Narrative Disorder… in Japan!

More cream and pink crockery I’m afraid!    This teacup and bowl are part of a set available at Nitori for around 299yen a piece. I got plates too which are a lovely organic semi oval shape.

The five-petaled flower is a very popular design here, indeed I almost bought another set which had the same flower and was much more pink - very pretty as individual pieces but as I began to load the full setting into my basket I was quickly overwhelmed by the amount of pink building in one place and the repetitive nature of the uniform design. This setting has just a blush of pink on each one and the design and colouring are not strictly the same on each piece making for a much more elegant effect on the whole.

If you are wondering what on earth the teacup is sitting on, it is actually the lid of the box in which the floral fan of the post “Prettinesses Pt 2″ came. The traditional box is made of wood with a lid exactly like a sushi mat and a leather thong with a wooden badge on it to close it. I have taken to using this as a case for my fountain pens which get lonely when left in the plush boxes they were bought in but are too delicate to flop around in a pencil case!

Note also the peach slices in the bowl - a Prettiness all nature’s making! For those in Sydney (or California, from experience) wondering what the red blush is on the inside of the slices not just on the skin - that’s what happens when peaches are allowed to ripen ON THE VINE lol. The flavour of these peaches is magnificent as is the flavour of most of the fruit and vegetables here in Japan - things just taste… right!

Any native English speakers living in Japan will have experienced Japanese English speakers/students when lost for either words or courage flip out their electronic dictionaries and deftly tap away with their thumbs till they come up with the English word they need. At this point they will either show you the screen or say the word, depending on their level of confidence, and instil in said native English speaker denshi jisho envy. If only it could be so easy to find the right word from the other direction… to BIC CAMERA POST HASTE!

Unfortunately, browsing of the denshi jisho available in Japan quickly deflates one’s excitement - they are so clearly made for Japanese learning English and not the other way round. If you have an intermediate or above knowledge of Japanese I’m sure they would  be great and I know many translators use the big ones with the extra technical/medical etc… dictionaries but they really are inaccessible for the complete beginner.

First, only the Canon Wordtank series has an OS available in English so even working out how to use them is less than transparent and the second main restriction is that they simply contain the wrong dictionaries for us. Say you want to know what a particular kanji means - now assuming you have bought one of the new ones which allow you to draw the kanji on the device and therefor you don’t need to know the furigana to type in order to look it up at all, the dictionary meaning you first get will be in Japanese and you then have to translate that by “jumping” to the Japanese to English dictionary to translate whichever word you highlighted in the first definition - assuming your model has that “jump” function. What’s more, you have to keep re-entering the kanji to get back to the definition to “jump” again if the first word you translated wasn’t enough for you to understand the meaning.  And still you are unlikely to find the translation you need unless you know for sure you have the starting kanji of the compound (as most will only let you search for kanji in the first place of a compound) and further still, only the very expensive models have extensive Japanese to English dictionaries 50,000yen upwards. SO, the upshot is - there is no cheap and cheerful denshi jisho that will work for a beginner AND there isn’t really an expensive one which will do the job either until you are far more advance in your language.

What about that DS lite kanji dictionary? I hear you ask. Well I have to say that Superman bought this one before we left for Japan and he has had good success with it. It doesn’t require that you know keystroke order and he says he uses it at work quite a bit. It is, however, only for kanji and again the application itself is all Japanese so it takes a bit of working out.

But all is not lost for those who want a true denshi jisho for English (or German or some other languages for that matter) speakers!! A lovely guy named Peter who lives in Japan has taken it upon himself to meet the need of this rather large niche of people by providing a product which is actually far beyond a denshi jisho. It’s not his day job but his commitment to improving his systems and his customer service wouldn’t give that away!

All the information you could possibly need is on his site: Japanese Language Tools Site the site itself is mostly text and screenshots doesn’t look that swish but he doesn’t need it - the system speaks for itself. In brief, he offers a fully reconditioned, recent model ( I chose the Dell Axim x51v, though there is another option) PDA with a dictionary application called Edict and a several dictionaries including Eijiro/Waeijiro installed as well as a range of more advanced dictionaries which you opt to either have installed on your original  system or can later download or buy on memory card if and when you feel your language needs more. He also offers the whole system on card or for download IF you already have a PDA which is setup to read Japanese text as well as English. If you are in Japan, though, the full system is the only thing which is worth getting as PDAs are not available here and the whole system costs about as much as buying a brand new PDA which you would still have to set up to be compatible in the first place but of course it would be up to you.

