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Ichimame has been called “the first and probably only maiko to write a blog” and she is creating quite a stir, attracting about 1,000 visitors a day, according to an article in the Daily Yomiuri. Since last December, the eighteen year old Ichimame blogs twice a week, mainly short pieces about her daily life: her music and dance lessons, the annual customs and festivals in the geisha district, her hair ornaments and kimono. She tells about her nervousness before the Kitano Odori and other dance performances, she also writes about the Plum Festival in the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine. She even tells us that she has started studying English, in order to be able to talk with foreign guests. She writes in the Kyoto dialect, with lots of elegant –dosu and –mahen phrases.

[Ichimame’s blog on the website of the Ichi Teahouse - the lower picture is Ichimame ]

But as soon as you look at the site, you will realize that this is not a private blog in which Ichimame reveals her innermost secrets, but rather a clever advertising campaign of the Ichi Teahouse where Ichimame works. For starters, Ichimame writes on the site of the teahouse (where you will find little else than her blog). The sleek site was apparently especially designed for it - no simple Wordpress blog here!

As the Yomiuri article also notes, the blog was in fact set up to inform young girls about the life of a maiko and so get new blood - not many teenagers are interested in the hard life of a maiko nowadays. This ploy was quite succesful and 100 reactions poured in, even from abroad. Ichimame’s beautiful kimonos and kanzashi hair ornaments must have made many kids envious. One, a girl from Ishikawa Pref., has subsequently passed the tests and now has started training as a shikomi in the teahouse with the professional name Ichiteru - as is duly noted in the blog of Ichimame.

The Ichi Teahouse must have a clever mistress to resort to this interesting type of promotion. It may also be born from necessity, as the Ichi teahouse stands in the hanamachi that is least known among Kyoto’s five pleasure quarters: the Kamishichiken, a small street leading to the gate of the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine, in the northern part of the city, far from the hustle and bustle of Gion and Pontocho. The name “Kamishichiken,” “Seven Upper Houses” was derived from seven tea houses that were built here in the Muromachi period (1336-1573), using wood left over from the reconstrucion of the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine. This makes it the oldest geisha district in Kyoto. Now, there are only 14 geiko and 8 maiko left. The area does have its own dance performances, though, every year in spring the Kitano Odori and in autumn the shorter Kotobuki-kai. The theater, the Kamishichiken Kaburenjo, has a nice garden which in summer is in use as a beer garden (Ichimame tells us that the maiko serve by turns as waitress).