Japaneseness and the Ideal Image of Women

Home , Oshiroi, Teeth blackening

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Japan Forum Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjfo20 The memory of the women's white faces: Japaneseness and the ideal image of women Mikiko Ashikari a a Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge Version of record first published: 09 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Mikiko Ashikari (2003): The memory of the women's white faces: Japaneseness and the ideal image of women, Japan Forum, 15:1, 55-79 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0955580032000077739

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The memory of the women’s white faces: Japaneseness and the ideal image of women

MIKIKO ASHIKARI

Abstract: During the Meiji period, the white face became the woman’s face, whereas in the pre-modern period, certain men needed to put white powder on their faces every day. An examination of changes in clothing and fashion in relation to the Meiji state’s policies on gender reveals that representations of the man’s face and of the woman’s face have been differently modernized and Westernized since the encounter with Western culture. The division by gender along the lines of Western clothing/unmade-up face/men and kimono/white face/women relates to the formation of a national identity in the course of the Japanese nationalist project. An ideal image of middle-class women became a symbol of tradition and native culture, and it still survives as such in contemporary Japan. A woman can experience and express Japaneseness through the representation of the ideal image of women by using the white face in public. There is a pivotal link between femininity and Japaneseness. This article explores both why it should be the ideal image of middle-class women that has come to represent tradition and national culture, and how the link between the representation of the ideal womanhood and of Japaneseness continues in contemporary Japan.

Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 Keywords: gender, representation, Japaneseness, white face, middle-class women, social memory

Femininity and Japaneseness are conﬂated into the ideal image of Japanese women. Being feminine in contemporary Japan means being a Japanese woman, rather than simply being a woman. Recent studies which deal with the contemporary Japanese woman’s body suggest that there is a pivotal link between femininity and Japaneseness. Both McVeigh (1997), in his study of femininity among Japanese women’s college students, and Clammer (1995), in his analysis of femininity as represented in women’s magazines, point out that Japaneseness and ladylike behaviour and appearance both contrast with and reinforce one

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another. However, these studies do not focus on the problem of why and how femininity and Japaneseness are linked. Moreover, much historical research by recent Japanese scholars discusses the ‘nationalization of women’ (josei no kokuminka) (Koyama 1999; Wakakuwa 2001; Ueno 1998).1 These studies, which show how a dominant gender ideology – men working outside the home and women managing the home – became essential for Japanese nationalism, base their arguments on the assumption that this ideology exists in present-day Japan. Nevertheless, they do not give any explanation of why and how the ideology has been able to continue for such a long time. This article questions this continuity and the pervasive power of the ideology. A lot of recent studies, including Ueno’s (1998), suggest that the past (or tradition) can be created or reinterpreted by our knowledge of the present. However, what I argue in this article is that our experience or knowledge of the present also largely depends on our knowledge or memory of the past (or tradition). By focusing on white make-up among women as a means for representing femininity in public, this article both explores the origin of the link between femininity and Japaneseness and examines the pervasive power of the link. Two different styles of white make-up for women exist in contemporary Japan.2 One is the traditional Japanese white make-up, which is famous worldwide due to the geisha’s white-painted face. Most Japanese women have or will have had at least one experience of the traditional make-up complemented by the traditional Japanese hairstyle – at their wedding ceremony, when they wear the wedding kimono. A simpliﬁed version of the traditional white make-up can be seen on women who wear kimono on any formal occasion, such as a graduation ceremony or a coming-of-age ceremony. The other is an everyday white make-up. The style of make-up in everyday life, just like clothing, hairstyles, bags and other accessories, has to a great extent become assimilated to that of Western women. However, the Japanese make-up style is still characterized by the distinctive ‘white’ face. Both my street observation and questionnaire survey suggest that the vast majority of women wear foundation in public places.3 Foundation for Japanese women is not only designed to make their skin look lighter than it really is, but also makes their Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 complexion look just like everyone else’s. They seem to be using foundation in order to achieve the ‘right’ face for a Japanese woman. As in most Western societies, in contemporary Japan women wear make-up and men usually do not. Most Japanese people believe that white make-up is traditionally women’s make-up. However, in the pre-modern period, it was the social norm for the male nobility, as well as the female nobility, to wear white-lead powder, to shave their eyebrows and to blacken their teeth. However, Japanese men in all social strata stopped wearing make-up in the course of the Meiji Restoration, and they started to consider make-up as feminine, as their European contemporaries did. Are these changes just a question of the assimilation of Western styles of fashion? This article, which examines the changes in clothing and fashion since the Meiji period in relation to state policies on gender, ﬁrst demonstrates how

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differently the representations of the man’s face and of the woman’s face have been modernized and Westernized since the encounter with Western culture. This division by gender relates to the formation of national identity in the Japanese nationalist project. Then, it will show that an ideal image of middle-class women4 became a symbol of tradition and national culture, and that it still survives in contemporary Japan. It is argued that the representation of the ideal image of women in public is related to the representation of Japaneseness. This article explores both why it should be the ideal image of middle-class women that has come to represent tradition and national culture, and how the link between the representation of the ideal womanhood and of Japaneseness continues in contemporary Japan.

