Fiona Graham was born in Australia and has a PhD from Oxford. She attended high school and college in Japan, and returned as an anthropological filmmaker years later to study geisha. "In order to research geisha, I really needed to become one," she says. "It started out as a documentary proposal. But as time went on, it got more serious and in depth, and I decided to continue."

Now Sayuki, she is the only white woman to ever become a full-fledged geisha in Japan.