A maiko (舞妓, maiko) is an apprentice geisha; a geisha, called geiko (芸妓) in Kyoto, is the fully trained artist. The apprenticeship runs roughly five years, from about age 15 to 20. Almost everything tourists photograph in Gion, the ornate hairpins, the trailing obi, the long sleeves, marks the apprentice, not the master.
This is the reversal that catches people. The image the word “geisha” summons in most of the world, the elaborate silk, the towering flower ornaments, the dramatic white face, is a picture of a teenager in training. A fully fledged geiko is quieter, plainer, and easier to walk past.
The ornamentation is not a mark of rank. It is a mark of inexperience, and it is designed to fall away.
The Path from Maiko to Geiko
The training system in Kyoto has four recognisable stages.
Shikomi (仕込み). A girl joins an okiya (置屋), the lodging house that will sponsor her, after finishing compulsory schooling at fifteen. For the first six months to a year she does housework, runs errands, and observes. She dresses in ordinary clothes and takes daily lessons in dance, shamisen, and the Kyoto dialect. Many leave at this stage.
Minarai (見習い), “learning by watching.” A short phase, often about a month, when she attends banquets in near-full maiko dress but sits and observes rather than performing. Her obi is shorter than a maiko’s, one visible sign of the intermediate stage.
Maiko (舞妓), literally “dancing child.” The apprenticeship proper, typically five years, from around fifteen to eighteen at debut through to about twenty. She performs, dances, attends banquets nightly, and continues formal lessons every morning. This is the stage the world photographs.
Erikae (襟替え), “turning of the collar.” The graduation ceremony. The red embroidered collar of the maiko is exchanged for the plain white collar of the geiko, usually around age twenty or twenty-one. In the weeks before it, a senior maiko wears the sakkou (先笄) hairstyle, a distinctive final look worn only in that closing stretch.
After erikae she is a geiko and may stay one for decades. Some of Kyoto’s most respected geiko are in their sixties and seventies, and a few have practised for over fifty years. Unlike the maiko stage, there is no exit date built into it.
Kyoto uses geiko rather than geisha. Both mean roughly “person of art,” but geisha (芸者) is the Tokyo and general Japanese term, while geiko is the Kyoto word and the one used in the city’s own districts. Tokyo also calls its apprentices hangyoku (半玉) rather than maiko.
Five Ways to Tell Them Apart
Kimono and obi
A maiko wears a furisode (振袖), the style with long trailing sleeves that mark a young unmarried woman. The colours are bright, the patterns large and seasonal, and the effect is deliberately youthful.
Her obi is the giveaway. The darari obi (だらりの帯), “dangling obi,” runs roughly five to six metres long and hangs almost to her ankles at the back, weighted enough that the full outfit can come to fifteen or twenty kilograms once hair ornaments are counted. It cannot be tied without help. No maiko dresses herself.
A geiko wears shorter sleeves, subdued colours, and a compact obi tied in the taiko musubi (太鼓結び), the neat drum knot ordinary women wear. From behind, the difference is unmistakable: a curtain of silk versus a tidy rectangle.
The same underlying garment logic applies to both, and if the vocabulary is unfamiliar, our guide to yukata vs kimono covers the obi types and layers in plain terms.
Hair
A maiko styles her own hair. It is pulled, waxed, and bound by a specialist hairdresser into set shapes, and she sleeps on a lacquered wooden neck rest to preserve it for days at a time. Junior maiko wear wareshinobu (割れしのぶ), with a split bun and red silk showing through; senior maiko wear ofuku (おふく). The pulling is hard enough that many maiko develop a small bald patch at the crown, which the okiya regard as a badge of the years served.
A geiko wears a katsura (鬘), a wig, styled in the shimada form for formal engagements. It is less punishing on the scalp and faster to put on. The trade is that the wig looks smoother and more uniform, without the tension lines and pulled hairline you see on a maiko.
Kanzashi
This is the fastest visual test at a distance. A maiko’s hair carries a full arrangement of kanzashi, the ornamental hairpins, and they change with the month: plum in February, cherry blossom in April, willow and morning glory in summer, chrysanthemum in autumn, pine and rice ears at New Year. A junior maiko’s are the largest and most elaborate; over her five years they progressively shrink.