Why I love it!

Drawing Kanji: Obviously, being a PDA and a touch screen, you can write your kanji directly on the screen - it does not seem to require a stroke order at all but if you are at all interested in learning it, the kanji dictionary (”kanjidic” hehe) will give you not only the meaning but also a stroke order diagram for next time! This is what I have used it for most of all - checking the kanji on food in the supermarket or to work out what mysterious pieces of paper with my name and address on them in the mail are lol!

Cross Searching: This doesn’t just mean being able to search in all dictionaries (which you can do) but searching for more than one word at a time so that you can actually find phrases in both languages for example you can put in “reside” “for” and you will get example sentences for how to tell someone how long you have lived in a place (very useful). Three days after I received my PDA I got a failure to deliver notice for a package I was expecting. Using Kanjidic and Daijirin I worked out that they were keeping the package for me at a post office but I couldn’t quite get the kanji for what was clearly the place but definitely wasn’t Kakuouzan (place name kanji is notoriously difficult, working on different rules and so I wasn’t surprised it didn’t find a local place name though it was probably user error anyway!) So I mosied up to my very very local post office tapping away at my dictionary and by the time I got there I was able to ask at which post office the package was being held and which train station and exit it was near. That seems pretty basic, I know, and I had many of the words I need already from the study I’ve done but there were some key words I needed to actually make my communication work and the PDA made it easy because it allows for cross searches (unlike most denshi jisho) so I was able to search for the phrase “pick up” and get an example sentence I didn’t quickly get by putting in “collect”.

Clipboard facility: Like any windows PDA, you can highlight any word or words and put them on a clipboard for pasting into any other application and is sooo useful if you are using the dictionary to decipher more than one word or kanji at a time.

Customer Service

I sent my first query email on a weekend, had a response from Peter on Monday and had my system in my hand the Sunday after (mail 7days a week in Japan)! The PDA looks absolutely new - came in all the Dell packaging including a sync and charge cradle and all the cables you would expect in a new PDA. It also comes with CDs and license keys etc… for all the software - there is nothing dodgy going on here! So how much was it? Well the full system on the Axim starts at 55,000yen - which is where any denshi jisho with even a basic set of Japanese to English dictionaries and a kanji drawing facility would cost - and you can add options/dictionaries from there. I added one extra dictionary to the standard set and you can see to the left all the choices I have on mine. Yes, you can get the Kenkyusha intermediate and the big one (he would have to get you a price for the big one though) BUT you may not even need them as it has dictionaries not available to the Japanese denshi jisho which will likely do you just as well.  Of course you also have a fully functional PDA as well - it’s my calendar and alarm clock and everything but my phone now!

Peter is absolutely lovely (from the emails, I haven’t actually met him) and will happily answer any questions you have before buying - just fill in the contact form with just the minimum required details and type your query in the space, he won’t be mad it’s not an immediate order and he will answer!

Though I am basically just hiding from the heat while Superman works and sleeps and works again, we did manage to get out on August 2nd  and take in the fireworks in Gifu. Gifu is somewhere that I have longed to go all my life as they have some astonishing flower festivals in Spring.  I’m delighted to know it will be an easy drive so I can take as much camera equipment and picnic gear as I like! (Assuming we finally have our Japanese licenses by Springtime!)

The fireworks were, of course, beautiful and went for about three hours all up AND no silly music, popular or otherwise, to bare with as there usually is in Australia. It was simply tens of thousands of people happily celebrating the beauty of light and fire.

At 3pm we met some of our new friends/Superman’s colleagues at the Golden Clock in Nagoya Station to take the 45min train trip to Gifu Eki. From there we joined the long queue sauntering through the heat for about 10mins to the bus terminal to get into the blissful airconditioning of the buses instead of walking for 45mins in the heat.

