Geisha represent aspects such as romantic or sexual appeal, conversationalists, and artistic for malls. To the Japanese men, these are items that are no necessarily owned by their wives. This is completely different than the American view. The wife for Americans are companions, lovers, and mothers all in one. For the Japanese, these traits a man could desire from any number of women, not just one. Americans look for a “whole” woman while the Japanese look for a “single” woman.
“For most Westerners, the work geisha conjures up a vague fantasy of a sex worker crossed with an artist, perhaps similar to the European courtesans of the last century” (Palmer). Westerners do not separate the difference between geisha and prostitutes the way the Japanese do. We see that geisha sell themselves for money, thus they are prostitutes. The problem is that geisha are entertainers and artists as well. The Geisha had to go through a lot to distinguish themselves from prostitutes. Since the Geisha and prostitutes sometimes worked in the same areas, the developed regulations “prohibiting geisha from sleeping with prostitutes customers. . . or from wearing the same tupe of kimono or hair ornaments, suggesting the difficulties of maintaining professional boundaries” (Boocock, 554). We also see this in Memoirs of a Geisha with the difference between the sections of the city that Chiyo and her sister are taken to. It is also noticeable when you look at the attire of the geisha versus the prostitute. The geisha's bow is tied in the back while the prostitutes bow is tied in the front for quicker access for clients.
The geisha's life changed dirastically when World War II came around. “The economic devastation caused by the war and ensuing United States occupation put an end to the tradition” (Palmer). The impact of Americans was devastating to the traditional Japan. There were trinkets being sold to Americans for money, so that people would be able to live. The Americans were found to actually be kind, and the rumors of Americans raping Japanese were false, bringing the cultures crashing together. The Americans also felt that they had to be kind to the Japanese due to the atomic bombs we put out. “American GIS also helped change the image of Japanese, especially as many married Japanese women” (Pye). This brought the cultures together, but even then, Western views diminished the Japanese traditions.
Memoirs of a Geisha share the differences between Americans and Japanese. Golden combines “a focus on one of the pillars of Western exotic imagination, quasi-academic discourse of the world of geisha and an implicit valorization of West over East” (Topping, 319). Westerners begin to try to change cultures they don't understand.
Works Cited
Boocock, Sarane Spence. "Japanese Women: Shadow or Sun?." Contemporary Sociology 13.5 (1984): 551-556.
Golden, Arthur. “Memoirs of a Geisha.”
Palmer, Kimberly Shearer. "Geisha reality." Women's Review of Books 20.12 (2003): 14-14.
Pye, Lucian W. "America's Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy." Foreign Affairs 86.2: 181-182.
Topping, Margaret. "Writing the Self, Writing the Other in Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème and Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha." Comparative Critical Studies 1.3 (2004): 309-322.