A geiko wears one or two restrained pins. Tortoiseshell, lacquer, sometimes coral, chosen for quality rather than display.
A maiko is decorated so that she is seen. A geiko is dressed so that her dancing is.
Makeup
Both wear the white foundation, oshiroi (白粉), applied to the face, neck, and upper back, with a deliberately unpainted margin at the hairline and a pattern of two or three points left bare at the nape.
The lips separate them, and this is the detail worth remembering. A first-year maiko paints only her lower lip. The upper lip stays white. It reads as unfinished on purpose, a visible statement that she is not yet complete. In her second year she paints both.
Eyebrows and eye lines are done in red and black, more heavily on a maiko. A geiko wears noticeably lighter makeup overall, and at some engagements almost none, in the reasoning that her skill no longer needs the frame. Then there is the collar itself: red and embroidered for a maiko, plain white for a geiko, the change that gives erikae its name.
Footwear
A maiko wears okobo (おこぼ), tall unpainted wooden platform sandals roughly ten to twelve centimetres high, with bells sometimes set into the hollow of the sole. They force short, careful steps, which is part of the training.
A geiko wears zori (草履), flat covered sandals, with white tabi (足袋) split-toe socks. Walking in them is unremarkable, which is the point.
Geisha vs Maiko at a Glance
| Maiko (apprentice) | Geiko / Geisha (full artist) | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | In training, about 5 years | Qualified, often for decades |
| Typical age | 15 to 20 | 20 and upward |
| Kimono | Bright furisode, long trailing sleeves | Subdued colours, shorter sleeves |
| Obi | Darari obi, 5 to 6 m, hangs to the ankles | Taiko musubi, compact drum knot |
| Hair | Her own hair, waxed and bound | Katsura wig |
| Kanzashi | Many, elaborate, changed monthly | One or two, restrained |
| Collar and lips | Red collar; lower lip only in year one | White collar; both lips, lighter makeup |
What the Work Actually Is
The profession is performing arts and hospitality. Nothing else.
A geiko or maiko trains for years in Japanese classical dance, the three-stringed shamisen, the ko-tsuzumi hand drum, the flute, singing, tea ceremony, calligraphy, and conversation. Lessons continue for the whole career, not just the apprenticeship. Dance schools in the Kyoto districts run on the traditional kata model, form repeated until it becomes instinct, and the standard held is closer to kodawari, an uncompromising relationship with craft, than to entertainment as most countries understand it.
The evening work happens at an ozashiki (お座敷), a banquet in a teahouse. She dances, plays, pours, runs drinking games, and manages the room so that every guest feels attended to without noticing the management. That last skill is the hardest and least visible one, and it is the practical face of omotenashi, Japanese hospitality as an art with rules.
Geiko and maiko are not, and have never been, courtesans. The confusion comes largely from Western misreadings and from postwar imitators, and it conflates two entirely separate histories. The elite courtesans of the Edo pleasure quarters were the oiran, a different profession with different rules, a different appearance, and a very different set of freedoms. That history is worth knowing on its own terms, and we cover it in oiran vs geisha.
One clean historical marker: geisha were licensed as entertainers and legally forbidden from selling sexual services, while the licensed quarters that housed the oiran operated under an entirely separate system that Japan abolished in 1958.
How Many Are Left
Kyoto has five hanamachi (花街), “flower towns,” and all five still operate: Gion Kobu, Gion Higashi, Pontocho, Miyagawa-cho, and Kamishichiken.
The numbers have contracted sharply. Estimates commonly put the nationwide geisha population at around 80,000 in the 1920s. Today Kyoto has roughly 200 to 300 geiko and maiko combined, of whom perhaps 60 to 80 are maiko at any given moment. Tokyo, Kanazawa, Niigata, and a handful of other cities maintain smaller communities. All of these figures are estimates; the districts do not publish precise rolls, and the totals shift year to year.
The pressures are the obvious ones. A five-year residential apprenticeship starting at fifteen competes with school and university. The banquet economy that sustained the districts has shrunk. Kimono, wigs, and ornaments are expensive to maintain, and the okiya carries those costs.
