Kimono fashion ~ by Lesley Downer

Kosode with autumn flowers
by Ogata Kōrin, 18th century
(Tokyo National Museum)

‘First the courtesan Kaoru commissioned the renowned artist Kano Yukinobu to paint a picture of flaming autumn on plain white satin. Eight court nobles were next asked to inscribe vignettes in verse, in black decorative calligraphy, on this gorgeous design. The result was a picture of breath-taking beauty, admirably suitable for a hanging scroll. But Kaoru had no idea of putting it to such trifling use. She had it made into a robe for herself.’

The Life of an Amorous Man, Ihara Saikaku, 1682

The trendsetters of old Japan were the fabulously wealthy and celebrated courtesans of the pleasure quarters, as in the story above, by the famous writer and teller of naughty tales, Ihara Saikaku.

The key word is ‘trifling’ - ‘trifling use’. Why waste a beautiful painting by hanging it on a wall when you could have it made into a kimono? Then you could wear it and reveal how the painted image would change as you draped it on your body and, even more spectacularly, how it would flow as you moved, transforming it from a two dimensional object to a three dimensional work of art!

'Whose sleeves?'

Tagasode, 16th - 17th century (Met Museum)

There’s a genre of painting in Japan called Tagasode - 'Whose Sleeves?' Whose indeed? There are no people in these pictures, no beautiful women, just kimonos, draped seductively over a lacquered clothing frame. In old Japan a picture like this was considered provocative, even erotic. Just as a person’s fragrance and belongings can strongly evoke them, so it’s an invitation to speculate on the wearer. How gorgeous must the lady be who wraps herself up in one of these! In terms of allure clothing counts for as much as or more than the body wrapped up inside.

Moronobu Hishikawa (1618-1694) (Met Museum)

In woodblock prints the faces and figures of the courtesans, dancing girls and kabuki actors tend to be rather simply delineated, a hint rather than a studious portrait, not much differentiated. The focus is on the kimonos, rather, which are ravishing and distinctive. In this print by Moronobu each kimono is different.

Kimonos as art
Kimonos are always the same shape. What makes them different is not the cut or the style, which never change, but the painted design. In Japan the kimono is very far from just a garment. It is an art form and the great kimono designers are revered as artists. Museums worldwide show exhibitions of kimonos, both historical and contemporary. And in the women’s palace of the shogun’s castle in Edo (now Tokyo) and in daimyo’s castles and in wealthy merchants’ homes, sumptuous kimonos were hung on lacquered racks as a form of interior decoration.

Kosode moyo hinagata bon. Book
of painted kosode designs, second half
17th century (Met Museum)

In fact the silk kosode (the basic kimono) was the primary canvas for artistic expression in the 17th and 18th centuries in Japan. Kosode were often works of art on a par with paintings.

As in the story above, some designs feature written characters or whole poems used as decoration. Literature, the visual arts and traditional motifs and themes such as the ‘One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets’ happily combine with textiles to make a unified work of art. The artist incorporates their reaction to the feeling of the poem in their design, sometimes including a line or phrase in the pattern.

In the Edo period (1603-1868) kimono designers were as high in status, if not higher, than woodblock artists. Many artists, beginning with Moronobu, created kimono patterns. The legendary woodblock print artist Katsushika Hokusai, creator of The Great Wave and much else, also made designs for kimono fabric. He did small repeat patterns which became popular in the late Edo era when sumptuary laws restricting elaborate dress were increasingly enforced.

Kimono pattern books (Hinagata-bon)
Shops turned out kimono pattern books for every season promoting the latest fashions. A clerk would take a selection of books to a daimyo’s castle or a wealthy merchant’s home so that the lady of the house or an assistant could choose suitable designs. Less wealthy clients could go to the shop and study the pattern books there. Every year you would need to order new kimonos so as to keep up with the fashion.

