Article content continued

Trainees like Asaki must clean the rooms. After vacuuming, they clean the mirror stands with wet cloths before polishing them with dry ones.

Once they finish cleaning the room, they move on to cleaning the bathroom.

When their proprietress leaves the house, the trainees have to see her off in the entrance hall, waiting there until they can no longer see her.

When she comes home, they have to kneel down with their fingers on the floor and say, “Welcome back, ma’am.” Before their senior maiko go off to a dinner party, the trainees must take oboko lacquered wooden clogs out of a shoe box and line them up in the entrance hall for the maiko. When their seniors leave, they must say, “Have a good day, sister.” They must repeat the same words and the same actions every time.

“It’s very difficult to reform the attitudes of teenage girls, who have never lived with anyone other than their family,” said Fumie Komai, the 70-year-old proprietress of Komaya.

She has nurtured 27 maiko over nearly 50 years and fully understands how difficult it is to raise today’s young girls to full-fledged maiko.

Since about 10 years ago, Komaya has allowed girls wishing to become maiko to experience training for a week to help them understand life in the geisha quarters. Asaki, too, experienced this trial training two months before becoming a live-in trainee.

“When you talk to your proprietress or senior sisters, you must sit in seiza [the Japanese style of kneeling on the floor],” Toshimana, a senior maiko from Gifu Prefecture, told Asaki in a way that suggested she was recalling her trainee days. “When you thank people, you must say, ‘Oki-ni’ [Kyoto dialect for “Thank you”].”