Mizuage was a ceremony undergone by apprentice oiran and some maiko as part of their coming of age ceremony and graduation. For kamuro, who had often already lost their virginity, a patron would pay for the exclusive privilege of being a new oiran's first customer; for maiko, it marked an apprentice's graduation into geishahood, and was accompanied by the changing of hairstyles and official visits to benefactors. Before the outlawing of prostitution in Japan, some maiko underwent ritual "deflowering" ceremonies, wherein patrons and benefactors would bid large sums of money for the privilege of taking a maiko's virginity, a sum of money the okiya itself would take. In the present day, a maiko's graduation is known as erikae, and is entirely non-sexual, though some older sources - such as the autobiography of Mineko Iwasaki, the geisha that author Arthur Golden used as inspiration for his character of Sayuri in the novelMemoirs of a Geisha - refer to the non-sexual graduation of a maiko as mizuage. Kamuro, and oiran as an extension, exist in the modern day only through re-enactors, who also do not include sexual initiation or prostitution as part of their practice, instead re-creating the arts that courtesan once performed and entertained guests with.
History
Mizuage has been long connected with the loss of virginity of a maiko, owing to the fact that some maiko did undergo a deflowering ceremony. A maiko undergoing mizuage would be sponsored monetarily by a patron, who through his sponsorship - intended to promote her debut as a geisha - would take the maiko's virginity. According to anthropologist Liza Dalby, mizuage was an important initiation into womanhood and the geisha world, giving way to the next stage of training, and the mizuage patron would often not have further relations with the young woman in question. Unscrupulous okiya owners would often exploit younger maiko and enforce the selling of their "virginity" repeatedly to unsuspecting customers, pocketing the money entirely - a sometimes outrageous sum of money. This practice was made illegal, alongside other acts of prostitution, with the introduction of the 1956 Anti-Prostitution Law.
Post-1956 to present day
Iwasaki described her experience of mizuage in her autobiography as a round of formal visits to announce her graduation, including the presentation of gifts to related geisha houses and important patrons, and a cycle through five different hairstyles - wareshinobu, ofuku, yakkō and katsuyama - before graduating. Dalby relays the change between pre- and post-1956 attitudes to mizuage within the karyukai through her first-hand accounts with the geisha mothers of Ponto-chō:
"What about mizu-age now?" I asked, seeing this as a chance to find out more about sex in the geisha world..."It's all changed now," said the okāsan. "There's no mizu-age ceremony any more...All the maiko have been through junior high school, so they aren't as ignorant as we were - right, Ichiume? They pretty much pick their own boyfriends and patrons when they're ready. That's not the same as mizu-age."
Today, all maiko and geisha have full say over their personal choices regarding sex, and nearly all maiko begin training, attending banquets, and interacting with customers aged 18 - though they may start living at the okiya as a shikomi for a few years before graduation to maiko status. Though customers attending geisha parties and banquets generally expect some level of convivial and low-key flirtation, a maiko is likely to be considered off-limits as a younger and more vulnerable participant to such gatherings. Maiko are instead treated with warmth and generosity, with customers cognizant of their relative inexperience at zashiki.
In literature
Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha portrays the mizuage as a financial arrangement in which a girl's virginity is sold to a "mizuage patron", generally someone who particularly enjoys sex with virgin girls, or merely enjoys the charms of some individual maiko. Former geisha Sayo Masuda describes mizuage in her 1956 autobiography Autobiography of a Geisha as sexual exploitation. Masuda describes being sold multiple times by her okiya to men, ostensibly for the purposes of taking her virginity, under the pretence that she had not yet lost it. The transaction was explicitly a sexual arrangement, far removed from the ceremony of graduating into geishahood, netting the okiya a large profit; despite her personal experiences, Masuda argued against the outlawing of prostitution in Japan, explaining that it provided a way for women to make an independent living when chosen as a profession, and through criminalisation, would merely be driven underground.
