20th Anniversary Dream Trip Contest

Great Travel Moment

We were in Japan just as the movie“Memoirs of a Geisha” was being released in theaters in the USA. There was a lot of noise being made about the fact that the lead roles in the film were played by non-Japanese actresses. Admittedly, I didn’t know very much about the geisha traditions other that what I had read in guidebooks. But here we were in Kyoto, near the Gion district–“Geisha Central”. We had toured an actual geisha house, and our tour guide had explained to us, with great pride, the traditions and art of the Japanese geisha. It wasn’t until I saw these Japanese tourists, dressed up as geisha, that I really understood how proud the Japanese were of their traditions, and why they felt the way they did about the casting of the movie.