A Geisha

I've always been fascinated by the Japanese culture and the term Geisha came up quite a few times recently that I decided I should know about it.

So I glanced over the wikipedia page about Geisha and got the movie to watch.

The movie is good, it's not excellent in my humble opinion as far as movies go. But it does shed some light over something I never knew existed till now.

If you're too lazy to read the wikipedia page, the word Geisha is japanese for art-person. A Geisha is a sort of entertainer that spends a lifetime learning various arts (music, dance, poetry, story telling) to be able to perform their jobs.

This is all, of course, just fine. The intriguing point (and the one that comes in focus in the movie) is that up until (very) recently being a geisha was not a career decision women take after high school. Rather they were *sold* as children to geisha houses (okiyas).

At the end of the movie I found myself wondering. How come slavery or the practice and school of thought that you can buy and sell a human life lasted so long. For thousands of years this was happening in various forms in various places all over the world, and it was only a few tens of years ago when we could truly say slavery was becoming extinct. How is it that human beings were able to accumulate this mind boggling amount of knowledge, including relativity theory and quantum mechanics, before they grasp the simple concept that one man shouldn't be able to buy or sell another.