The invention of the Emperor’s face: ‘enrich the nation and strengthen the army’ and national identity Many studies of nationalism present the Meiji Restoration as one of the most successful nationalist projects (e.g. Anderson 1991; Smith 1991). These studies often attribute the success to a relatively high degree of Japanese ethno-cultural homogeneity resulting from two and a half centuries of isolation and internal paciﬁcation by the Edo shogunate, to the ‘unique’ antiquity of the imperial house and its emblematic Japaneseness and to the samurai culture and ethic. On the other hand, recent studies on the nature of Japanese nationalism emphasize the importance of the ‘invention’ of the Japanese race as a basis, combined with the ideology of the family-state of divine origin, for the successful nationalist project initiated by the Meiji men (e.g. Yoshino 1992: 26, 90–2, 1997: 200–1; Weiner 1997: 101; Siddle 1997: 137; Oguma 1995). Through the Meiji Restoration, the nation came to be conceived of as an extended family, with the Emperor as the supreme father to the national community and head of the family-state. As a result, a common perception of a consanguineous Japanese race developed, fostered by the notion of the family-state. This racialized national identity was the other underlying component in the enormous success of the Meiji Restoration as Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 a nationalist project. In this context, how the Emperor was represented in public began to play an essential role in establishing the modern nation. The Meiji Emperor, whose portrait still looks very familiar to present-day Japanese people, was indeed unknown to the masses at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration. Only very few people knew about or were interested in the Emperor, who lived at the Kyoto Imperial Court. The imperial court, isolated from other worlds, kept its own culture to a large extent. The courtiers still wore the court dress that had originated in the clothing codes of the seventh century, and both men and women wore the same style of make-up as the Heian nobility had worn. Not only the women, but also the men, put on white-mercury (later, white-lead) powder, drew their eyebrows in and blackened their teeth for formal occasions. Their appearance was totally distinctive from that of the common population of

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the Edo period, including that of the samurai. The transformation of the Emperor from a ceremonial head into the head of a family-state that claimed unquestioned, absolute sovereignty was one of the key achievements of the Meiji leaders. Along with this change, the Emperor’s Heian culture-derived face was completely transformed into an appropriate face for the head of the modern Japanese family- state and supreme commander of the army and navy in the first decade following the Meiji Restoration. In 1868, a British diplomat, Ernest Satow painted a picture of the 16-year-old Emperor Meiji that was quite different from the image we get in a later, well- known portrait: Behind the throne a crowd of courtiers were ranged in a double row, wearing little black paper caps and gorgeous brocade robes of various hues. . . . His complexion was white, perhaps artificially so rendered, his mouth badly formed, what a doctor would call prognathous, but the general contour was good. His eyebrows were shaven off, and painted in an inch higher up. His costume consisted of a long black loose cape hanging backwards, a white upper garment or mantle and voluminous purple trousers. (Satow 1968[1921]: 370–1) Lord Redesdale, who was received in audience at Kyoto in the same year, also wrote: ‘His eyebrows were shaved off and painted in high up on the forehead; his cheeks were rouged and his lips painted with red and gold. His teeth were blackened’ (Redesdale 1915, cited in Casal 1966: 21). In response to such Western visitors’ surprise, in the first year of Meiji (1868), the government first stated that noblemen were no longer obliged to dye their teeth black or to raise the level of their eyebrows. In 1870, the blackening of teeth and shaving of eyebrows by noblemen were banned. In the following year, the ban on danpatsu (cropping the knot of hair, which was a traditional hairstyle) was lifted, and the government encouraged men to copy the short Western hairstyle.5 It was in the sixth year of Meiji (1873) that the Emperor appeared publicly for the first time with short hair. At the same time, the adoption of Western styles of dress Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 occurred, first among upper-class Japanese people. In 1871, the Emperor and the courtiers abandoned Japan’s thousand-year-old traditional lacquered cap and wide-sleeved court dress, which had been established according to Chinese custom in the seventh century, and started to wear formal Western clothing for official government ceremonies. At this point, the Emperor’s ‘ancient’ face, white-lead powdered with artificial eyebrows and blackened teeth, was abandoned in favour of the modern face, and he adopted the uniform of supreme generalissimo. The Meiji Restoration gave the Emperor a religious, political and military function to perform in society. He retained his historical function as the god-king, who acted in a religious capacity as the intermediary between the gods and the people. Politically, the Emperor derived his authority not only from the Meiji

