The revival of Dances of the Old Capital was Gion’s first staging of the production since the district closed in the final years of the war. Its return gave Sayuri and Mameha work and renewed a public geisha tradition, but it took place in a community altered by wartime deprivation and postwar change. The production’s significance lies in that double movement: performance resumed, while neither the women nor Gion could return unchanged to the past.

Background and Return to Performance

During the war, the geisha districts faced rumors that the military government would shut them down, and by the middle of 1943 people in Gion feared that their lives and livelihoods were being overwhelmed by events. The eventual closure suspended the performances of Dances of the Old Capital for a number of years. Its revival therefore followed not an ordinary pause in the theatrical calendar but a rupture in the working life of the district.

Beginning in March and continuing through the spring, Sayuri and Mameha worked on the production as it was staged again for the first time since that wartime closure. The revival placed their labor within a broader postwar effort to resume professional and communal life. It also offered a visible measure of how much time had passed: an old performance could return, but only after the historical conditions that had supported it were broken.

Mameha’s Joke and the Changed Gion

Before the revival, Sayuri asked Mameha whether Dances of the Old Capital would resume the following spring. Mameha answered by proposing a theme, the Dance in the Stream. The joke depends on a contrast between a formal dance and a performance associated with women posing as geisha at hot-springs resorts, where the supposed dance becomes a striptease: the performer pretends to wade into deeper water, lifting her kimono’s hem, while men cheer and toast with sake. Mameha’s suggestion was not a description of the revived production; it was a pointed parody of what could pass as geisha entertainment elsewhere.

Her follow-up made the changed circumstances explicit. With American soldiers now in Gion, she said, English would get a woman further than dance, and the Kaburenjo Theater had been turned into a cabaret. The juxtaposition sets the revival against a transformed entertainment district: traditional performance was returning, but foreign occupation and new venues had altered the terms on which geisha could attract an audience. Mameha’s wit conveys both her ability to read those changes and the distance between the old theatrical ideal and postwar commercial life.

Work, Memory, and Aftermath

The revival ran alongside the renewed business of Sayuri’s social world. During the spring, the Chairman and Nobu were busy and brought the Minister to Gion only twice. In the first week of June, Iwamura Electric requested Sayuri at the Ichiriki Teahouse; when she arrived half an hour late, Nobu and the Minister were the only people waiting. The production thus belongs to a period in which theater work and patronage continued together, though neither restored the earlier rhythms of Gion.

The book measures that changed world against later loss. Sayuri recalls that Gion’s Kaburenjo Theater had become a cabaret, and that the district itself would shrink from eight hundred geisha when she first arrived to fewer than sixty, with only a handful of apprentices. The return of Dances of the Old Capital is consequently a real resumption, not a reversal of history: it brings the women back to work while underscoring how fragile the institutions and community around that work have become.