Kneeling on a mat-covered floor, Geisha Kikuno bows in front of the small audience gathered before her. Accompanied by a singer crooning in Japanese, Kikuno — dressed in a black kimono adorned by floral accents, her face powdered white — rises and begins a slow and graceful dance.
You’d expect this scene to be taking place in Japan — specifically, in an ochaya (tea house), where geishas entertain their guests within a hanamachi (geisha district). But it was actually staged much more locally: at a Japanese arts center in Manhattan’s Flatiron District last fall. Far beyond the mere purposes of cultural education, this production had — and continues to have, with others anticipated in 2016 — a greater mission.
Kikuno, an Osaka-born woman whose real name is Saeko Ohno, strives to deliver geisha culture to New York City — and then some.
“I actually see bringing geisha culture to hopefully boom in New York as a step to refresh the recognition of our own culture back in Japan,” Kikuno writes in an email through a translator. “Like, to reverse export our own culture back from New York to Japan.”
The mighty mission of renewing Japan’s longstanding geisha scene requires many efforts, and the New York City entry is just one of them.
But there’s still more work to be done to re-establish the geisha scene, which traditionally has entailed female performers hosting music, dance and gaming activities for a largely male clientele.
“Due to the declining interest in geisha culture and the widespread popularity of karaoke, people lost interest in [geisha performances] for guests who eat and drink in traditional Japanese restaurants,” reads the page, which raised only $111 of its $5,000 goal.
Indeed, hanamachi districts have declined throughout Japan — as have the number of geishas. In a 2014 blog post, J-Collabo — a Brooklyn-based nonprofit driven to promote Japanese arts and culture, with which Kikuno collaborates for her New York appearances — claims the number of hanamachi plummeted from 600 to 10 in the last 80 years.
And so Kikuno set her sights on New York. That 2014 appearance was her first time in the Big Apple, and — though her Kickstarter flopped — she says she’ll return anyway this coming September.
“I thought the people in [New York] welcomed it, because it was the first time they [saw] something like that,” Kikuno recounts of her 2014 geisha residency. And with Japanese food so popular here, she adds, she knew the traditional meals served during geisha performances would be a hit. “I became confident that in [New York], the new concept of geisha culture could be spread and appreciated widely among people there.”
Not only does she want to hold additional dance performances in New York, she hopes to set up a yearlong exhibition of kimono robes, as well as hold a kimono and accessories sale. It’s all a step-by-step process.
“I hope to meet [as] many people as possible [to] grow the seeds of our future,” she says. “I am very excited about the idea of advancing ourselves into that new world.”