Wrap Up: The Maiko

As I mentioned two posts ago, I’ve run out of steam for writing about the Japan trip. Blogging about traveling in a foreign country ultimately seems a futile exercise because so much happens and there are only so many hours in the day in which to write (and so much energy with which to write). Hence much goes unwritten and undescribed. I’ve realized in retrospect that, in an attempt to provide a broad account of our daily adventures, I’ve neglected many of the brief, subtle, surprising, and delightful moments that make visiting Japan so wonderful and faintly magical. The next time we travel I may alter my writing strategy and attempt to focus my efforts on these moments.

One such moment occurred one morning on a train platform in Kyoto. We were waiting for the train to Kurashiki; the platform wasn’t terribly crowded. At some point Sid noticed a maiko, an apprentice geisha, walking along the platform. Contrary to popular Western conceptions, geisha and their more conspicuously dressed maiko are not at all commonly seen wandering around in public during the day. There are shams that dress like maiko and pose for photographs with tourists, but the genuine artists and their apprentices are rarely seen, partly because they work mostly in the evening, partly because they have better things to do with their time than wandering around in public, and partly because there just aren’t that many of them any longer. This one was the first we’ve seen.

She was much the embodiment of the image of a geisha: her face was covered in snow-white makeup, her lips were vivid red, her hair was a jet-black sculpture decorated with a dangly silver ornament. She wore a royal blue outer coat over her kimono. I watched her through the window of one of the mini convenience stores that you find on train platforms. I don’t know what she purchased; it disappeared into either a fold of fabric or the small purse she carried. When she smiled at the cashier, framed by the racks of newspapers and glossy magazines, the digital displays on the platform, the concrete and the steel of the shinkansen station, the refridgerators full of Asahi beer and Pocari Sweat and bottled green tea, it seemed as though she existed on her own temporal plane, fully present in, but independent of, her modern surroundings. In that moment, it was as if I could see a glimpse of all of the centuries of the tradition she maintains stretching out behind her.

When she left the store and glided–“gliding” being the only way to describe the ambulatory movement of someone who makes an art out of walking on platform sandals in a dozen layers of calf-length fabric–along the platform, Sid pointed out her companion. She was an elderly, diminutive woman, dressed in simple, traditional clothes. She was probably the maiko’s mentor.

Of course it crossed my mind to photograph her, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to reduce this fleeting look at a beautiful representative of an ancient, honored tradition to a mere digital snapshot among the 2000 others I took. It just seemed cheap, in short. Tracie told me later that she noticed that another tourist, seated near her on a bench and also watching the maiko, took a camera out of her purse, hesitated, and then returned it to her purse unused. Some sights just aren’t meant to be photographed. Instead we have to retain them in our own memories, fallable as they may be.

Sayonara, Japan!