Forbidden Kyoto - 2012/05/27 - Life as a TAYU - Diva beyond Geisha

Life as a TAYU - Diva beyond Geisha

Broadcast Schedule (UTC) May 27, Sun. 3:10
7:10
11:10
15:10
19:10

The camera enters the exclusive Shimabara entertainment quarter, which has long stood out even in Kyoto for its close court connections. The tayu, who hold the highest rank in this district, are highly accomplished not only in the standard geisha skills of music and dance but also in the kokyu (the only Japanese instrument played with a bow), incense, waka-style poetry and other ancient arts. The delightful talents of the tayu are honed, of course, only through great daily effort behind the scenes. We observe their life and work through the eyes of Aureana Tseu, herself an inheritor of the traditional Hawaiian hula dance.

This is the fifth in our popular series of programs taking a fresh, distinctive look at forbidden worlds of Kyoto that can usually only be glimpsed for fleeting moments. We have already visited the Gion and other entertainment districts, the home of a tea ceremony school and other usually unvisitable places but now we penetrate Shimabara itself at the very pinnacle of the Japanese entertainment pyramid, the most inaccessible place of them all.

It is the custom throughout the geisha quarters to turn first time customers away but Shimabara is so exclusive that very few Japanese, let alone foreigners, even know of its existence or of the tayu who work there. There used to be several dozen houses there for entertaining courtly guests but the district declined from the start of the Edo period when the seat of government was transferred to Edo, the city that is now Tokyo. Today, only a single house remains but the tayu are the creme de la creme of the entertainment business.

Today's traveler is a princess of Hawaiian hula, Aureana Tseu. The inheritor of a grand tradition, Aureana visits her friend, Sherry, while agonizing over whether to become a Kumu Hula, a teacher of the dance. Sherry shows her the cherry blossoms in full bloom, the sumptuous elegance of the tayu and other attractions of the Kyoto spring. How will Aureana react to seeing the threatened culture of the Kyoto entertainment quarters with her own eyes? We see the tayu, the bearers of a grand, forbidden entertainment tradition created for the court, through Aureana's eyes.

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This video has no dropped frames so has been marked as CFR by removing the timecodes. It will play on the PS3.

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part 1 of 1: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?27u03bsachdyh0p