My lost geisha
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
It was the photograph in my father’s war album. Her white kimono. Hair black as onyx. Pale, serene face. Perfect bone structure. Gloss, a sheen upon her hair. On one side, a nameless GI. On the other, my father, not much more than a boy. Many a day I looked at the geisha in wonderment. When she looked back from the photo everything save her ceased to exist. She and my father. I detected a bond. How did this come about? That 8 x 10 B&W photo vanished from my father’s war album. How did this come about? Why?
This mystery began when my father registered for military service December 1, 1944. It grew legs and marched when he joined the Army. It picked up steam when he took the train to Seattle and set sail when he left the Port of Embarkation for Hiroshima in Operation Downfall, the Allied’s plan to invade Japan. Along the way two atom bombs brought Japan to her knees, and would-be invaders, my father among them, occupied Japan instead. There was no invasion although dad would travel Honshu and Kyushu mightily.
My father worked in Ordnance in Yokohama — that’s Ordnance without an I, spell check. He spent time in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Somehow he met a geisha. A night of revelry? I don’t think so, though U.S. soldiers sought entertainment with wild abandon. Taking advantage of their desire, prostitutes and nightclub hostesses called themselves “geisha girls”. In so doing, they fostered a misconception among Westerners that geishas were prostitutes, a misconception that persists.
A true geisha didn’t engage in questionable work. Might she have been a Comfort Girl forced into prostitution by the Imperial Japanese Army? I think not. She seemed pure, and I will write here that she was.
Other photos exist. Parasols and girls, moments of elation amid total destruction. But, that image of my lost geisha. That’s the image burned into my mind. I see her as I write. Had I a way, I would recreate her in pristine black and white.
Where did she go? My hunch is mom destroyed her after dad passed. I prefer not to think about that, but I will tell you this. Through some miracle if I could put my hands on that photo I would frame it in gold and keep it on my desk.
Now . . . one other war photograph consumes me, a happy moment in a vanquished land. Dad’s smiling. A parasol rests across his left shoulder, a gift, I daydream, from his geisha. Behind him, stacked stones form a structure. To his immediate right stands a stone lantern. Perhaps he stands near a temple. Farther to the right stands a torii, symbolic entrance to a shrine. Dad does, indeed, stand near a temple.
Two bombs ushered in peace, and dad mustered out. He would marry my mother April 11, 1947. In the home they’d build, I would ramble through closets where I’d discover flags. Unfolding them, the sun’s rays burst off alabaster silk as if afire. Japan—Land of the Rising Sun. Japan—Land of geishas.
As the 1950s progressed, dad amused us with a few Japanese words, but he never mentioned the shadows of the vaporized set onto stone or arms stenciled with stripes and plaids. Nor did he mention my lost geisha. As for mom, I remember a disparaging comment when she caught me looking at my geisha one afternoon.
The geisha’s gone but many years later she inspired me to invent a woman who loved orchids and all things geisha. She drank orchid tea, washed her hair in orchid oil, bathed in orchids, and garnished her drinks, salads, and desserts with their petals. I brought her to life, and our stories intertwined like wild wisteria. I am sure my father would have loved her. How could he not. He brought her and her inspiration home to me.