 

Pattern book (hinagata-bon)
Enoki Hironobu 1751 (Met Museum)

The pattern books show designs for younger women, older women, young men, courtesans - but that doesn’t mean that the purchaser of the books would commission such designs, just as you wouldn’t actually expect to wear the clothes you see on the catwalk at Fashion Week. The pattern books were more like fashion magazines, like Vogue. People who couldn’t afford or wouldn’t want to wear such extravagantly glamorous clothes could still enjoy thumbing through the pages.

If you decided to commission a kimono, first you would choose your pattern from the pattern books. The tailor would record details of your requirements then make full size draft drawings with specifications to send to the dyers or embroiderers for the next stage of the production process. Once the decoration was finished the garment would be complete. 

Kosode, Edo period, 18th century, design of autumn
grasses and brushwood fences on  light green
chirimen crepe (Tokyo National Museum)

Edo period sumptuary laws decreed what sort of fabrics and designs you could and couldn’t wear. Certain fabrics and designs were reserved for the ladies of the imperial court or of the women’s palace at Edo Castle or for extremely high-ranking daimyos’ ladies. Conversely townswomen in particular were prohibited from wearing luxurious fabrics. 

As a result both they and their tailors became expert at, for example, designing a very plain unostentatious jacket with an incredibly expensive, over the top lining. It was the height of chic to dress very conservatively, allowing just a flash of the glorious lining to be seen.

The courtesans were famously flashy dressers. Yet what men found the most provocative was not the layers and layers of brilliantly coloured and heavily embroidered fabric - it was the tiny bare foot peeking out from under the voluptuous skirts, the only hint of the real woman gift-wrapped inside it all.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. For more see  http://www.lesleydowner.com/.

Pictures courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tokyo National Museum - by way of Wikimedia Commons. 

The Victorians meet the Geisha - by Lesley Downer

Playing the shamisen by Felice Beato (1860s)

In 1867 a 24 year old Englishman called Ernest Satow was travelling around Japan. Satow could speak and read Japanese - he was the legation interpreter - and had heard all about the ‘famed singing and dancing girls’ of Ozaka (Osaka). He was referring to geisha, though the word with all its titillating associations had yet to enter the English language. Japan had been open only a few years and no one in the west knew much about it, nor had the geisha and the myths that surround them become the source of fascination that they now are.

Satow went to a party where some performed but was not impressed. ‘Some of them were certainly pretty, others decidedly ugly, but we thought their looks ruined any case by the blackened teeth and white-lead-powdered faces,’ he wrote.

Kiyoka of Shimbashi
by Kazumasa Ogawa, 1902

For centuries there had always been twenty stalwart Dutch merchants who inhabited the tiny Dutch trading post of Dejima, but apart from them Japan had been closed to westerners. Westerners first arrived in any quantity in 1853, when the American Commodore Matthew Perry hove into view with his four gunships bristling with cannon. The following year his crew billeted at the port of Shimoda demanded women. Anxious to protect respectable women and to limit contact between foreigners and ordinary Japanese, the shogunate sent them geisha, who were in any case the only sort of women suitable for such a job. Having enjoyed their company and spawned a fair number of mixed raced babies, the Americans wrote in shocked tones in their journals and reports about what a sexually lax race the Japanese were.

Thus from the very start of western interaction with Japan, the western arrivals - initially entirely men - had a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards Japan and Japanese women.

Kobayakawa Okichi of Shimoda by
Kobazakawa Kizoshi, 1930s

In 1858 the first American Consul, Townsend Harris, and his Dutch secretary, Hendrick Heusken, arrived. They too demanded women and put their negotiations on hold until they got them. As before, the only women available for the job were geisha. Townsend Harris was given a geisha called Okichi and Ofuku moved in with Heusken. According to legend Harris later left Okichi without a second thought and she ended up turning to drink and drowning herself.

Townsend Harris’s negotiations forced the Japanese to allow westerners to settle in Japan. They built a town - Yokohama - to house them. They also provided a pleasure quarters just outside, on the not unreasonable assumption (to the Japanese way of thinking at the time) that westerners, being men, would need one. There were geisha, courtesans, dancing, feasting - but mysteriously not many westerners went. The Japanese managers finally worked out that while westerners had the same impulses as them, they preferred to satisfy them surreptitiously, rather than be seen walking into the pleasure quarters in broad daylight.

