Word: geishas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...them have been hired by the Government as Peeping Thomasinas. Some of them loiter around the luxury counters of department stores, taking notes on their sisters who squander yen on beauty creams instead of patriotically investing in Government bonds. Other, luckier maidens, steal at dusk to vantage points near geisha-houses, machiai (waiting-houses) and licensed prostitute quarters, and there scribble down the automobile license plates of bloods who waste their money during the national emergency. Sometimes, when the young scalawags arrive by taxi, the guardians of national thrift have to slip right inside the house to get a good...
With a good eye for detail, Mr. Gunther remembers a Tokyo night-club sign in English: WINE WOMEN SONG AND WHATNOT. Illustrating Japanese lack of tact: Geisha girls, entertaining a U. S. naval officer who had been on the U. S. S. Panay when it was bombed and sunk by the Japanese, kept repeating all evening: "Panay! Panay! So sorry! So sorry!" Typical Japanese Army reasoning: Capitalism is responsible for communism, hence to defeat communism capitalism must be overthrown. Author Gunther also picked up a warning that the Japanese are capable of committing hara-kiri on a national as well...
...which could be changed at any time to western currency, to the yen which could not. Last week's events made them even more likely to continue this preference. For some 40,000 Japanese civilians and thousands of Army men who have thrown money about in the cafes geisha houses, bars and dance halls of Shanghai, the yen's fall meant that gaiety would become more expensive. Japanese officials began asking their nationals not to spend their yen in the International Settlement and the Japanese-sponsored Asia Development Board began a "thrift" campaign to cut down on "entertainment...
...eminent psychoanalysts who believe that when either is thwarted there are sad consequences. An extraordinary confirmation of this theory was noted last week by Tokyo's Asahi. Ryuichi Yoshikawa, a 27-year-old painter in Osaka, begged his parents and older brother to let him marry a geisha girl. They refused. That night, while the family slept, Ryuichi got a heavy knife and methodically chopped off the heads of his father, mother, sister, brother, sister-in-law, six-year-old nephew and three-year-old niece...
...same Japanese heat wave did the Army some good. Ablaze with patriotism, Japanese geisha girls announced that they would charge one additional yen (20?) to each patron every time he complained of the heat, the money going to the Army fund. Girls from one popular tea house had collected over $100 by week's end. Heat, patriotism and disability caused Shimezo Maho, Tokyo merchant, to jump into the cold Pacific off the island Oshinta, leaving his $3,000 life insurance policy also to the Army fund...