Chiyo’s encounter with The Chairman changes her fortune drastically and this goes to show how gieshas/women were intermediaries of class, wealth, and fortune.Ī jorou-ya is a brothel which is a place of prostitution. Geishas typically supply money for their assigned okiyas, pay back the people that financed them once they start working as a geisha, and will work for men that offer the highest bid. Crab considered himself something of an aristocrat. Crab, The Chairman, Nobu (chairman’s best friend), and The Baron. They were basically inclined to please these powerful men because they were dependent upon the wealthy, upper-class men of Japanese society.Ĭhiyo was affiliated with upper-class men such as Dr. if a powerful man makes up his mind to destroy me, well, he’ll do it!” This is an implication that women didn’t have as much power as men did in Japanese society. There’s a quote from the book and I’m not sure if it was said in the film that says “I certainly can’t afford to have a powerful man upset with me. It embodies the elegance and reserved movements of Japanese dance and it also points to the importance of fans in the overall scheme of a performance and demonstrates how the flowing sleeves of a costume were used to accent the fluid lines created by dancers. There was also a six-panel folding screen that depicted dancers of the Edo period which reminded me of the scene of Chiyo’s dance performance. There were some that were plain looking (most likely worn by ordinary women) and the flashy fashionable kimonos that were most likely worn by women of upper-class society. In relevance to my visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there was a wide variety of kimonos being displayed and a lot of the designs on them were based around cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums. The kimono is worn daily by geishas and there were different styles worn for different occasions such as tea ceremonies, parties, funerals, and other events. Other social standards imposed on the geishas included paying off debts that were bound to geishas since the start of serving the mistress of their appointed okiya and to give the “look” to attract a man’s attention- based on the scene where Chiyo is being transformed into a geisha and Mameha is teaching her the ways of a geisha.Ī geisha’s place in society is shown through a kimono, which defined the geisha’s status and class. We become Geisha because we have no other choice.” It saddens me that women were oppressed in the sense that they had no power or freedom of choice to become what they wanted, but instead were forced to live the life of a geisha. It was set to be a social standard for women living in poverty to be sold to okiyas by their parents to become a geisha- “We do not become Geisha to pursue our own destinies.
Chiyo was a daughter of a fisherman in a small village and after the death of their mother, Chiyo and her sister were sold to people of other houses Chiyo’s sister was sold to a brothel and Chiyo was sold to an “okiya”- a house for geisha in Gion, which is a district of Kyoto, Japan. After watching the film “Memoirs of a Geisha”, I saw that geishas evolved from women placed in lower-class society.
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