The Teahouse Beauty
by Utagawa Toyokuni (1769 - 1825)

One of the most sympathetic visitors to Japan was Ernest Satow’s friend and colleague at the British Legation, Algernon Mitford, the grandfather of the Mitford sisters. He spent three years there in the 1860s and was very impressed by the orderly society he saw. He visited the most famous pleasure quarters of all, the Yoshiwara, which was, he wrote, a decorous place where prostitution was confined and ritualised and kept well away from ordinary people. Yokohama, however, with its western seamen and adventurers, was almost ‘as leprous a place as the London Haymarket’ - prostitution being, of course, at least as prevalent back home.

Eventually Japan opened up fully and westerners began to flood in, bringing with them all their Victorian preconceptions and prejudices.

Early visitors were shocked to the core to discover that men and women cheerfully bathed together in large hot baths. They concluded the Japanese were licentious, promiscuous and immodest, with a shocking lack of moral fibre - not surprising, given that they were pagans and thus inferior to the European master race. Then in 1882 one British visitor, well ahead of his time, began to wonder if perhaps the Japanese ‘simply did not look at each other’s nakedness with lust or lewdness, inconceivable though this may seem to the European mind.’

The easily shocked Victorians were also horrified by the way Japanese women casually slipped their arms out of their sleeves and rolled down their kimonos to breast feed in public. And once or twice a Victorian was out riding when a whole family- grandparents, parents and children - leapt from the bath and rushed out stark naked to have a good look at the extraordinary sight.

Girl playing a Gekin by
Baron Raimund von Stillfried, 1890

But the Japanese soon got the measure of western prudery and thereafter kept their clothes on, at least when westerners were around.

It didn’t take long before the word ‘geisha’ entered the English language. To this day people still worry about whether geisha do or don’t. There’s also the confusion between who is a geisha and who is an ordinary girl in a kimono.

One problem is that westerners are ignorant of the different sorts of kimono (the word just means ‘clothing’) and the different ways of wearing it and what they signify and thus can’t distinguish between respectable kimono-wearing women and geisha or courtesans. As a result geisha and ordinary young Japanese women exist ‘interchangeably in the western imagination in the twilight zone between respectability and decadence, between prudery and immodesty’ (to quote a wonderful book on the subject called Butterfly’s Sisters, by Yoko Kawaguchi.)

All of which is rather satisfying to western men, who have long been convinced that Asian women are of deliciously dubious morality, a quality embodied above all in the concept of the geisha.

Kyoto maiko by me

When I lecture on the geisha, I start out by explaining that the word means ‘artiste’ and that geisha undergo a rigorous five year training in classical Japanese dance and music, akin to becoming an opera singer or joining the Bolshoi ballet. But no matter how often I repeat that geisha are independent, empowered women, sooner or later someone will stand up and ask, ‘But are they prostitutes?’ The fantasy that geisha are ‘submissive’, trained in the arts of pleasing men, is one that western men are not prepared to relinquish.

My latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. 

If you’re curious about geisha you could also take a look at my oldie but goldie, Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World. 

And the marvellous Butterfly’s Sisters by Yoko Kawaguchi, Yale University Press, 2010

For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Old photographs and woodblock prints of geisha courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

A kimono by any other name ... by Lesley Downer

Writing about old Japan, there are many words which are very difficult to translate. The architecture, customs, clothing, even hairstyles are so different that the words simply don’t exist in English. For the entirety of Japanese clothing, as diverse in terminology as our blouse, skirt, dress, etc, we have only ‘kimono’ and maybe ‘robe’ and ‘gown’ that come remotely close.

In Japanese ‘kimono’ just means ‘something worn’, ’clothing.’ It’s come to mean traditional Japanese clothing, usually women’s wear.

Maiko and okami-san (house-mother): 
2 sorts of 'kimono' 

Not surprisingly in pre-modern Japan, the period I write about in The Shogun’s Queen, the different parts and types of clothing all had different names. The basic garment which we call a kimono was a kosode. Then there was the uchikake, a rich brocade overgarment (‘brocade’ - does it really communicate the rich silk?) with a quilted hem that trails on the ground behind you. I tried calling it an ‘over kimono’ and finally settled on ‘mantle’ though ‘mantle’ evokes something quite different from an uchikake.

