The word geisha comes from the phonemes Gei in Chinese which means art and Sha which refers to person, that is to say that it is a person of art or with artistic abilities. For more than 400 years, together with the samurai, they have caused a fascinating admiration and questions about their environment such as creation and connection with prostitution. In the year 1979, the geisha was recognized as the art in its sublime expression, they were known as the porcelain ladies expert in the art of entertaining.
They come from an ancient tradition that entails responsibility, discipline and an original talent for the cultivation of the arts, hence they are called geisha or artists. They are trained in a place called okiya, which in its tradition is a house or inn for geisha, where they are trained from an early age, sometimes parents deliver their daughters to these houses, which are equivalent to boarding schools, for lack of being able to maintain them., seeing that in these houses no money is provided for the training of future geishas, when they are admitted, parents can only visit their daughters on weekends or when the time they have free is adequate, some of them lose the contact from family members while they are receiving this training.
In the course of their studies there, they leave one life to start another, which begins by changing their own name for another, adopting a new one. The work of the art of a geisha is to learn to behave, to serve as a hostess at a private reception or at parties. The training program is very strict that during the years they spend at Okiya they carry out their tasks fully until they are capable enough to do so without any supervision. They are trained in all artistic disciplinessuch as dance, music and instrumentation, reading and writing, decoration such as floral arts, food, hostess service, decorum and etiquette, and above all in the most important and legendary tea ceremony, whose beauty and precision enchant anyone who witness, demonstrating excellent behavior and giving honor to the house which has trained you for this.
