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Sadayakko Kawakami Sada Yacco
Sada Yacco Quick Jump
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Sadayakko or Sada (as she was known at the height of her career) was born in the Nihombashi district of Tokyo just four years into the new era, in 1872. Her father had been a successful businessman but when she was six his business collapsed. Desperate, the family took her along to a geisha house in the Yoshicho geisha district and arranged for her to be adopted by the proprietress, a woman named Kamekichi, who became her geisha "mother." Undoubtedly money changed hands and the family finances benefited from the transaction. Still, it was an adoption, not a "sale of persons," considered a perfectly normal way in those days to ensure the future of one's child.
Mother Kame too did well out of the deal. Not only was the child"of good family," which would make her more salable as a geisha, she was also strikingly lovely, with translucent white skin, lustrous black tresses, and extraordinary eyes. The left was flat like an Asian eye, the right had a crease like a Western one. And she was very quick; she could "learn one thing and pick up ten," as the saying went. At the age of ten she demanded to learn to read and write, an outrageous request for a young girl training to be a geisha. The first high schools for women had opened only in 1870 and they were certainly not for the likes of Sada.
Had it been any other child, Mother Kame would have said, "What are you trying to do? Reading and writing is for men!" But she had high ambitions for Sada. She could win, she thought, not just a good danna but the very best in the country. To groom her, she arranged classes in riding, swimming, billiards, and martial arts as well as reading and writing.
The word danna means "master" in the sense of "patron" or "husband," though the geisha's patron will almost always already be married to someone else. Until the enormous changes brought about in Japan by the Second World War and its aftermath, it was a matter of prestige, a mark of a man's wealth and success in the world, to be known as the patron of a beautiful and famous geisha. Even the dashing rebel samurai leader Kido, devoted as he was to his wife the ex-geisha Matsuko, was the patron of a Gion geisha named Okayo, who had been one of Matsuko's friends. And, as he wrote in his diary, he also spent much time carousing in geisha quarters.
For the geisha house "mother" and "older sisters" who had the future of a young geisha in their hands, their most important task was to find her a suitable patron. In the course of her career, a geisha would probably have several. The first would have the unique privilege of introducing her to the ways of love through mizuage.
At sixteen, Sada, who, as a virgin geisha, had been given the name of Ko-yakko (Little Yakko), was an exquisite girl with feathery eyebrows, delicate features, and those extraordinary mesmerizing eyes. As the proprietress of a top geisha house, Mother Kame had many connections in high society. One day she met up with Eiichi Shibusawa, a great industrialist, real-estate magnate, and banker who lived in a splendidly baroque faux-Moorish mansion. To him, Mother Kame confided herambition for Sada. He suggested the prime minister himself, Hirobumi Ito, and said he would put in a word on Sada's behalf.
Like Kido, Ito (1841—1909) had been a swashbuckling gallant from Choshu. Under the stern rule of the dying shogunate he risked execution by smuggling himself aboard a British ship in 1863 when leaving the country was still a capital offense. (According to another version of the story, it was actually the shogunate that sent him and his colleagues on a secret mission to find out how things were in the West.) With four friends he sailed via Shanghai to London, where he lodged in Hamp-stead and studied at University College for a few months. Reading one day in the Times that an international coalition led by the British was planning to attack his home province, he rushed back to Japan to mediate. By 1880 he was the leading figure in the government and in 1885 became the first person to take the title of prime minister. He was instrumental in developing the country's constitution and served four different terms as prime minister.
A short, stout man who loved to strut around sporting a chest covered in medals, he had a broad forehead, turned-up nose, and straggling goatee beard. He was a notorious libertine. Pompous in public, in private he loved nothing better than the company of a group of charming geisha, whom he would regale with an endless flow of improvised songs, finally driving all but the one who struck his fancy out of the room with a favorite ditty such as "Oh, what a boor and nuisance are you!"
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