Through a geisha's white American man's eyes

A prostitute or artist?

Take a look at the picture of the woman at the left of the text. What do you see or think? Is she just a beautiful but mysterious feminine presence? Or, as an Asian woman, is she attempting to be “white” with the face paint? Is this just dress-up? Is her outfit supposed to be a traditional cultural emblem or simply a modern interpretation with a size label on the back? Is this a prostitute? Or an entertainer? Do you consider her to be an artist? Does anything about her speak of artistic achievements? Or is she just a sex object?

Now take all those ideas, images and interpretations and throw them out the window. Bury them in the yard. Forget about them, because as Kimiko Akita argues in “Bloopers of a Geisha: Male Orientals and Colonization of Women’s Language” we in the West lack the “equivalent of geisha [so] the Westernized image and voice of geisha  has always been created and controlled by men, through Orientalist filters” (14). We cannot say or think anything about geishas or the geisha lifestyle without acknowledging that the West has created, shaped – even altered – the East.

In traditional Japanese culture, the geisha is a revered individual, a “respected professional… [with] refined deportment… multifaceted and excellent artistry…feminine demeanor, sophistication and well-mannered behaviors” (Akita 13). This level of value and veneration is not quite what the Western world might used to describe the prostitutes and whores who hang around back alleys and casino night clubs in big cities. But all too commonly, the American concept of the geisha aligns itself with those sordid ladies-of-the-night, the geisha resigned to a mere hooker from another land, only with lavish kimonos and white face paint in lieu of skin-tight spandex and heavy eyeliner. And it is the locale of the “other land” that creates the opposition between American and Japanese, Self and Other, Us and Them. The geisha is mysterious, beautiful, sublimely different and thoroughly exotic. Akita points out that while the West had some notions of the Japanese culture beginning from the rise of the trade industry, “encounters with American GIs during the postwar occupation” made the Japanese culture more prominent as they came back with tales of the “geisha-girl… as a symbol of repression, passivity” (13). Because the real geisha were elite and revered in the Japanese, the banal encounters most American soldiers had with Japanese women were indeed with prostitutes. Prostitution was legal until 1956, but Akita notes that the “geisha were forbidden by law to provide sexual services”, this edict going as far back as to the 1700s when the geisha first arose in Japan (13). Thus the stories and tales Western soldiers brought back solidified the idea of females from Japan – not just the geisha but all Japanese women – as being a passive, obedient, mysterious, foreign, exotic, exciting, enticing, and above all, willing to bestow their erotic gifts upon those who would seek it. 

In her essay, Akita criticizes Golden – as well as Takayoshi Ogawa, the man who translated the American novel into Japanese – because “men create (dictate) most of what we know about women and women’s lives (a landscape foreign to men) and how men treat women as Other and alterity and misrepresent them” (12). Because Golden and Ogawa are both men, they cannot and will never understand the true world of a woman, nor provide complete, truthful and wholly sincere portray of women’s roles. Through domination of language, men misrepresent women, the West misrepresents the East, and they spread “false knowledge… around the world” (Akita 12) just as Golden (and to some extant Ogawa through the English-to-Japanese translation) has done with the geisha through a fictional text.

It could be argued that Golden was attempting to portray an accurate story from the viewpoint of a geisha. It is true that he did interview several former geishas, perhaps even taking it too far – one individual named Mineko Iwasaki claimed in a lawsuit that much of the novel was a loose adaptation of her own life, albeit hyped-up and over-sexualized. Edward Said’s masterful essay “Orientialism” warns the novelist or artist who wishes to portray the East by saying that he must “located himself vis-à-vis the Orient… [finding the] deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking it its behalf” (2). But this is not without some previous knowledge – or more accurately, assumptions – about the East. It also should be stressed that the portrayal of the East, whether it is concerned with a person, place or both, is merely representational.  The Occidental can never truly portray the Oriental because whatever is said cannot be trusted. It would simply be a construct that the West has fabricated about the East. So even if Golden was striving for authenticity in his story, he could never hope to reach that point because somewhere along the line, his own assumptions, voice and creative motivation to tell a thrilling, engaging and (most importantly) fast-selling story would take over and distort the truth. 

“For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I’d always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness – a world in which fathers didn’t sell their daughters” – Memoirs of a Geisha

Perhaps if Golden had stopped and really took the time to understand the Japanese culture, he would not have made such an inaccurate and unsettling mistake as to assume that the traditional geisha lifestyle was something that young girls were being forced into, as his main character claims in the novel. Despite selling millions of copies of Memoirs of a Geisha and seeing the novel turn into a Hollywood-ized film production, it is too bad that Golden suffered from the cruel social disease that is Orientalism.

Or perhaps his sole error is rather simple to understand: he was born a white male, after all.  

Word count: 944

Works cited

Akita, Kimiko. “Bloopers of a Geisha: Male Orientalism and Colonization of Women’s Language.” Women and Language 32.1 (Spr 2009). Wilson Web. Web. 8 August 2011.

Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Print.

Said, Edward. “Chapter 4: Orientalism”. Printed Excerpt.