Organizations
From the Edo period (1600–1868) goze organized themselves in a number of ways. Few large-scale organizations have been found in urban areas, though during the nineteenth century some documents speak of a goze association in the city of Edo. In Osaka and some regional towns goze were sometimes informally linked to the pleasure quarters, where they were called to perform their songs at parties and the like.
Goze organizations developed most in rural areas and continued to exist in Niigata (once known as Echigo) and Nagano prefectures well into the twentieth century (the last important active goze, Haru Kobayashi (小林ハル, Kobayashi Haru?), died in 2005, age 105).
From the Edo period onward, other goze groups were found from Kyushu in the south to approximately Yamagata and Fukushima prefectures in the north. Farther north blind women tended to become shamans (known as itako, waka, miko or the like) rather than goze. Large and important groups were especially active in the Kantō and surrounding areas, in what are today Gunma, Saitama, Chiba, Shizuoka, Yamanashi, Tokyo-to. Other groups were formed in Nagano and Gifu prefectures, and somewhat farther south, in Aichi prefecture. In addition to the well-known groups of Niigata prefecture, groups existed in other areas along the western seaboard, including Toyama, Ishikawa, and Fukui prefectures.
Suzuki Shōei (1996 and elsewhere) divides the organizations of Echigo goze into three main types.
- Goze organizations such as the one in Takada (today the city of Jōetsu), in which a limited number of goze houses (in early twentieth-century Takada 17) were concentrated in the city and in which each house was led by a master teacher who passed on the rights to her position and property to her top (or favorite) student after her death. Girls who wished to become 'goze had to move to the city and enter the house (fictitious family) of the goze teacher. Sometimes they were adopted by the teacher as a daughter.
- Organizations such as the one centered on Nagaoka, in which goze remained in the countryside, often their own home, after completing their apprenticeship with a goze elsewhere. These goze teachers were loosely linked to one another by their relation to the goze head in Nagaoka (a position assumed by a goze who, after becoming the head, assumed the name Yamamoto Goi). Once each year the goze of the Nagaoka group assembled at their headquarters, the house of Yamamoto Goi, to celebrate a ceremony known as myōonkō (妙音講?) in which their history and the rules of their organization was read out loud. A this they deliberated on what to do about members who had broken rules, ate a celebratory meal, and performed for one another.
- Organizations such as the one found in Iida (Nagano prefecture), in which the position of head rotated among members.
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