Sayo Masuda

Background

Sayo Masuda was born on the 16th of August, 1925 in Japan. She was born out of wedlock into a poor family and was quickly shipped off to live with her uncle. As a child, Masuda lived as a nurse-maid in a large farming household near Shiojiri. During these years other children gave her the derisive nickname "Crane", as in the winter she was never allowed to wear socks and would lift one leg up and warm her foot on the thigh of the other leg. Masuda did not learn her own real name until she was hospitalized at the age of 12 and the doctors called her Ms. Masuda.

Education

Educated in the traditional arts, music, dance, singing, but deprived of school education, Masuda remained illiterate up to thirty years when, having abandoned her profession, she learned to read and write by herself.

Career

In need of money, Masuda's mother brought Masuda home when she was twelve years old and indentured her to a geisha house for the equivalent of 120 kilograms of rice. For four years Masuda did chores around the geisha house and learned some artistic skills until at the age of sixteen her virginity was auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Masuda was able to escape from the geisha house, but her life became no easier. She was reunited with her uncle and half-brother and worked briefly at a sawmill, which did not pay enough for them to eat. In the hope of finding better prospects, she and her brother left the countryside and moved to Chiba, east of Tokyo, where her brother came down with tuberculosis. The only way Masuda could earn enough money to pay for his medicine was to return to prostitution.

Masuda worked as a waitress and discovered her love for children. She frequently told stories to groups of children in town. She also worked in the rice fields. When the rice was planted, she was asked by a family to look after their children. After being a caretaker for several years, Masuda was able to open her own restaurant in 1959 and ran it for several decades.

Masuda wrote her life story while working as a farmhand in the 1950s, more than ten years after leaving her life as a geisha. Masuda went into seclusion after the 1957 Japanese publication of Geisha "Kutoo no Hanshooga" (published as "Autobiography of a Geisha").

Achievements

• Sayo Masuda is particularly known for her book "Autobiography of a Geisha", the first full-length autobiography of a former hot-springs-resort geisha.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Autobiography of a Geisha

    (The glamorous world of big-city geisha is familiar to man...)

    2003

Views

Throughout her autobiography, Masuda continually projects the idea that parents should be responsible for their children and should not bear children they are not prepared to support. She also vehemently argued against the prohibition of prostitution in Japan. She stated that although no one became a prostitute to enjoy it, it was merely the human instinct to find a way to make a living when no other avenues were open. Although she agreed it was probably well-intentioned, she also stated that she could not have possibly survived if she hadn’t prostituted herself. Furthermore, she argued that simply banning prostitution would not stop people from engaging in it, as people who felt the need to engage in it would inevitably find ways to work around it.