As I was previewing this picture I noticed the man in the yukata and his partner are looking at the camera (she is making the ubiquitous “V” symbol) This is something I have noticed a lot when uploading photos here, I rarely take pictures OF people exactly but blow me down if the Japanese aren’t as aware of a camera as a cat! Now, you may say “Hey, I saw the pic of your camera in a previous post and it’s pretty hard to miss.” Sure, I’ll give you that - but here’s the same shot with my zoom lens set at 50mm equivalent (that’s human eye equivalent)…

I call that Eagle-eyed!

Natsu Matsuri (Summer festival) is an excuse for the girls who wish to do so to dress up in their light, cotton Yukatas. I am told that they can be cooler than dressing up in modern clothes but it depends how heavy your obi is and how tightly you tie it around your waist - mostly, though it is a full dress-up occasion and comfort has little to do with it!

The Yukata fun is not just for the girls!

I’d suggest that mostly the men did it to impress the girl they were taking to the event (lots of couples there being sweetly romantic) but it’s entirely possible that they simply wanted to. Japanese men LOVE to dress themselves up and primp away at least as much as the girls, if not more!

So, the bus took us through Gifu to the banks of the river (I think it’s called the Nagara.)  I’m not sure if the 200 yen we paid as we jumped off the bus was fare for the bus or an entrance fee but it was a pittance to pay for either!

This was the view from our spot - you can see the crowds across the river just beyond the bridge which was the prime spot in front of which the fireworks were fired and the low lying ones danced. To get those spots you had to be very, very early but we were happy being less crowded and saw plenty.

From the hills off camera to the right of the shot above, Gifu Castle watched over the scene. It was a loong way off (my zoom was at max for this shot) but I couldn’t help wondering what the fireworks must have been like from there!

Of course a festival isn’t a festival without sharing food - so we made our way back up to the road where there were lots of food stalls with delicious things-on-sticks!

The fireworks began about 45 minutes before sundown with some fireworks which didn’t so much sparkle as explode in multi-coloured smoke. They were few and far between and unfortunately those I managed to catch were badly exposed either one way or the other, as I fiddled with my settings trying to access the long-ago archived photography folder of my brain, in the fading light.

As the sparkling ones began, the dusk light made for some delicate colours, almost pastels…

At one stage, everything went pink and I turned to find the sky had gone all sentimental…

(this photo has been cropped to remove some head-silhouettes along the bottom but not colour-processed in any way - it was truly breathtaking)

At last, the sun set over Gifu…

And the show began!

This was my first chance to play with my camera and I was excited to take some fireworks shots but, as we were going with friends and I didn’t want to be too anti-social, I didn’t want to bring a tripod which is really essential for good fireworks shots. Nevertheless the handheld, and therefore faster (yet still too slow for the hand) shutter speed, made for some interesting effects not entirely un-pretty…

Zoom was fun too…

And this one was even a little eerie…

The audience was mostly silent but would ooh and ah and swell with “Sugoi!” (Amazing!) at the big fluffy ones which produced the most light but my favourites were some I hadn’t seen before which exploded in the shape of flowers…

and, my very favourite, butterflies…

or perhaps they were magnificent birds dancing for the joy of Summer…

Afterwards, the crowd made its way to the stone steps in the wall to  climb up from the grass. No amount of Pentax built-in Image Stabilization was going to make up for the jostling as I took this dreadful shot but I had to get it. Obviously we were already up by the time I took it, some 45 minutes after the fireworks ended - imagine how huge this pool of people was at the beginning!

Everyone was actually very patient and calm - we were just pushed together. I can’t imagine being given safety permission to hold an event with such a bottle neck of an exit in Australia!

The walk back to the station was leisurely in the warm (still 28 degrees) evening and had something of a community feel to it as we streamed through Gifu’s streets. The convenience stores en route were having what must be one of their biggest nights of the year as we all piled in to buy drinks and use their “facilities.” An hour and a bit later we were on the train and an hour after that enjoying cool, cool showers before collapsing happily into bed feeling it was worth breaking the vow not to leave the house till Autumn!

