Word: kyoto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Connecticut schoolgirls on Commencement Day, the geishas of Japan gather together on the Day of the Seven Herbs at the end of Japan's New Year feasting to receive their awards for a year well spent. Last week, as the fragile and mannered geishas of Gion, one of Kyoto's most famed geisha districts, trooped into the auditorium of their two-story training academy for the annual ceremony of a new geisha year, the balconies were ringed with the faces of teachers, music masters and teahouse madams smiling as benignly at their charges as any proud parents...
...patron she hopes will one day claim her permanently, the geisha must be tireless and fascinating, solicitous and flattering, soothing and delightful, ready to make conversation, play a game or listen to pompous discourse at the whim of her customer. "A good geisha," said a member of Kyoto's geisha association last week, "is one who the guests say is good. Not only is the guest always right, but he must always go home knowing...
...Mammon have long been partners in Kyoto, whose centuries-old Buddhist and Shinto temples are a potent magnet for worshipers and sightseers from all over the world, but changing times have exacted a telling strain on the partnership. When they were cut off from government subsidy by the MacArthur constitution, which divorced Japanese church and state, most of Kyoto's temples began charging admission fees in order to support themselves. The result was a bonanza of tax-free riches. This delighted the Buddhist and Shinto priests but filled Kyoto's Mayor Gizo Takayama, a Congregationalist, with ill-concealed...
...Kyoto's priests cried out in dismay. "Whoever heard of a man having to pay a tax to worship his God?" they protested in handbills and newspaper ads. By way of answer, city hall pointed gleefully to at least one priest who had absconded with some 9,000,000 yen contributed by visitors at his temple, spent 2.000,000 of it on geisha girls and cabarets and the rest on a sloe-eyed model whom he set up as mistress of her own bar. Admitting that "perhaps some priests have become a bit too worldly," the abbot...
...Ichiro Kono, whose official title as Minister of Agriculture and Forestry serves to disguise the fact that he is one'of the brainiest men in the Hatoyama government, invited priests and mayor alike to Tokyo to talk the whole thing over. "With 8,000,000 tourists coming to Kyoto yearly," he pointed out, "nobody's coffers need be empty." Let the temples charge their admission, he suggested; let the city collect its tax. Then let the temples put in for heavy tax deductions against the national government on the expenses in their maintenance. "On those terms," said Chief...