Ponto-chō

Ponto-chō (先斗町) is a Hanamachi district in Kyoto, Japan, known for geiko and maiko and home to many geiko houses and traditional tea houses. Like Gion, Ponto-chō is famous for the preservation of forms of traditional architecture and entertainment.

Ponto-chō in the morning
Ponto-chō at night
Ponto-chō at night

Etymology

The name Ponto-chō is said to be a portmanteau of the Portuguese word "ponte" (bridge) and the Japanese word "-chō" meaning town, block or street.

District

Ponto-chō centres around one long, narrow, cobbled alley running from Shijō-dōri to Sanjō-dōri, one block west of the Kamo River (Kamo-gawa). This is also the traditional location of the start of kabuki, and a statue of Okuni still stands on the opposite side of the river. The district crest is a stylized water plover or chidori.

Cultural features

Geiko and maiko have existed in Ponto-chō since at least the 16th century, as have prostitution and other forms of entertainment. Today the area, lit by traditional lanterns at night, contains a mix of very expensive restaurants — often featuring outdoor riverside dining on wooden patios — geisha houses and tea houses, brothels, bars, and cheap eateries.

The area is also home to the Ponto-chō Kaburenjō Theatre at the Sanjō-dōri end of the street. This theatre functions as a practice hall for geiko and maiko and twice a year since the 1870s Kyoto geiko and maiko perform the Kamogawa Odori — Kamogawa river dancing, a combination of traditional dance, kabuki-like theatre, singing and the playing of traditional instruments — there, offering a rare chance for ordinary people to see performances by real geiko and maiko.

An American Liza Dalby became a geiko in Ponto-chō during college studies and later wrote a popular book favorable to the community there.[1]

gollark: Also, apparently if you could transmit information faster than light that would break causality, which would be bad.
gollark: According to xkcd, keeping updated would only require 5 printers worth of throughput, which is not very much in terms of bitrate.
gollark: I mean, it's probably way more complicated, but basically you can't send information faster than light that way.
gollark: Anyway, my knowledge of this is not very detailed, but IIRC quantum entanglement means that if you observe one particle the other one collapses into another state, or something like that, and you don't control which state is picked, so you can't send any data.
gollark: Yes. I think they might strip a bunch of the images, but with *no* media, just text content, it's 15GB.

See also

References
  1. Dalby, Liza (1983). Geikoa. Berkeley: University Of California Press. ISBN 0-9658812-6-1.


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