We deeply learned the idea of community from few Japanese literature works in our class, like Ihara Saikaku’s From Life of a Sensuous Woman and Ueda Akinari’s Bewitched. We recognize the Japanese community and especially its male chauvinism and economic stratification of society from those stories. In Bewitched, we observe that the men must be economically independent as they need to support his wife and his household. The men who fail to be financially supportive, like Toyo, would not be accepted by the family and social structure. And the women are considered to be solely economically dependent on the men. Also, in From Life of a Sensuous Woman, the girls from the poor families wager all their money on the intense competition of becoming the mistress of the domain lord.

The ideas of Japanese community, male chauvinism, and social class remind me a film called Memoirs of a Geisha, which I have watched few times. Imagine the scene that the geisha who are traditional Japanese female entertainers wear the gorgeous colorful kimono and walk gracefully in the streets of Gion, the house of geisha in Kyoto. However, behind the marvelous beauty of this traditional art, there are young girls’ years of hardworking training and practicing. Traditionally, geisha begin their training at a young age and some girls were even bonded to the geisha houses as children. Those young girls are apprentices of the geisha house and are bonded under the contract to their geisha house. As the training process is very expensive and they have to pay back the debts to the geisha house with the earnings they make. They are not allowed to work or live independently until their debts are fully settled. In other words, the geisha’s freedom is limited by their contractor or owner, the geisha house, even including the right of developing relationship or marriage. Beside paying back the debt by their own, they could also find and ask help from their sponsors to redeem themselves from the contract. Those sponsors are usually the power elite of the society, like government officials, military officers, and business owners. We observe that even though the geisha are the treasure of Japanese traditional art with quite handsome earnings, they are still considered as lower class of the whole social hierarchy.

Historically, the young girls who came from poverty families were used to be sold to the geisha house by their parents who did not have financial ability to raise the girls. And that is the plot in the film, Memoirs of a Geisha. Chiyo, a young girl from a poor fishing village along with her sister are sold to different geisha houses by their father. In the geisha house, Chiyo meets another young girl called Pumpkin, the mother of the geisha house, and the dominant working geisha, Hatsumomo. Chiyo and Pumpkin need to study together and compete with each other for the position of the mother’s adopted daughter and heiress of the geisha house. That is, the wining person then would have some security under her own name in her old age since right now all the earnings belong to the name of the house instead of themselves’. This is a cruel fact for the two young girls: they two meet each other in the same geisha house and become good partners at the early days by fate; when they two later realize that the only way they could own the asset to establish themselves in the small geisha house, in the geisha industry, or in the society, is to fight with their best and only friend. Beside the competition between the two young trainers, there is also conflict between Chiyo and her geisha sister, Hatsumomo. Hatsumomo is the house’s only working geisha and is famous for her beauty in the local area of geisha houses. She is jealous of Chiyo’s attractive grey-eyes and views the little Chiyo as her potential rival who will definitely affect her dominate status in the geisha house. Soon after Chiyo’s discovery of Hatsumomo’s hidden boyfriend, which is against the rules of the geisha lifestyle, Hatsumomo increases her anger towards Chiyo. In addition, the conflict between Chiyo’s escape from the geisha house and the mother’s later punishment towards Chiyo impresses me a lot. Not like other girls’ silence and accepting the reality, Chiyo rebels and runs away from the house to get her life back. Even though she eventually failed and is demoted from geisha training to working as a slave to pay off her debt to the mother, at least she has the desire of being free and independent, which are the basic ideas of feminism. That is, she is not a numb and she is not dead.

Geisha house in the film is like a golden cage and the young girls are like the canaries. They are trained by the best but strict art traditions, including manner, expression, tea ceremony, instruments, dance, and so on. And they are provided with food, clothes, rooms, and servants all at the expensive of freedom. Common people are easily attracted by the breathtaking beauty of the geisha and their eremitic lifestyle, but what we could not observe directly is the price the young girls pay. During that era and social class background, the geisha are deprived of their female rights or even the human rights. They are like to own the asset he commercials sold by their parents to the house, are the financial dependence of the mother, are the assets of the house, and the art works for the rich men to enjoy. This is the sadness and tragedy of that era and that social stratification system.