An Evening with Geiko in Kyoto: The Private Geisha Dinner

In Kyoto a geisha is called a geiko, a word that puts gei, the art, first. She is a professional artist of the city's traditional performing arts: dance above all, then song, the shamisen, the drums and the flute, and the art Kyoto prizes as highly as any of them, conversation. A maiko is her apprentice, attached to an okiya and to the teachers of her district, training most days of the week in dance, song and instruments, and she becomes a geiko only when the district judges her ready.

Within the profession there are two callings. The tachikata is the dancer. The jikata is the musician, who sings and plays the shamisen, the drums or the flute while the tachikata dances.

In Gion Kobu every geiko and maiko studies one school of dance, the Inoue school of Kyomai, a style that took its shape in the eighteenth century in the reception rooms of Kyoto rather than in a theatre. It takes its control from Noh, so that the angle of a closed fan or the slow turn of a wrist carries a meaning, and it is made for a tatami room a few metres across. Kyomai is parlour dance. The ozashiki is where it was meant to be watched, at the distance of a low table, and a seat in the largest theatre in the city gives a lesser view of it.

To the eye the two are told apart by dress, which the companion piece on the five districts sets out in full: the maiko in the long hanging darari obi and a red collar, the geiko in a white collar and a shorter obi tied in the plain otaiko knot.

The ornaments are a craft of their own. Kanzashi, the pins and combs of formal Japanese dress, are made in lacquered wood, tortoiseshell, silver and silk; the kushi, a comb, and the kogai, a long bar, come as a pair, the lacquer gilded or inlaid with shell. The flowered hana-kanzashi of a maiko are made by the tsumami technique, small squares of silk folded with tweezers into petals one at a time, and they change with the calendar month by month. The makers serve an apprenticeship of five to ten years, and today only the maiko of the hanamachi still wear the full sequence of the seasons.

Kyoto keeps five hanamachi, flower towns: Gion Kobu, Gion Higashi, Miyagawacho, Pontocho and Kamishichiken. Kamishichiken, beside the shrine of Kitano Tenmangu in the north-west of the city, is the oldest, its first seven teahouses raised in the Muromachi era from timber left over when the shrine was rebuilt. Gion is a separate district, larger and later, on the east bank of the Kamo River. Each district trains its own geiko and maiko, keeps its own crest and stages its own dance. The lanes themselves, and how to walk them, belong to another piece.

Kyoto's five geisha districts, and the oldest of them →

Two buildings matter to the evening. The okiya is where a maiko lives and trains, under the woman the district calls okaasan, mother, who keeps her kimono, her lessons and her calendar of engagements. The ochaya is where she works. It is a teahouse in name, a set of tatami rooms in practice, each one an ozashiki, run by a proprietress who knows her patrons by name and by taste. For an evening she calls the geiko and maiko from their okiya, orders the kaiseki from a caterer in the district, chooses the sake and sees to the car. The kenban, the registry office of each district, collects the tallies of the night and sends them on to the okiya.

Ichigen-san okotowari: no first-time guests. The phrase governs every ochaya in Kyoto, and abroad it is read as hauteur. It is closer to bookkeeping.

The ochaya takes no money on the night. The proprietress advances the hanadai, the fee for each geiko and maiko, along with the caterer's bill, the drinks and the taxis, and even a second evening elsewhere if the party moves on, and the patron settles the account later, sometimes much later. A teahouse that extends that much credit extends it only to people it knows, or to people vouched for by a patron who will answer for them. A guest who arrives with an introduction arrives with a guarantor, and the evening that follows is shaped around what the proprietress has been told of that guest.

The rule binds the patron as firmly as the teahouse. A guest received by one ochaya in a district is that ochaya's guest, and taking an evening to a rival on the same lane is a serious breach of manners. Nor is the door closed to foreigners in particular: Japanese guests without a recommendation from an established patron find it closed in exactly the same way. The relationship is the asset on both sides of the threshold, which is why a single good introduction in Kyoto is worth more than any sum offered at the door.

An evening runs about two to three hours. The guests are seated at a low lacquered table, a scroll and flowers in the alcove, and the first courses of the kaiseki arrive from the caterer while the room is still quiet. Then the door slides back. The geiko and maiko greet the party from the threshold, kneeling, before they come to the table, sit between the guests and pour the first sake.

The dance comes when the table is settled. The open floor between the guests and the alcove becomes a stage of a few tatami, a jikata takes up the shamisen and begins to sing, and a maiko or geiko dances a short piece chosen for the season, a few minutes long and close enough that the silk of the sleeve moves the air. Watched from a low table, a fan opening or closing makes a sound.

