The Ignoble Night Life of Japanese Men and Geishas

While 1 billion Chinese are living under fear of tyranny and ruthless persecution, we Japanese are busily gossiping about how many geishas and barmaids Prime Minister Sosuke Uno actually fondled. How embarrassingly peaceful Japan is.

The remarkable thing about this sex scandal is not the fact that Uno slept with geishas (which is as natural as Lee Atwater spreading dirty rumors), but the fact that millions of Japanese women, for the first time in the country’s political history, positively expressed disapproval of such conduct. This is a very healthy phenomenon.

While millions of Japanese men still love to think it is a macho triumph to be sleeping with geishas and barmaids, the dirty little secret of Japanese night life is that most geishas and barmaids are ill-educated, ill-bred and boring, very boring people.

Many Japanese men (including this writer) are very reluctant to go to obligatory geisha parties and nightclubs, not because we are God-fearing, not because we are bluenoses or prigs, but because these women who cater to businessmen and politicians are, in fact, so crass, ignorant and irksome.

Now, thanks to the prime minister’s sex scandal, once-tolerated geisha-chasing and barmaid-hunting may become less tolerated and, one hopes, Japanese men can begin to spend more time with their wives and children, instead of carousing around late at night.

Perhaps this kind of behavioral change is even more important than which party will win the next Parliamentary election. We cannot improve politics, after all, without improving our quality of life and mores.