Since the Japanese drive on the left as we do here in Australia, the main concern Superman and I have about driving in Japan is not being able read the street signs. I’ve been hunting for something which would allow us to learn them before we move but have had little luck till today (when I used the term "road sign" instead of "Street sign" D’oh!)

So for anyone interested here’s the link!

New International and Japanese Road Signs

Small quibble - on the first page two of the signs look remarkably similar and yet have, admittedly slightly, different translations… I think if I see this one I’ll just stop anyway hehe

The Daily Yomiuri is a Japanese Newspaper which has an English version and is available online. I’ve been reading it since Superman first came home with the news that we might be moving to Japan. Recently they ran a comic contest (just a single illustration really, not even strips so I’m not sure comic is the actually the right word but *shrug) Below are two that really tickled me.

The winners can be seen here.

Last week, after our Monday Japanese lesson, I finally decided to take the plunge and learn Katakana before the next lesson. I had been weirdly worried that if I learned Katakana too quickly I would forget my Hiragana but that was of course just silly and I can now read both, if slowly. Nevertheless I did kind of overdo it (who, me? hehe)  On the morning of the third day I woke up to find a wash cloth on my bedside table. it took me a couple of minutes to remember waking at about 2 am convinced there was katakana written all over the bedroom walls and actually getting up to get the cloth to wipe them off. I remember returning to the bedroom and actually wiping at the walls and thinking "oh it’s gone" and climbing back into bed!

For those wondering, Katakana is one of the two Japanese alphabets (the other being Hiragana) both alphabets are phonetic, each character representing a syllable which ends in a vowel (except ‘n’) which is why many English words which have been adopted by the Japanese are given extra vowels within the spelling and at the end (for example "aisukuri-mu" is ice cream!) All the sounds in the Hiragana Alphabet are the same as in Katakana but because Katakana is used for foreign words there are a few extra combinations made with Katakana to make unusual sounds.  Unlike most European languages, the Japanese have no issue with adopting words from other languages but spelling them with Katakana is how that is distinguished and it does make it much easier - you know you should be reading the word with a different mindset. Some words are hybrids which are half foreign word and half Japanese so will be written with both kana! If you see katakana it is very likely to be an English or European word which you would be able to work out even if it’s not immediately recognizable!

You can see here how, at least when not hand written, the Katakana is much more angular than the Hiragana so they stand out next to each other. You will also see that some characters (in both kana but mostly in Katakana) are incredibly similar. I found the best thing to do was to get some little flash cards and sort out the ones that are similar and spend some time working out their differences (the difference between shi and tsu, for example, is the angle of the two small strokes and the starting point of the larger line - though the pen weight is not always obvious in some typefaces.)  I also found that seeing the handwritten scripts also can highlight differences because the hand written script will show the pen weight and is a more flowing, connected version and you can get a better feel for it. 

The Real Kana site is a wonderful tool to drill your kana - you can even select different scripts to drill to really test yourself!

Of course the Japanese also use approximately 2000 Kanji which are actually Chinese characters. Most Japanese will only know about half that unless they are particularly educated in language and many people do exactly what we will do which is carry around an electronic dictionary to help them translate those with which they are not familiar.

To anyone learning Japanese, I highly recommend learning at least Hiragana to start and even getting your text book in the kana version if it is possible. I really believe it helps enormously with pronunciation but also on a more subtle level it seems to put you into a frame of mind which simply sees the kana and learns the meaning with less temptation to translate (usually slightly imprecisely) in between. I may be totally wrong about what’s happening in my head but that’s what it feels like to me!

I also found this chart which shows the evolution of Hiragana from their original chinese characters - warning: if you are learning Japanese from anything other than a Chinese mother tongue you may not want to confuse yourself!

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Well our flights are booked for our first sojourn to Japan! Superman’s company is flying us out to have a week’s orientation in Nagoya after which we will return for about a month before we head off for the long term. We will be met in Nagoya by our relocation consultant who will show us around the city in general but more specifically she will show us rental properties for our stay. She is having trouble finding places which will allow our cat - in Japan many rental properties are "pets negotiable" but the convention is that this means dogs!  Apparently they are considered preferable - exactly the opposite to Australia, who’d have thunk it? I’m a little worried about living in a "pets negotiable" apartment complex if it is filled with yappy pups, I hope the walls are sound proofed!

