Secret Passages

I've always loved mystery stories involving secret passages. My favourite Nancy Drew was #2: the Hidden Staircase, about an old lady who lives in a house that's riddled with passages behind the walls, and staircases everywhere. Another one of my favourite stories was something that landed in my lap after the elementary school library decomissioned it. It was called The Hidden Cat, by Brent Locke, about three little girls who discover a hidden treasure trove in the passage ridden walls of their friends' Victorian house. The story came complete with the girls having to solve a puzzle to gain access to the final room. (Says something in a fake old-person voice about not having video games and having to read when I was a youth!) The Hidden cat is long out of print, and even that sage of human knowledge, the Internets, doesn't seem to know all that much about it except that Brent Locke was a woman and that the book is rare, and holy crap! The only copy on Ebay is $80!
The internets doesn't seem to know much about secret passages in general. To be honest, I was not looking for real, purposeful secret passages, such as the ones on the underground railway used to hide runaway slaves, or the ones used to hide Jews during WWII.
I was looking for secret passages built by eccentric lunatics with way too much money. Secret passages like the ones in H.P. Lovecraft, used to hide nefarious doings, or maybe a dark secret, at the very least a hiding place for someone's stash! Hell, I would have settled with a nook providing habitation for the occasional hobo.
When I was a kid, I used to want to be Nancy Drew. I went around tapping on the walls of our old house, convinced that the area between my room and the adjacent room contained a secret room. In reality, it was probably a chimney. But that did nothing to hinder my dream that someday, I'd find a secret passage in our house.
Typically, of the internet, most of the hits I found when I was looking up secret passages were pages for companies that will install one for you. Subtly. Behind a bookcase. THAT's never been done before. I think the whole concept of panic rooms is self-indulgent...what makes you so special that a gang of weapon-bearing criminals would invade your house? But I suppose that we can add panic rooms to the list of things that the idle wealthy use to massage their own egos.
So, any prospective constructors of secret rooms, here's my two cents. You're lame. Unless you're going to hide a treasure in there, or puzzles, or a dark secret worthy of a secret room, you're just a posseur. Really, what are you going to put back there? An office with a computer? Where you can do your "secret 9:00 am phone-in meetings?"
The idle rich have been installing secret doors in their mansions for hundreds of years now, for the sake of paranoia, midnight trysts, or keeping the filthy prole servants out of sight.
I'll depart with telling you of the only secret room I've ever managed to find. In Machado House, at Brown University, there's a foyer that the resident programme club never uses. It has an old piano, and a marble fireplace with the most expressive head of Medusa carved into it.
To the left and right of the fireplace were mirrored panels. Behind the one on the left, there was nothing...but a little tug on the mirrored panel to the right of the fireplace revealed a hidden door. There was a small passage to the dining room behind it, with shelves set into the walls. This was one of the "keep the dirty servants out of sight" passages....but it was still pretty damn cool. I felt like I'd finally lived out my childhood fantasies of being Nancy Drew.

Classy Hookers

Shortly after reading Memoirs of a Geisha in highschool, I was trying to explain to a friend the difference between Oiran, Geisha, and Tayuu. This particular friend, who happens to have an aptitude for bawdy lyrics summarized my explanation with the following.

Tokyo ghetto whore
Get a little less, pay a little more
When she's out goin' on the hunt
Gotta remember: tie kimono at the front.
She's a ten-yen Tokyo ghetto whore...

Aside from the price (which might not be so off given inflation), she got a lot of things right. A lot of the time, when we see pictures Japanese Jolly Ladies, we tend to peg them all as "geisha". Given that geisha have been romanticized since Commodore Perry stormed into Tokyo Bay, and that quite a few ten-yen Tokyo Ghetto Whores claimed to be geisha whilst having a good time with American GIs during WWII, it's not surprising that we make this mistake.
Geisha, however, are not prostitutes. Their job was similar to that of today's hostess club hostesses: entertain male clients with talk, games, music and dancing. Sex might happen on the side for a little extra, but it wasn't in the official job description..at least for the city geisha. The Japanese themselves tended to blurr the lines between geisha and prostitutes in more rural areas. Sex was part of the contract for geisha at the hotsprings, for example. Anyone wanting to know about this should read Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata.
Many of the dolls and pictures we see, and some of the more diabolical looking women in ukiyoe are Oiran. Oiran are very, very classy hookers, and the highest ranked among them were the Tayuu. They had to be talented artists and dancers, but sex was definitely a big part of the job description. And it didn't come cheap. You can spot an oiran because she has her kimono tied in the front, and her elaborate hairdo is a virtual pincushion for things that dangle and jingle and stick out at odd angles. Her hair is often done up in a structure resembling butterfly wings (which was supposed to remind men of certain things), and her geta (shoes) are so tall that one famous Oiran of the Edo period became famous for her peculiar walk--swinging her legs out to the side in order to accommodate her shoes in her tight kimono. Oiran almost always have bare feet in the pictures and prints that you see of them. The purpose was to remind men that beneath the elaborate clothing, big hair, and thick makeup was a real woman....and SEX. TO. BE. HAD.


For some modernized oiran with unconventional hair colours, go here.
For more information on geisha (and the forums from which I stole that picture) click here.
For some vintage pictures of oiran, go here.
To see the full sized versions of the above pictures, click on them. They're worth it.