The Land od the Rising Yen

have a little more
money for themselves. But they have strict orders from their poor, oppressed
wives to bring their pay-packets home unopened and they would not dare to
disobey. That’s where the new industry comes in. Pay-packets are printed and
supplied to order, showing the required, smaller sums; replicas of the
company’s bags, typography, pay slips, etc. A man can open his pay-packet, take
out a few thousand yen for his own private use and still deliver a properly
sealed and seemingly unopened pay-packet to the higher authority.
    If this goes on for long the
oppressive and lordly Japanese male will have to strike a blow for his
emancipation and start an ‘Equal Rights for Men’ movement.
    Something like it is already in the
air. Why should certain occupations be closed to men? I have not heard of male
geishas yet but male hostesses — well, hosts, if I may coin a word — have made
their first appearance.
    A charming Irish lady who works as a
governess for an English family in Tokyo told me about her experience of this.
She went into a newly opened café and ordered a cold drink. A pleasant,
good-looking, smartly dressed, well-spoken young man approached her and asked
for permission to sit at her table. Having received permission, he sat down,
ordered a lemonade for himself, and proceeded to chat to her most amusingly for
about twenty minutes. The lady — pretty and charming but no longer in her
twenties — felt very pleased with her success: the young man was at least ten
years younger than she. She stood up and said goodbye to her companion.
    ‘Thank you very much,’ she said
warmly.
    ‘What do you mean, ‘Thank you very
much’? asked the young man, painfully surprised. ‘You will be charged for my
drink and you owe me 300 yen.’
     
    A footnote to this remarkable
development. Mr Michikhiro Kono, the manager of Tokyo’s latest and biggest
host-club, the Night Miyamasu, told a reporter of the Asahi Evening News that his night-club used to be a conventional one with hostesses instead of
‘social partners’ — as he preferred to call his young men — but the club proved
to be more profitable after the changeover. He added that more than six hundred
and twenty men applied when the night-club advertised jobs for men between
eighteen and thirty-five, offering a monthly salary of Y 200,000 (£235 or
$560). As work starts at 5.30 p.m. the men could take this employment as a
second job. Applicants included employees of reputable trading firms,
high-school teachers and former Japanese Self-Defence Force personnel. Ten per
cent of them were married men. One of the applicants brought written permission
from his wife.

     

THE GEISHA
     
    In all disputes and discussions the
first rule is: clarify your terms. This is important in philosophy — linguistic
or otherwise — in politics, in political science and in law. Whole books,
indeed whole libraries, have been written on the interpretation of an ‘and’ or
an ‘a’ in a statute or an international treaty. Clear definition of terms is
important in all fields, but in none more so than that concerned with geishas.
    Westerners of both sexes are often
under the impression that the geisha girl is a superior kind of prostitute. But
Western husbands on their return to Manchester, Los Angeles or Melbourne are at pains to explain to their wives that they are not: nothing could be
farther from the truth, they say with a slightly nervous laugh. Geishas are
cultured young ladies with exquisite manners, they are dancers, singers and
entertainers of great talent, and it is not on their skill in the art of love
but on their skill in repartee that their reputation rests.
    The truth — at least one truth, I shall come to the other presently — is that the geisha girl is a
cultured and highly trained young prostitute with a gift for repartee.
    It is equally true, nevertheless,
that while geishas can be bought for the night (it is a matter of price and a
very high price at that), a geisha-party, much more often than not, means only
supper, drinking sake, watching dancing and listening to singing and gay
conversation (full of repartee). Mamasan — the wise and all powerful
supervisor and mentor of the girls (it would be horribly rude to call her the
brothel-keeper) — is not surprised if someone wishes to linger late in one of
the tiny little houses where the parties take place but, as a rule, after
midnight the guests return to their family hearths.
    A young