Against that, the tradition is not dying quietly. Girls still apply every year, entry is now genuinely voluntary and chosen, and public dance performances such as Kyoto’s Miyako Odori each spring sell to full houses.
Etiquette in Gion
Maiko and geiko walking through Gion are commuting to work. They are late, their footwear is difficult, and they cannot stop.
The rules, plainly:
Do not touch, grab, or block. Incidents of tourists pulling at sleeves, obi, and hair ornaments are the reason the restrictions below exist. A maiko’s outfit costs more than a car and cannot be repaired quickly.
Do not photograph on private streets. Since October 2019, the Gion Kobu district has posted signs banning photography on its privately owned side alleys, with a stated penalty of 10,000 yen. In 2024, Kyoto extended restrictions on tourist access to several private alleys off Hanamikoji. Public thoroughfares remain photographable, but the alleys are not public.
Ask, or better, do not ask. Someone walking briskly in full dress at dusk is on her way to an engagement. Requesting a photo is asking her to be late.
Watch instead. Standing quietly on Hanamikoji around dusk and simply looking is both permitted and better. So is buying a ticket to a public dance performance, where the whole point is to be seen.
There is also a practical note: a large share of the “maiko” photographed by tourists in Kyoto are visitors in rented costume from a henshin studio. If the makeup is uneven, the obi is short, the hair is a loose wig, and she is smiling at the camera in the middle of the afternoon, she is a tourist. A working maiko is dressed with a precision that reads even from across a street.
Recommended Reading
- Geisha by Liza Dalby (1983, University of California Press). The anthropologist who trained as a geisha in Kyoto; still the essential study.
- Geisha, a Life by Mineko Iwasaki with Rande Brown (2002, Atria Books). A memoir by Gion’s most famous former geiko.
FAQ
What is a maiko?
A maiko is an apprentice geisha in Kyoto, where fully qualified practitioners are called geiko rather than geisha. She joins an okiya, or lodging house, after finishing compulsory education at around fifteen, spends several months as a shikomi doing housework and taking lessons, then debuts and works as a maiko for roughly five years. During that time she performs at banquets, studies classical dance and the shamisen daily, and wears the elaborate kimono, hair ornaments, and platform sandals most people associate with the word “geisha.” Tokyo uses the term hangyoku for the same stage.
How long is the apprenticeship?
About five years as a maiko, preceded by six months to a year as a shikomi and roughly a month as a minarai. A girl typically debuts between fifteen and eighteen and graduates at around twenty or twenty-one, in a ceremony called erikae, the turning of the collar, where her red embroidered maiko collar is replaced with the plain white collar of a geiko. Formal lessons do not stop at graduation; geiko continue studying dance and music throughout their careers, which can last decades.
Are geisha and geiko the same thing?
Yes, with a regional difference in vocabulary. Geisha (芸者) is the general Japanese and Tokyo term; geiko (芸妓) is the word used in Kyoto and is what practitioners there call themselves. Both translate roughly as “person of art.” Kyoto tends to use geiko partly to distinguish its own tradition, which emphasises classical dance, from the Tokyo style. Apprentices are maiko in Kyoto and hangyoku in Tokyo. If you are in Kyoto, geiko is the more accurate and more courteous word.
Do maiko still exist?
Yes. Kyoto’s five hanamachi districts all remain active, and there are perhaps 60 to 80 maiko in the city at any given time, with roughly 200 to 300 geiko and maiko combined. Numbers are far below the estimated 80,000 geisha nationwide in the 1920s, and the districts face real pressures from a shrinking banquet economy and a five-year residential apprenticeship that competes with formal education. But new maiko debut every year, entry is voluntary and chosen, and public performances such as the spring Miyako Odori continue to sell out.
Is it OK to photograph maiko in Kyoto?
Only with care, and not everywhere. Since October 2019 the Gion Kobu district has banned photography on its private side streets, with a stated fine of 10,000 yen, and Kyoto tightened access to several private alleys again in 2024. On public streets photography is not illegal, but a maiko walking at dusk is travelling to work in footwear that makes stopping difficult, and touching her kimono, obi, or hair ornaments is never acceptable. The considerate options are to watch without a camera, or to attend a ticketed public dance performance where photography arrangements are clear.