Young unmarried girls including maiko (teenage trainee geisha) wear furisode, kimono with long swinging sleeves, while one of the markers of the fully qualified geisha is that she wears a kimono with shorter sleeves.

As for the obi, do readers understand the Japanese word or should I translate it as ‘sash’ or cummerbund’?

And how to describe tea ceremony? Does ‘bamboo scoop’ or ‘bamboo spoon’ evoke the tiny exquisitely shaped artefact that you use to take two scoops of green tea? Does ‘bamboo whisk’ conjure up the delicate shaving brush-like implement you use to beat the tea?

Chasen, chashaku, chawan (bowl), natsume (caddy)

Then there’s traditional architecture. When you visit someone you slide open the door and step into an area I call the vestibule, the entry way or the entrance hall. It’s where you leave your outdoor shoes and is a good step below the level of the main floor of the house. There you’re still outside, you haven’t intruded into the house proper, so you call out. And when you’re invited in you’re actually invited to step up. But do vestibule or entry way or entrance hall sufficiently communicate all this? And does it matter?

My YA author friend Victoria James has been busy changing the language of her novel to make it comprehensible to American readers. Do Americans understand ‘nobble’? And what do they understand by ‘biscuit’?

This probably all seems very simple. Of course writers should be as understandable as possible, should do their best to make even the most foreign of cultures accessible. My editors naturally want me to make my text as comprehensible as possible.

Maiko in furisode

But what is the best way to take the reader on a journey to another place and another time? To what extent do we need to hold the reader’s hand?
Following the rule of accessibility I might write, ‘She put on her kimono and over it her mantle and went to the entrance hall and slipped her feet into her wooden geta clogs ...’ But supposing instead I wrote ‘She put on her kosode and over it her uchikake and went to the genkan and slipped her feet into her geta ...’

Supposing I used chashaku instead of bamboo spoon and chasen instead of bamboo whisk and genkan for the entrance hall of a Japanese house?

In Sea of Poppies Amitav Ghosh is completely unforgiving. He peppers his sentences with foreign words. Some you understand straight away from the context, for some you have to flip back to the last use of the word and some you never understand. You just have to glide over them. He uses no italics and there is no glossary.

For example:: ‘... this was no ordinary ship bearing down on him but an iskuner of the new kind, a ‘gosi ka jahaz’, with agil-peechil ringeen rather than square sails. Only the trikat-gavi was open to the wind and it was this distant patch of canvas that had woken him as it filled and emptied with the early morning breeze. Some half dozen lascars sat perched like birds on the crosswise purwan of the trikat-dol, while on the tootuk beneath the serang and the tindals were waving as if to catch Jodu’s attention.’

'Sash'? 'Cummerbund'?
The green garment is the ends of the tayu (courtesan)'s obi,
knotted at the front to indicate that if you are rich, lucky
and bold enough you might be allowed to untie it. 

Speaking in New York he said that growing up in India he’d read English literature voraciously. He’d read, for example, the word ‘marshmallow’ and though he didn’t know that it was soft and white he knew it was edible and that was enough. He argued that it wasn’t necessary for the reader to understand every word but that the use of authentic words of the era created white noise, a phrase which evokes rather wonderfully the creation of atmosphere in fiction - though some might argue that he does take it rather far.

To me it raises very interesting questions. How do we write about a very foreign culture? How many foreign words can we include? Do they give atmosphere or hold up the reader? Following Ghosh’s example, could I use kosode and uchikake, and if not, why not? Ghosh’s language is actually quite difficult but that doesn’t stop you reading.

To quote him: ‘Language in novel works differently from language in journalism — it establishes atmosphere and background. Each good novel has white noise — filmmakers do it through visuals. Novelists do it with words, and so one must throw as a writer everything into the mix.’

Lesley Downer's latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, is now out in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.