World War II

World War II is the period in which Gion’s apparent shelter from Japan’s mounting hardship fails, and its geisha, households, and patrons are forced into new arrangements for survival. The war’s effects unfold unevenly: military connections and the circulation of scarce goods initially protect the Nitta okiya, but that advantage proves temporary. The geisha districts close, Sayuri leaves Gion to work with the Arashino family, and the war’s end brings defeat rather than an immediate return to her former life.

War and Gion’s Unequal Shelter

Sayuri later describes the years from the Depression through the war as kurotani, the valley of darkness. In her account, Gion is not untouched by deprivation, but it is initially buffered by the resources flowing through the district. Women connected to cabinet ministers and naval commanders receive advantages that they pass along within a tightly interdependent community. Sayuri likens Gion to a high mountain pond replenished by streams of rich water: the supply reaches some places more than others, yet raises the level of the whole pond.

The Nitta okiya is among the most favored places in that system because of General Tottori. During the war’s early years it continues to receive food, tea, linens, and some luxury goods even after rationing begins. The household shares some of what it receives with others in Gion, less from personal generosity than because its members understand themselves to be connected on the same web. In fall 1941, when military police discover a maid carrying far more ration coupons than her household was allowed, she is sent to the Nitta okiya for safekeeping while arrangements are made to take her to the countryside. General Tottori has instructed the police to leave the household alone, making its protection practical as well as material.

Sayuri’s own arrangement with General Tottori illustrates both the reach and the limits of wartime patronage. He pays many of her expenses, including lessons, registration, and medical costs, and his position as director of military procurement gives the okiya access to goods and assistance unavailable through an ordinary patron. When Auntie falls ill in March 1939, a call to the General brings a doctor from a military hospital, whose medicine helps her recover. The General also sends tea, sugar, and chocolates. Yet Sayuri does not receive the prominent dance recitals, lavish gifts, or leisure she had expected from a danna; military men do not support a geisha in the same way as businessmen or aristocrats. His value to the household lies less in display than in institutional access.

The Withdrawal of Protection

The household’s position changes abruptly when General Tottori’s protection is lost. After a military policeman arrives at the okiya in December 1942, its supplies and possessions are taken away. The police cite violations such as hoarding cotton, failing to surrender metal and rubber, and improper use of ration tickets—practices common among Gion’s households, but newly consequential for one that had enjoyed exceptional protection. The neighborhood association confiscates ceramics and scrolls for sale on the gray market, with the proceeds benefiting others. The distinction between ordinary exchange and punishment blurs: the Nitta okiya’s things are sold both to raise money and to penalize it.

By the middle of 1943, the earlier hope that the war might soon end has given way to fear about its course and the future of the geisha districts. The threat is not abstract. After a fire destroys the okiya of Hatsumomo’s friend Korin, Korin must work in a factory south of the city, fitting lenses into equipment used for dropping bombs from airplanes. She returns to Gion with a persistent cough and soot-stained skin, and is made to work double shifts on meager food. Her circumstances show what the geisha fear when rumors circulate that the military government will shut their districts and send them to factories. Raiha’s bleak joke—that the future is bleaker than the past—briefly releases the group’s fear in laughter, but the danger soon becomes policy.

In January of the following year, the closure is announced while Sayuri waits in line at a rice shop, holding her ration coupons and wearing peasant clothes rather than a kimono. The government orders the geisha to report to the registry office the next morning. The announcement turns an uncertain threat into an immediate problem of livelihood: those around Sayuri wonder which men they know might save them from factory work. She sets out at once to find General Tottori, who is rumored to be staying at Suruya Inn, where they had met twice a week for years. The episode marks the end of Gion’s wartime exception. Its former network of patrons cannot protect every geisha from displacement.

