Geisha

The word splits into gei, art, and sha, person. The job is entertainment at a formal level: shamisen, dance, song, poured drinks, and conversation steered so that a table of strangers enjoys itself. Training begins as a maiko, an apprentice who wears the heavy hairstyle and the trailing sash and spends years learning what she may say and to whom.

Kyoto keeps five districts where this still operates, Gion being the one everybody has heard of, and an evening gets booked through a teahouse rather than through the woman herself. Prices are high and quietly kept. Numbers have fallen from tens of thousands before the war to somewhere near a thousand today, and the profession now recruits adult women instead of children sent by their families.

Western confusion about the work is old and was partly manufactured: bar hostesses in the occupation years borrowed the name, and the phrase geisha girl attached itself to the wrong thing. Anime usually takes the imagery rather than the job, dropping a character into a lane of paper lanterns and white makeup to signal a formal world whose rules they do not know yet.