Brigid doesn’t know it yet but her journey to japan begins on Monday with the first of her round of vaccinations, her international chip implant and pet passport certificate! She did well coming here to Sydney (for a very nervous cat) and she has definitely mellowed a little up here but I have to admit I’m concerned about a 14 hr plane flight for her. Luckily Australia is a rabies-free certified nation so she will only have to stay in quarantine for 12 days instead of 2 months.

We will be flying via Hong Kong and landing in Nagoya airport which, once again courtesy of Mike McKinley at his blog, I am now aware is actually on an island off Nagoya which is man-made for the purpose - this is it on google maps. Very anime futuristic, don’t you think?

It is a 9 hour flight to Hong Kong and then another 5 or so hours to Nagoya so with the one hour stop to stretch on Hong Kong as well as flying business class I’m sure we will arrive at least in as good shape as I did after the 14hr non-stop to LA in ‘05 which really wasn’t so bad at all. What’s more we will be arriving on Sunday evening and so will be able to get a good night’s sleep at the hotel before the week begins. Anonymous-car-manufacturing-concern certainly looks after their people!

I’m looking forward to posting my own pictures from Nagoya but for now here’s another from Mike MacKinlay’s blog taken from above Nagoya Central station. This will be Superman’s station for getting to work and I’m not sure but from the research I’ve done, the shadow cast across the city in this shot may actually be Superman’s building - if not it’s definitely close.

Much has been said about the culture shock of Westerners moving to Japan and in typical anxiety disorder management style I am putting my research skills to use to attempt smooth out the shock as much as possible. Obviously the first thing to do is crank up the expectation of difference to 11 - done, second: start learning the language - done, third: scour the blogs from other gaijin going through it themselves - in progress…

7:10 to Tokyo » Featured Story » Garbage & Recycling in Japan - Get Your Degree in GOMI!  
Garbage recycling takes on a whole new meaning!

Get more for your yen with a 2000 yen bill
Apparently everything in Japan comes out with limited-time-only/seasonal  variations … even the money!

Get Cheap Stuff At The Recycle Shop
The Japanese are obsessive upgraders so if we don’t mind being oh sooo last week we can save some yen in these second-hand shops.

How To Find Shoes That Fit You In Japan 
A tricky way to deal with oversized, western feet!

Pedestrian’s Best Friend: The Bicycle Bell

And finally a way to deal with pedestrian congestion in Japan - on the street or even in the shops. I don’t have the mind-set to do this but it’s a good laugh! Enjoy!

Death Note is one of the many anime/animations Superman and I used to enjoy on the adult swim site before it was geo-locked (whereby streaming content is blocked to IP addresses accessing websites from outside particular geographical areas - grrrr.) We were barely through the first season of this anime but in Asia has already been treated to two live action films. The first of those live actions is about to be released in over 300 theatres in the states in it’s Asian form, no doubt with dubbed English, and most likely because a third is about to produced, it seems, with American money. The third movie will be directed by Ringu and The Ring Two (and soon to be Three) director Hideo Nakata and so will most likely be too much horror for me but I will be sorely tempted to see if and how they Americanize this one. That the first Death note movies are going to be shown only dubbed suggests to me that there will be limited adjustments, perhaps even that they plan to continue to use the same actors for the two main characters - why else would they introduce them to the american public rather than make the third movie a new origin story as they usually do?

So how is it that Death Note seems, so far, to be escaping the usual Amercanization treatment? I think the plot itself may actually be providing somewhat of an immunity in two main ways.

First, the storyline is based in pagan religion - something I doubt any American Production company would dare bring to American shores, at least not for something they are hoping to make quickly and easily and then reap the fast-horror-bucks. Without giving too much away, the “Death Note” of the title is actually a notebook which is the property of a Japanese Shinigami, or god of death, any human who finds the book and follows the instructions on its use can kill anyone they like, in any manner they like as long as they know their real name to write in the book. The shinigami becomes both visible and bound to whoever is using his book and must stay with that person until their death and so our anti-hero also gains a bizarre, often amusing, confidante of sorts in the form of this pagan god. The shinigami can just be made out as a shadowy shape in the background of this poster to the right - it is he who likes apples I’d imagine that this film would be as popular as things such as The Ring and so details would quickly leak out and I can see protests across the very christian and increasingly fundamentalist nation - I would think american actors’ agents would be treating this one with great care.