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Constitution, which legally invested in him the sovereign power of the nation, but also from his ancestors. The military function he had was that of supreme commander of the army and navy. The members of the armed forces were to remain loyal to the Emperor above all. In order to show the Emperor’s power, the Meiji government planned royal parades in many rural areas: the To¯hoku area and Hokkaido¯ in 1876, the Hokuriku and To¯kai areas in 1878, Yamanashi, Mie and Kyoto prefectures in 1880 and Yamagata, Akita prefectures and Hokkaido¯ in 1881. Furthermore, the government distributed the Emperor’s portrait to every school in 1889. After the Sino-Japanese War, the Meiji Emperor consolidated his power by presenting himself as the ‘symbolical representative of the nation’ (Baelz 1974[1932]: 116), and his reformed face, which was circulated through all national communities, became a symbol that evoked the idea of Japanese national identity.6 Dalby (1993), in her study Kimono, shows that Western clothing came to symbolize European power, while the traditional courtly robes, which originated from the ancient Chinese court robes, came to reﬂect the contemporary weakness of China during the early Meiji period. Dalby cites the Emperor’s proclamation of a clothing reform that rejected the traditional courtly dress as non-Japanese: The national polity [kokutai] is ﬁrm, but manners and customs should be adaptable. We greatly regret that the uniform of our court has been established following the Chinese custom, and it has become exceedingly effeminate in style and character. . . . The emperor Jimmu, who founded Japan, and the Empress Jingu, who conquered Korea, were not attired in the present style. We should no longer appear before the people in these effeminate styles. We have therefore decided to reform dress regulations entirely. (cited in Dalby 1993: 66–7) Here was the introduction of the idea that the traditional Japanese court dress of the male nobility, complemented by the top-knot hairstyle and make-up, looked ‘effeminate’. By contrast, Western clothing and short hair were considered to be masculine. Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 Louise Young, in her chapter on the emergence of a Japanese discourse on race in the course of Japan’s empire-building, points out that social interactions with non-Japanese produced two axes of racial differentiation: Japanese and Euro- peans, on the one hand, and Japanese and Asians, on the other (1997: 158). The face of the Emperor as head of the family-state was also reformed along with the two axes: the Emperor’s face was reformed in order to catch up with the European nations, on the one hand, and to stress the idea of Japan’s superiority over other Asians, on the other. The Emperor’s face was not just Westernized; more impor- tantly, his face became a symbol of the Japanese race and Japanese identity. Thus the Emperor’s face worked as a sign which homogenized his subjects and included them within the family-state.

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The invention of the ideal image of Japanese women: ‘good wives and wise mothers’ and traditional national culture Using the sense of loyalty to the Emperor, the Meiji leaders motivated the people to contribute to the nation as members of the family-state. However, the Meiji state’s policies that mobilized the subjects were strictly gendered, and the new political and economic policies fostered a greater separation of public and private spheres by gender – men/public/world and women/private/home.7 This separation made it possible to protect Japaneseness from Western inﬂu- ence in the course of the Meiji nationalist project of both modernization and Westernization. It is here that the ideal image of middle-class women became a useful mediator in reforming and preserving traditional Japanese culture and values. The formation of Japaneseness and Japanese identity in the Meiji period seems to be deeply embedded in the private/public, home/world gender division. Partha Chatterjee (1986, 1989), who has studied colonial discourse, nationalism and cultural modernity in India, argues that this separation is the resolution between the conﬂicting claims of nationalist ideology and modernization in post-colonial societies. Chatterjee (1989) elaborates an ideological framework for analysing the formation of national identity through the dichotomy of gender in the Indian nationalist project of the nineteenth century. According to Chatterjee, a separation of the domain of culture into two spheres, the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’, made it possible for the colonized people to learn superior Western techniques of organizing material life and incorporate them into their own cultures without threatening the self-identity of their national culture. Science, technology, rational forms of economic organization and modern methods of state-craft, which had given the European countries the strength to subjugate non-European people and to impose their dominance over the whole world, simply belonged to the material domain. Learning from the West, therefore, should not mean the imitation of the West in every aspect of life. