave them under special circumstances. Since they were also prohibited from bringing their own womenfolk with them into Japan, they had no choice, if they wanted female companionship, but to ask for a professional courtesan to be sent from the official brothel quarter in town. Many of the accounts produced by employees of the VOC of their life on Dejima are candid about the arrangement that ensured a steady supply of women to the trading post.