Of course, the shinigami element could probably be removed (thought the poster above suggests it will not be) and have the book be simply a mystery that just … works - maybe hint at witchcraft or some slightly less controversial supernatural function - but even then you’d have the very delicate matter of the vigilante hero and the complexity with which the story deals with the concept of justice. There is no escaping the fact that the main character is a teenager killing people even if they are convicted criminals. Americans prefer their vigilantes to have superhero complexes (”hey he just fell into that vat of acid when he was lunging to kill me - I didn’t touch him”) and this simply is not possible here. The discussion of the concept of justice is far from black and white there is little hope of Tobey Maguire’s agent allowing him to follow up Spidey with such a role (though I must say I can actually see a younger Di Caprio in either of the lead roles in this case…) The script-doctor in me says that the obvious solution would be to make ‘L’, the mysterious teenage genius to whom the police entrust the hunt of our vigilante, the main character but if that were done it would turnt he film into a simple man hunt and really would not be Death Note anymore.

I guess I’ve disproved my own argument - Death Note is not immune to being stripped bare and americanized at all. Could it be that someone out there just has the guts to leave the guts in this story…? I hope so. Time will tell.

Standing in my local secondhand bookshop I had a desire to read something about Japan and found myself looking at ever-so-slightly foxed copies of both “Geisha of Gion” and “Memoirs of a Geisha”. I knew that Iwasaki had been Golden’s muse for “Memoirs”, indeed she had sued him for revealing that fact, and so, ever the historian, I decided upon autobiography over fiction.

Geisha of Gion is a prettily drawn insight into the Karyukai of Kyoto and life within the Iwasaki Okiya, where Mineko, born Tanaka Masako, began training at the age of five. Her memory and descriptions of kimono and the details of her arts are exquisite. I particularly appreciated that she does not shy away from using the proper Japanese terms and then interpreting them for us, rather than simply using English substitutes as one often finds in books edited by Americans for Americans. If you are looking for a book filled with Japanese culture then it certainly meets that criteria and I certainly appreciated that element of the book. However that was not, in the end, the element which I found most intriguing.

One of the reasons autobiography is it’s own category rather than being lumped in with non-fiction is not only to classify it as written by the subject of the book but also because classifying autobiography as non-fiction is problematic. No matter how well researched, the content will always be from the point of view of that one, intrinsically biased, person (indeed there is no real research requirement unless the author wishes to impose one upon themselves, legal clearance that is doesn’t defame anyone is all that is really required.) Sometimes the author’s bias or desire to impress a particular belief upon the reader is so glaring that it adds an element of fascination in itself. While neither “Memoirs of a Geisha” nor its author are never mentioned by name, Geisha of Gion is nevertheless heavily influenced by Golden’s work. It is clear that Iwasaki wishes to correct some of the impressions left by Golden particularly in two respects: the suggestion that a geisha is a high class sex worker and that Iwasaki’s father simply sold her to the okiya against her will.

The first issue is simply stated and backed up by, amongst other cultural experts, my Japanese teacher Prostitutes exist, Iwasaki informs us, but they are oiran (courtesan), not geisha(entertainer or artist.) The mizuage (or coming of age ceremony) for the two types of women is different, for both it occurs when the geisha first menstruates and at both her best clients receive small pink cakes with a tiny red nipple on top, representing a breast. The difference lies in that for the geisha it is simply a celebration of her coming into womanhood and parties are held and gifts received, only for the oiran is the girl’s virginity sold to the highest bidder. Geisha do not give sexual favours for their fees. Geisha often have boyfriends (who sometimes become husbands) but sexual liasons are carefully managed and outside of the professional requirements of a geisha. How much of Iwasaki’s story is sanitized in this respect is of little consequence.

