History
The Japanese version of the jester, these men were once attendants to daimyo (feudal lords) from the 13th century, originating from the 'Ji Sect of Pure Land Buddhism', which focused on dancing. These men both advised and entertained their lord and came to be known as doboshu ('comrades'), who were also tea ceremony connoisseurs and artists. By the 16th century, they became known as otogishu or hanashishu (story tellers), where they focused on story telling, humour, conversation. They were sounding boards for military strategies and they battled at the side of their lord.
A time of peace began in the 17th century and the otogishu and hanashishu no longer were required by their lords, and so they had to take on a new role. They changed from being advisors to becoming pure entertainers, and a number of them found employment with the Oiran, high class Japanese courtesans. Seisuisho ('Laughs to Banish Sleep'), a collection of comic stories written by Sakuden Anrakuan, was compiled during this time.
"Geisha" means "arts person", while hōkan was the formal name for "jester". Taikomochi was a less formal name for these men, which literally means "drum (taiko) bearer", though not all of them used the drum. It could also have been a corrupted way of saying "to flatter someone". These three terms came into use during the 17th century. In 1751 the first onna geisha (female geisha) arrived at a party and caused quite a stir. She was called geiko ("arts girl"), which is still the term for geisha in Kyoto today. By the end of the 18th century these onna geisha outnumbered the male geisha - the taikomochi - and the men became so few that they started by otoko geisha ("male geisha"). The geisha even took over from the yujo due to their artistic skills, their contemporary outlook and their sophistication. The men continued to assist the women - this time the geisha - in the entertainment field.
Read more about this topic: Taikomochi
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)