Then the games, which are the part of the evening guests least expect and most enjoy. Konpira fune fune is the best known: a small object sits on the table between two players, the song of the boats to Konpira shrine is sung, and on each beat the players take turns to touch the object or lift it away. The tempo quickens until someone slips, and the first to slip loses. Tora tora is a game of the folding screen: two players disappear behind it as a song is sung and step out at its last line as a samurai, an old woman with a stick or a tiger. The old woman beats the samurai, the tiger eats the old woman, the samurai cuts down the tiger. It is rock, paper, scissors played as theatre, and guests in a Kyoto teahouse take it with complete seriousness.

And then, the dishes cleared and the shamisen laid on its side, the conversation. This is the art the guests remember longest and the one a geiko works hardest at: reading which guest wants to talk and which would rather listen, turning a question about the obi into an account of the Nishijin weaver who made it, saying a great deal about the dances in rehearsal and nothing at all about the patrons of other evenings. Most ochaya work entirely in Japanese, so a foreign party needs someone at the table who speaks both languages, and the evening is only as good as that person's ear.

Kyoto publishes no tariff for an evening with geiko. The ochaya bills its own patrons on account, and its figures stay between them. The public figures come from those who arrange evenings for visitors, and they run at these levels.

• The hanadai, the engagement fee for each geiko or maiko: about 50,000 yen each, with the meal at 10,000 to 30,000 yen a guest on top and an interpreter extra, as published by a long-established English-language guide to Japan.
• A private evening with a maiko arranged by a Kyoto agency, with the kaiseki, drinks, dance, games and an interpreter included, for two to three hours: 69,800 yen a guest for two guests, falling to 38,000 yen a guest for five or more, and 79,800 yen a guest for two from mid-March to June and through October and November.
• Geiko and maiko received at a private villa in Higashiyama for about ninety minutes of dance, song, games and conversation: from 130,000 yen for the party, with the dinner arranged separately.
• A seat at one of the public dances: 4,000 to 7,000 yen; at the Miyako Odori a first-class seat with tea served before the curtain runs at 7,000 yen.

The arithmetic favours a party of four or six over a couple, because the hanadai is for the artist's time, not the guest's seat, and it divides. What none of these figures includes is what a patron of an ochaya spends over years of evenings to be received there at all. That is the part of the evening that cannot be bought on the night.

Each district stages its own dance once a year, a full company on one stage, and these are the open door to the same arts the ozashiki keeps private:

• Kitano Odori, Kamishichiken: from late March into early April (in 2026, 20 March to 2 April).
• Miyako Odori, Gion Kobu: the whole of April, at the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo theatre.
• Kyo Odori, Miyagawacho: in April (in 2026, 4 to 19 April).
• Kamogawa Odori, Pontocho: in May.
• Gion Odori, Gion Higashi: 1 to 10 November, at the Gion Kaikan, the only autumn dance of the five.

At the Miyako Odori the tea ceremony is performed before the dance for the holders of the tea ticket, by a geiko or maiko of Gion Kobu in formal kimono, and the guest is served matcha and a sweet before taking a seat.

The tea ceremony in Kyoto →

In the lanes between the theatres, a geiko walking to an engagement is at work, and Gion's own rules for visitors set out how she is let pass.

Gion's visitor rules, and the manners of the lanes →

There are three sound routes. A small number of ryokan and hotels in Kyoto keep standing ties with the districts and receive geiko and maiko in their own rooms for their guests, which leaves the ochaya door out of the question. Agencies that arrange evenings for visitors hold an introduction themselves and extend it to the guests they place. And a guest travelling with someone the teahouse already knows is received on that person's word, which is the way the system was designed to work in the first place.

On the Custom Tour of Japan, an evening with geiko and maiko is arranged within the journey, set where it belongs among the days in Kyoto. The Tour Director, who works with the party and the company's Japan specialists to shape the tour and then travels with it, is in the room, fluent in English and Japanese, so the conversation at the table runs in both. The party is told beforehand how the evening goes and what is expected at the table, and arrives ready to be received. What the teahouse casts on the night is what the evening is.

The Classic Cherry Blossom Tour of Japan includes an evening with the geiko and maiko of Gion.

The Custom Tour of Japan, designed for one party →

Luxury Kyoto tours: in blossom, in maple, and in private →

Kyoto: the city and its places →

Late in the evening, the shamisen back in its case, a maiko asks a guest which season brought them to Kyoto and listens to the answer as if it were the only question of the night. Outside, the lanterns of the district are still lit when the car comes to the door.

Planned around youThe Custom Tour of JapanFrom 6 daysOn the dates you chooseFrom USD $3,500per person, per daySee the journey