Displacement, Labor, and Survival

Sayuri’s wartime refuge comes through Nobu, who arranges for her to live with the Arashino family. She works with them sewing parachutes by day and sleeps at night in the workshop, sharing floor bedding with the family’s daughter and grandson. Fuel is scarce enough that they burn compressed leaves, newspapers, and magazines for warmth. Their food includes soybean dregs, bran fried in flour, occasional potatoes, dried whale meat, seal sausage, and sardines. Sayuri becomes so thin that people in Gion would not recognize her. When the young grandson cries from hunger, Mr. Arashino sometimes sells a kimono from his collection to obtain money. Sayuri calls this gradual stripping away of security an onion life, in which each layer is removed with grief.

The threat of air raids makes even this precarious refuge uncertain. During the family’s first raid, in spring 1944, they see bombers overhead and flashes rising from the ground to meet them. Kyoto is not struck in that raid, but the fires in Osaka turn the moon red, and ash reaches the city from fifty kilometers away. Sayuri worries about the Chairman and Nobu, whose company is based in Osaka and who have homes there, and about her sister Satsu. In the deprivation of exile, she recognizes that reunion is not simply a matter of longing: Satsu has no way to know the name of the Nitta okiya, and travel to a distant city is beyond the means of someone living in poverty.

The same war that displaces Sayuri produces radically different outcomes for people who once seemed equally secure. Raiha, a prominent geisha from a merchant family, is killed in the Tokyo firebombing while visiting her father’s estate; the sumo wrestler Miyagiyama also dies in the same raid. Pumpkin survives repeated bombings at the lens factory where she works near Osaka. Mameha survives while working as a nurse’s assistant in Fukui Prefecture, whereas her maid Ta-tsumi is killed in the bombing of Nagasaki. Mr. Itchoda dies of a heart attack during an air-raid drill, while Mr. Bekku survives work at a naval base. General Tottori survives as well. These divergent fates lead Sayuri to recognize how unpredictable survival is, irrespective of the comfort or status a person seemed to possess before the war.

The Arashino household’s possessions also enter the wartime economy through Mother. When Mr. Arashino needs cash, he asks Sayuri to contact her; Mother buys and sells heirlooms in the gray market, and many Kyoto kimono pass through her hands. Mr. Arashino appears to hope she will hold his kimono until he can buy them back, but Mother says she cannot find them. The story’s richly made objects thus change function under scarcity: what had signified status and professional life becomes a source of cash, while its passage through the market can separate an owner from the possibility of reclaiming it.

Defeat and the Uncertain Aftermath

The war ends in August 1945, but Sayuri presents the defeat as another descent into darkness rather than a clean release. Japan is defeated and devastated; the arrival of an occupying army makes people feel as though they are awaiting judgment. For a year or more, Sayuri hears almost no laughter, apart from the young Juntaro’s, which his grandfather tries to quiet. The silence becomes part of her account of childhood and war: a generation growing up amid hardship carries a seriousness formed by the lack of laughter.

By spring 1946, the people around Sayuri have begun to believe they will survive defeat, and reports of American soldiers’ violence have not proved true; she describes the soldiers as generally kind. But her own appearance makes clear how thoroughly her earlier life has been interrupted. Watching a passing group of soldiers in torn work trousers and with unwashed hair, she sees herself not as a member of the separated world of Gion but as one among the neighborhood’s other women. The distinction made by her geisha life has been suspended by labor and deprivation.

War also leaves a material crisis for Iwamura Electric. Nobu gives Sayuri a piece of concrete from the company’s Osaka factory, explaining that two of its four factories have been destroyed and that the company may not survive the next few years. The fragment is both evidence of industrial loss and a token exchanged between them: Nobu frames it as a piece of himself, just as Sayuri’s fan had represented a piece of her. The survival of their personal bond and the company’s future are therefore connected to the same damaged landscape.

That vulnerability continues under the Allied Occupation. In retrospect, Nobu explains that the Occupation authorities were prepared to make a final judgment against Iwamura Electric and seize it, which would have prevented him and the Chairman from working in business again. The Minister intervenes, reopening the case and persuading the authorities that the company was being treated too harshly. The war’s end thus does not end the pressure on the people and institutions tied to Gion: wartime destruction gives way to occupation-era restrictions and corporate uncertainty, while the relationships that once offered protection remain crucial to survival.