Word: geishas
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This emancipation lasted scarcely ten years. The rising militarists, in destroying so much else, clamped down on women, and reasserted male superiority. But once Japan had plunged into war with the U.S., it was these same militarists who insisted that woman's place was in the factory. Even geisha girls were rounded up for munitions work, and housewives organized into "patriotic" associations to sew uniforms and make bandages. When the war ended in humiliating defeat, the men were totally discredited, and the young women ripe for transformation into mambo-garu-generally to the distress of their mothers...
...experiment with trial marriages. On mountain trails near Karuizawa and in the beach shacks on the Izu shore, schoolboys and girls were found sleeping together. To their horrified elders, the new mambo-garu (mambo girl) was little better than the new sutorippu, or stripteaser, who was rivaling the traditional geisha as a professional entertainer...
Carrying the Male. But there remains one enormous roadblock on the path of female emancipation: the Japanese man. Few husbands will take their wives out for an evening. Their usual excuse is that their employers, for business reasons, insist that they attend numerous geisha parties, where much of the nation's business is still transacted. In the geisha houses, the jokes and sake drinking have not changed in a thousand years. Tipsy politicians and businessmen play such children's games as "scissors, paper, rock" or the passing of lighted tapers until they go out, to determine who must...
Even the men unable to afford the geisha house often will not go home to their wives, but stay downtown in all-male sake bars, lingering over a single drink, or in pachinko parlors playing pinball machines. "Why do they do this?" asks a girl indignantly. "Because they want their wives to think they are big shots. They want the world to believe they are out chasing women. An average Japanese wife is ashamed if her husband comes home at 6 or 7 at night. The neighbors will then say he must be only a humble clerk...
...reasonable veto power, and, after a miai, will often see each other for several months before making a decision. Says an observer: "A lot of things are changing in Japan, but if I were asked to predict which institution will prove more durable, the go-between or the geisha, I would say the go-between...