Neo-Geisha Organization was founded in Tokyo, in 1996, by HIYOKO, the anti-consumerist, pro-pleasure visionary ideologue who started life as Heather Peterson. Assembling the city’s foreign-born bar hostesses into a loose union bound by a tightly-crafted agenda, HIYOKO modelled the Organization on her favorite new-new religions, cyberpunk novels, animated movies, Third World governments, and esoteric Tantric philosophies. Authoring such diverse documents as Neo-Geisha Manifesto and All the Glamour Without the Hysterics, HIYOKO changed the relationship of Buddhism to the contemporary world. In April of 1997, she finally led her thousands of followers into a high-concept homicide/ suicide such as the Land of the Rising Sun had never seen.
Japan’s usually lethargic Parliament responded by pushing through numerous and severe legislations to insure that something like this could never happen again. With almost all first-generation Neo-Geisha members dead, thousands more Organization sympathizers fled to self-imposed exile all over the world, from Pyonyang to Tehran, Vladivostock to Ljubjana. Conjectures abounded as to the future of the thought system.
Waves of clandestine restructuring and ideological mutation happened during a seven-year period known as the Neo-Geisha Restoration.
Today, Neo-Geisha Organization exists as a semiological collective headquartered in New York City. Having abandoned any ties to violent struggle, the Organization limits its own activities to artistic production and analysis. Numbering once more in the thousands, new-new members include novelist Hillary Raphael, photographer Gilded Peony, design group Tokyo Mon Amour, as well as many more anonymous contributors.
Now rejecting death and embracing media, Neo-Geisha Organization invites you to again Live Near the Future™.