芸妓ハンメイル ~ Geisha fan mail

Mail - I loved it as a kid. Getting it, sending it - good old fashioned United States Postal Service snailmail - all of it. I was a philatelist and my father still has envelopes from Hong Kong with the upper right hand corner torn out from where I had harvested his Queen Elizabeth II stamps. I knew how to spell Lichtenstein at age twelve.

I still feel a little thrill holding a package or postcard from a country I've never visited, so I can understand the eagerness young people have at the prospect of a message from a foreign place. Now imagine that you are a young trainee in traditional arts and something of a minor celebrity, a walking tourist attraction if you will. Now turn the adoration into fan mail.

It's not impossible to figure out the address of an okiya from the other side of the world (if I did it, surely you can). The difficult part is when fans write mail in earnest to the person of interest, they often expect a positive response in return. This can create considerable burdens for celebrities. Calculate in your head roughly the amount of free time a maiko/geiko has between classes and engagements and you'll remember why being a art-person is a character-defining lifestyle in Kyoto.

But one can hardly count on a busy arist to respond like a penpal, especially if you have no prior relationship with her. Chances are good that her okaasan intercepts anything that arrives through the mail and filters it to her accordingly ("Oh, you got a congratulatory card from America, but it's not in Japanese so I'll just put it in the pile with the others and you can look at it later" or something). It might be best to channel your energy into going to Kyoto to congratulate these women in person, where their art and charm really shines through. They seem to like entertaining regular customers as much as they like meeting new, interesting people. [The secret is: they want you to keep coming back.]

I channel my energy into supporting artists - buying their CDs, paying full price to their events, and respecting their right to privacy. It's one thing to post online for the world to see who is and is not associated to a geisha's particular okiya (they themselves post it for the world to see, therefore it's okay). But I'm not about to surrender their home addresses or class schedules or listings of their engagements for the common internet stalker.