The second impression Iwasaki is at pains to make is that of her father’s character as a loving father, sadly misunderstood by her four older sisters who were also sold to the okiya and to this day are still angry and or bitter to varying degrees. I found it heartbreaking to read as this woman now in her thirties and a mother herself insisted that at the age of five she and she alone made the decision to go to the okiya to become a geisha like her sisters. Again and again she describes how her father resisted the okiya ‘mother’ when she requested their youngest daughter come into her service. She describes how when she first agreed to go to the okiya it was simply some kind of trial which she could have ended at any time - a special arrangement because the okiya mother was so desperate to have this child as her heir because she was so very beautiful. I have no doubt that Iwasaki believes everything she has written in this book but I simply don’t believe that her father had not entered into a similar contract as he did with his other four girls, nor do I believe her protestations that he was so concerned for her welfare. She describes how, at eight years of age, she went to court to be adopted by the the okiya mother (as she had to be to become the heir to the okiya) and took the Iwasaki name. The judge asked her to say which family she chose to belong to - after choosing the okiya, she promptly threw up. Clearly she was desperately torn by the decision and yet she wants desperately for us believe that her father was a loving man, or at least that her father loved her if not her sisters.

Of course if his situation was such that he needed to sell his daughters into service then that is sad but understandable and perhaps he was a loving man - unfortunately Iwasaki presents an enormous paradox regarding this. She explains fairly well the reason that he was forced to sell his first daughters (very much against their will to this day) and yet she is also keen to impress upon us how successful her parents were as artists, particularly her father - revered and also … making very good money, certainly at least by the time the third fourth and fifth daughters are sent. Nor does it explain why the couple went on to have so many more children - eleven in all (her mother is described as having a weak constitution) five of girls sent to the okiya. But Iwasaki does not present her father as an angel - she reveals man prone to sudden violence when angered but who treated her as special and mostly she was spared the violence. In fact she seems disturbingly proud when describing violence or raging committed by her father in defence of her after her brothers and sisters had teased her in some way or, in one shocking case, when a chicken has pecked at her and has its neck wrung in front of her when she is three years old. Clearly she cannot deny the violence and neglect her father displayed towards his children but she is determined to believe that she had a special place in his heart.

The overwhelming sense that she is special was no doubt encouraged by her father and by her being given the place of atotori - or heir to the okiya - at such a young age (she was wanted by the okiya because she was so breathtakingly beautiful even as a three year old doncha-know?) and narcissism permeates every line of this book. One is left with the impression of an extremely sad little girl who, desperate for attention, love and a place in the world, latched on to her place in the okiya and became, quite simply, a spoiled brat. This manifested in what was no doubt an extraordinary dedication to her arts but a failure to mature socially and emotionally. Iwasaki displays the same sudden explosive temper as her father and his mother before him had, sometimes in legitimate defence of herself but sometimes far too violent for the situation or sheer tantrums (such as the violent destruction of the fur coat of the wife of a man with whom she had an affair for many many years) and she describes each one with the same utter conviction that she was justified. When she describes the cattiness and cruelty of the other geisha, first within the okiya and later, seemingly, across the karyukai of the entire country, she puts every incidence down to pure jealousy and protests that she siply didn’t understand it. I’m sure jealousy was a large part of it and any woman knows how bitchy and cruel women can be to each other but the character displayed by the author is certainly one which would not endear itself to other girls and I have no doubt she did not help the situation.

Geisha of Gion is definitely worth the read, not only for the insight into this area of japanese culture but as a fascinating study of the effect this odd situation in which she suffers being abandoned by her birth parents but is sold into a life in which she is paid deference at an age when she has no abiility to understand it as anything other than that she is superior to all around her. There are many stories of being sold into service and being treated poorly (as were her sisters) but this is a different psychological story and a new one for me. It would be fascinating to read the accounts of other sisters - particularly Kuniko who lived in the okiya with Mineko. Kuniko did not have the potential (read beauty) as a geisha and so was essentially a maid but she had intelligence and so became an integral part of the behind the scenes in the okiya and, it seems, a much more grounded personality than her sister and would have quite the tale to tell.