Country Geisha. Masuda Sayo, who lived a life at the edge of survival during her early years, has been described as a geisha. If so, she serves as an excellent example of how misleading the term can be. Her experience was much different from that of the elegant entertainers who inhabited the higher geisha world of Kyoto and Tokyo. Masuda was a lower level country or hot spring geisha and easy to confuse with prostitutes. Also, she left the geisha world at the end of World War II when barely twenty and found other ways to eke out a living. We have her story by chance and lure of possible prize money. In 1957, only a few years after the Occupation had ended, Masuda, age thirty-two, decided to tell her story, Account of the Wanderings of a Country Geisha,” in a popular magazine, Shufu no tomo (The Housewives Friend). Though she had earned second prize, the magazine had her narrative rewritten into a formal style that did a disservice to her personal voice. She was in fact a good story teller. Subsequently, she was able to expand her memoir into a book under the direction of a sympathetic editor who met with her and did his best to preserve her style and identity as expressed in her own hand, a simple hiragana or phonetic script. From that time until Masuda’s old age, her publisher has respected her privacy. As of 2005, she is still alive but has remained anonymous. This changed recently when she agreed to meet her English language translator, Gaye G. Rowley, on the occasion of a new paperback edition of her book. As yet, there are no photos of her in the public domain.

Early Life and Training. Masuda was born in mountainous Nagano Prefecture, which is famous for skiing and other winter sports and has hosted Olympic winter games. The illegitimate daughter of impoverished rural parents, she was turned over to a maternal uncle for the first few years of her life and apparently never had any contact with her father. Surprisingly for Japan in the early 1930s, where compulsory elementary education and mass literacy had become the norm for most children, she did not receive formal primary schooling and learn to read and write. Perhaps because Japan, especially the countryside, was hard hit by the Great Depression, Masuda was instead shipped out to work as a maid for a well-off farm family. At the age of twelve, approximately 1937, her uncle, with acquiescence from her desperately poor mother, sold or rather indentured Masuda to a nearby hot springs geisha house, the Takenoya, in the resort town of Suwa. It was here that she learned her family name for the first time.

Until the age of sixteen, Matsuda received training as a novice in the song, dance, and instrumental arts associated with geisha entertainment but remained nearly illiterate. For the next four years, coinciding approximately with the Pacific War, she lived as a full-fledged country geisha, entertained men, and received points, or graduated payments, for sex. As Rowley, explains: “at the lower end, in a hot-spring resort like Suwa where Masuda worked, sex with geisha was the expected end of every evening.” Moreover, “The only regular patrons in Masuda’s day were local factory owners and their sons, small-time entrepreneurs, and petty gangsters.” As Masuda’s describes it, however, there were “sleep-with-anyone-geisha” and geisha who slept only with a danna or patron. To get a good patron, to get him to like her, she had to work at being “cute and sexy.” To become a mistress, which she briefly did, was a step up. It was a life which has also in part been depicted in Kawabata Yasunari’s famous novel, Snow Country, and a postwar film version, but both are told mainly from the point of view of male clients.

War’s End and Occupation. Masuda was cast our by her patron and had no place to go after restaurants were closed down by the government in March 1944. She managed, age twenty, to become the mistress of another man in Chiba prefecture, but his house was burned down in a raid at war’s end and he died of a heart attack in 1946. “I hadn’t really experienced the war in any direct say,” she explains in her memoir, “and so I didn’t understand clearly what it meant for the war to end. But if this was what war was like, I thought, why couldn’t it have ended a week earlier? Then our house wouldn’t have burned down.” Her wanderings in Tokyo and nearby Chiba Prefecture during the Occupation years, 1945-1952, as graphically expressed in her book and retold in the excerpt on this site, are extremely valuable as an illustration of life at the lowest level in the rubble of a lost war. And more than that, it is the tale of a young unmarried woman making her own way and falling into a life of petty crime and violence. “I did literally anything,” she confesses. She sold newspapers, worked in a factory making clay kitchen braziers, found a better paying job making dumpling soup in a restaurant, and left this for the black-market and ended up selling soap. Masuda tells her readers too of the struggles of resident Koreans in Japan as her life intersects with theirs in a cycle of discrimination and she becomes what she calls their “gang moll.”

Uppermost in her mind throughout her travails was the well-being of a beloved younger half brother, seven years her junior. He came into her life at the end of the war when she unsuccessfully tried to reunite with her mother. Matsuda scarcely mentions the Occupation of Japan except to swear to her brother that, whatever happens, she will not become “’a GI-whore’” [Rowley’s translation for Masuda’s term, pan-pan, or street walker]. Her meager savings from the black market and menial jobs were intended to help provide him with an education but were siphoned off for medical expenses when he contracted tuberculosis. For bigger money, she became a prostitute by night in order to attend her brother’s bedside by day. He gave her what little education she acquired in reading and writing. His death in 1952 by suicide, when he threw himself from a hospital roof to spare her further financial drain, was a painful loss. It is a reminder too of the scourge of TB in modern Japan and the combined effort by Japanese and American medical doctors to fight it during the Occupation.

Post-Occupation Notoriety. Back in her home territory in Nagano and briefly re-united with the only man she ever loved, a repatriated veteran with a wife and child, Masuda decided she must leave him. Her way back from descent into an alcoholic daze was by learning to tell children’s stories. Not sufficiently educated even to take an exam to train for a trade, she had to work as a waitress and cater to drunken customers. Because of her background, she could not even be a kindergarten assistant. Yet, at thirty, she felt “born for the first time” and free finally to be herself. She was resigned to doing whatever “bits and pieces of work” enabled her to keep going. She lent a hand at rice-planting and then found a job looking after children. At this point, Matsuda, as Rowley points out, learned about the prize money and was also motivated to publish her memoir as a way to express opposition to the Prostitution Prevention Act of 1957. She believed that prostitutes should not be criminalized and should be able to work as prostitutes if they so desired. She says of the legislators and the proper women who supported prevention, “Among those making the laws, were there any women like us who couldn’t have survived if they hadn’t prostituted themselves?” Her story, misread by some as gossip, brought her notoriety as well as fame, forcing her to seek peace of mind in anonymity.