Last night we went on a geisha tour with a guy called Peter MacIntosh.
Peter was a wealth of knowledge about geisha, although we were a tiny bit surprised that he could recognise them even outside their geisha clothes (ie in jeans) from the back.
Anyway, he told us lots about how the geisha system works which was fascinating and showed that Memoirs of a Geisha was mostly right but also wildly wrong on some points.
This is a pic of a teahouse which is the place you have to call to book a geisha.
You can only book if you are a member of a teahouse which is by invitation only. Some teahouses are also boarding houses for geishas like the one below:
Peter is pointing out the names of the geisha. Usually they take similar names with a common prefix even though they have regular names from their previous life which they keep for their passport etc.
There are about 300 geisha in Kyoto.
The geisha move pretty fast and don’t normally stop for photos so here’s a few pics that I managed to snap not particularly well. The older women are “Mothers” from geisha boarding houses although there are some older women still active as geishas themselves. The oldest geisha in Kyoto is over 90.
This is the bridge that features in Memoirs of Geisha. For those who have read it, it’s where the main character meets the Chairman and he gives her an icecream. We did not see any icecreams, however.
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