Word: okichi
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Dates: during 1956-1956
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...Lonely Singer. Okichi, the first of Author Yamata's geishas, has a special interest for Americans as a kind of lively skeleton in the U.S. diplomatic closet. Just short of 100 years ago, it was Okichi's destiny at the age of 18 to be assigned as paramour to 50-year-old Townsend Harris, first U.S. consul to Japan. Indeed, Harris, a white-thatched descendant of Roger Williams, threatened to break off trade treaty negotiations with Japanese officialdom until the girl was installed in his living quarters near the seacoast town of Shimoda. Long before she caught...
Unfortunately for her, Harris' arrangements with the Japanese called for the geisha to be spirited away whenever the "black ships" of the Americans were in port-and as these absences lengthened, Okichi consoled herself with sake. Consolation became alcoholic degradation, and Harris would have nothing more to do with her. No samurai, but still a carpenter. Tsuru-Matsu came back and married her; but love and liquor would not mix. When she was told that Townsend Harris had been buried "among the silent hills of Brooklyn." Okichi lingered on a few years, then suffered a paralytic stroke; dragging herself...
Nowadays Shimoda stages an annual "Carnival of the Black Ships" celebrating the U.S. opening of Japan to the West, and an actress assumes the honored role of Okichi. But, says Author Yamata, U.S. ambassadors do not stay to acknowledge that portion of the ceremony...