Dawn Porter, Geisha Girl!

I watched a documentary a while ago on Channel 4 about the search for love, normally I'm not into flighty stuff but it's first stop was none other than Japan - Kyoto to be exact - which is nowadays the only way to peak my interests. Dawn Porter the narrator wanted to experience the life of a modern day geisha, I think we got on the wrong foot when she revealed that her understanding of a geisha was akin to the high class prostitutes of the west. At first I thought 'how rude' then I thought 'what a fucking idiot'. I thought it was good practice to research a subject before you spoke about it. Maybe she wanted to view it with fresh eyes, but that still didn't mean she could approach the topic with such a negative impression. Granted, her position did change, eventually, but it very much irritated me. Maybe it's because I recently re-read Arthur Golden's Memoir's of a Geisha, that I felt so outraged by her assumptions.

After arriving at the Kyoto okiya to meet Mother and the other maiko and geisha living in the house, Dawn was set to work. First she had to learn the correct sitting position of a geisha; sitting on her shins gracefully (which is the key word here) making sure that the kimono is not ruffled in any way, making sure it looks smooth and beautiful, making sure it's effortless. This doesn't seem that hard on paper so I could understand why Dawn was taken aback by the pain. After getting used to sitting, she had to learn how to stand gracefully, effortlessly etc. Maybe it's too simplistic to say effortlessly, it actually involves a lot of muscle control due to the fact that you have to put all of your body weight on one leg while maintaining your balance to ensure that you glide up instead of wobble up. Not to mention having to not do the thing that comes most naturally to you when you're in that position, 'DON'T STICK OUT YOUR BUTT'. Dawn received many smacks on the arse, it was a steep learning curve. The hardest thing about this initially for a western girl who is used to showing what she feels, when she feels is maintaining a perfect, pleasant mask. As if the squats, from sitting down and standing up, hasn't left her with seemingly permanent pain whenever in a crouched position - if you can't tell, by the way, I hate squats. She did a days worth of work which completely wore her out, I can sympathise because I'm unbelievably weak and not afraid to admit it.

Later on that day Dawn got to chat with a fellow (using the word loosely) geisha. She wasn't just curious, or at least that's not the impression I got. I could happily accept genuine curiosity. She seemed like she was trying to get the girls to say that 'yes' their lives were hard, 'yes' it's not always the happiest place to be and 'yes' this wasn't really what they wanted of their lives. Well, 'NO' Dawn, sometimes women make unusual choices and it's not your job to show them the supposed error of their ways.

The next day Dawn was allowed to dress in full maiko regalia, a $100,000 kimono, white make-up, red lips and the hair. It was wonderfully grand, wonderfully dramatic and wonderfully heavy. Maybe that's not so wonderful. Upon seeing her reflection in the mirror Dawn was displeased, not because the clothes weren't to her liking but because of the discomfort resulting from the kimono. All the padding around her waste to prevent the kimono from riding up restricted her breathing and hid her waist line. The make-up didn't look as good on her, I somewhat agreed with her on that point. Her lips were painted white except for the very centre of her lips which were painted a vibrant red to give the illusion of a much smaller - in length - plumper lip than her own. On her eyelids was the same vibrant red, following her eyelids. It seemed that red was very much the theme because there was yet more red on her eyebrows. I think on a more delicate looking western girl it would have looked just as good as it did on the Japanese girls. When they finally changed her name she was ready to be presented to the world, Dawn was now Kikutari. All this time Dawn felt that little by little everything that made her Dawn Porter was being stripped away to be lost forever. Yes, she was that dramatic, I think she lost perspective. The more I watched, the more ridiculous I thought she was, you're doing a job for Channel 4, from which you're getting paid a hefty sum to go talk to a few Japanese people. It's only temporary.

I fully admit that I'm a bit biased. OK. A LOT biased. But, I would've felt the same about anywhere Dawn Porter went, I think my issue is mainly with her method of journalism. I think with cultural differences it's imperative to observe and discuss without bringing your culture into it.

She's gone and she's never coming back

My supervisor's gone, she left the country and headed back to Germany. I'm sad, she was lovely, always patient, always answering our stupid questions and always with a never ending source of flies for us to use.

She left about 2 weeks ago, I'm not good with dates but I know it was around the end of October. Eleanor and I decided to get her a little going away present in the form of anything we could find in the local Mile End shops. We snuck out while we were trying to clean our fly tubules; one thing about my project that always grosses me out. The problem with incubating flies for 2 weeks is that you end up with fly stew; often a mixture of dead fly, mould, fly feed and paraffin. It's quite a tedious job because of the need to remove the paraffined (yes, I know that's not a real word) end of the tubule using piping hot water. Then, placing the tubules in the death contraption that is the Autoclave; it relies on the production of steam to clean and therefore reaches great, explosive pressures. We tentatively, always tentatively use the autoclave.

We told her that we were going out for lunch; something we rarely do because we often get too engrossed in analysing our data. We walked along the Mile End road stopping in shops to check out their card and chocolate collections. We settled, after several minutes of debate, on a card adorned with black cats against a yellow background, on the interior was a night-time landscape; midnight blue with swirls of various lighter shades of blue to highlight the clouds. And yes more cats, but not the whole cat just the eyes. Across the A5 piece of card there were at least 15 sets of eyes staring back at us, Eleanor loved it, I was a bit dubious but not bothered enough to argue. We went on, to another shop, to buy her some chocolates, one standard Cadbury's chocolates in a box shaped a bit like a Christmas cracker and some Smarties, not just any smarties though. These were like easter egg smarties except instead of an easter egg it was a penguin which sound like maracas when shaken, now that I liked.

We skillfully hid our presents in Eleanor's big coat when we got back to the office, unfortunately she was knee-deep in a conversation with one of the Phd students in the lab. We had to wait. So, we thought it would be best to start analysing our data. I'm not going to go too far into it but my data was faulty so I couldn't analyse. With the intention of correcting the problem I walked - in total - 12,255 steps that day, trekking all the way from the office to the fly lab was a bitch. I'm not fit and I've never tried to be but the always broken lift (I think I've mentioned this before) left me with 5 floors to walk up at least 4 times that day. I was not pleased.

When she'd finished with her colleague and we were finished with cleaning the fly tubules we handed our card and presents to her. She was genuinely shocked and grateful. She opened her card, which she loved because apparently she was a big fan of cats. Unfortunately, her husband was allergic so she couldn't have any. So, she had resigned herself to collecting cat statues from all over the world. She gave us a hug and a Ferrero Roche as a thank you. We said our goodbyes and that was the last time we spoke.

I'm gonna miss her.