Japanese Bathing Beauties
BY REV. GOLIGHTLY MORRILL
Pastor People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.
To the religious rambler, Japan is divided into two parts—that which is inhabited by the Geisha girls, and that “cohabited” by the Yoshiwara.
I thought more of the Geisha dancers than the dance, and that wasn’t much. The word “Geisha” means accomplished one, and there are schools for their education in music and the arts. People visit the girls more for pleasure than for profit, and since they are one of the institutions of Japan, I went one night to a tea-house to see them. Making myself as comfortable as possible on the floor, a screen door was slipped aside, and in came a pretty Geisha girl who touched her head to the floor three times, sat down and looked at each one of our party. Immediately there fluttered in three more, and they made the room look like an Oriental bird cage. They sang for us in a tone that suggested an ungreased axle or a nail drawn across a piece of glass, played on the samisen and koto, which nothing but the genius of a Wagner could appreciate went through a fancy fan drill and proved themselves good entertainers, but felt embarrassed because we were not familiar and indecent. They acted serious and spoke to one another, and I asked what was the trouble. It seems they didn’t know what to make of us, as the average tourist was usually boisterous, drunk and rough.
The Yoshiwara is the red-lantern district of Japan. One night we formed a stag party to visit the Tokio Yoshiwara, but we couldn’t shake the “dears” who were as anxious to go as we were and insisted on accompanying us. Our rickshaws rolled through squares and streets and miles of mud and misery, until we came to what was in itself a “city of dreadful night,” but all ablaze with electric lights. Here were squares of theatre-looking buildings in which women, dressed in bright and fancy garb, sat by little stoves, and sullen, smiling or smoking pipes, looked out at the spectators. The government regulates this “social” as a “necessary evil,” and houses, supervises and guards the girls. In Japan it is regarded as noble and filial for a daughter to sell herself to support the father and family who may have failed financially. The same thing is done in Europe and America for wealth and social position, but differently estimated and under another name.
Here they squatted in butterfly regalia, with silk kimona, obi, glossy black hair stuck full of combs and gold pins, eyes painted and faces powdered, thrumming a little guitar, squeaking out a love-song, and making goo-goo eyes in a way that would make one smile if he could forget the hell-horror of the place. Some of the inmates do not leave until death; others return to society, which welcomes and does not disown; one may return to her home, loved and respected, but with none of the fine clothes and jewels given by her admirers during her absence. However, the place often becomes a matrimonial bureau, and the girl is met, courted and selected by some Jap as his wife. In addition to segregation, there is such a supervision that the inmates can’t leave for even an hour without the consent of the police.
Hotel life is interesting. If you are curious, you have only to wet your thumb and thrust it through the wall paper of your bed chamber to get as many views as Peeping Tom had of Lady Godiva. This hole privilege is, however, only claimed by the traveler who has no respect for the holy of holies at inn or temple.
Japan is the land of the Rising Sun—and daughter, who with the whole family will take their bath and leave the same water for you to swim in unless you set your alarm clock for a very early hour, or sit up all night to get there first. Imagine a public bath, if you can, for many homes have no bathroom, where the water by 10:00 A.M. is like a roily creek after a rain; by 3:00 P.M., yellow as the Missouri, and by bedtime like the mud geysers of the Yellowstone.
The public bath was the one thing we wanted to see and kept asking about. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and after visiting 2,738 of the 3,000 temples in Kobe, I wanted to get “next” to a public bath. At last I discovered one and sent the guide ahead to reconnoiter. He said, “Come.” I passed the word along and the ladies came, but wished they hadn’t. We entered and I became a “looker-on” at Venus in the bath, and not one but many, who made the painted females in the Uffizi look like chromos or Mrs. Jarley’s wax works. They eyed us with an indifference that made us blush and look through our fingers for shame. With the ease that only a model for the altogether possesses, they posed before the mirrors, arranging their black hair, or poised like maids of the mist by the steam tank. Their type of beauty is different. Jap beauty is in angles, the American in curves. Nature made one with a ruler, the other with a compass. As a rule, the baths for men and women are divided by a wooden partition at the end of which sits the proprietor or his wife on the lookout. Formerly there was no privacy and the fastidious foreigners insisted that the sexes should be separated. This was accomplished by placing a bamboo rod between them, but even that is discarded now in some sections. Everybody gets into the swim, thus beautifully illustrating the proverb, “Evil to him that evil thinks.” O tempora! O mores!
One of the strongest impressions made upon me in my journey through Japan was at Mogi, a malodorous little fishing village, out from Nagasaki, with so large a smell that a blind man could easily find it by following his nose. Coleridge, the poet, whose business it was to rely on imagination rather than on fact, counted sixty well-defined and several stinks at Cologne. He would have been overpowered here and called for the help of a professor of higher mathematics to enumerate the volume and variety of odors we encountered from Nagasaki to this town.
A well made road lassoes the intervening foot-hills which are covered with cultivated fields; the peasants were all busy, the children were happy and more so when we threw them peanuts instead of “pansies” for thoughts. Men, women and oxen were carrying various loads, but the common one was a bamboo bucket affair balanced on both ends of a bamboo pole. These buckets were not filled with milk, or cheese, or vegetables, but with a substance which they had assiduously collected in accordance with the Scripture, “Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost.” I can never forget the ascent or the descent to Mogi. From rocky road, through pretty forest, by picturesque ravine, we reached the fishermen’s huts with their nets by the shore and beach where bathing mermaids can only be caught and carried home in a camera.
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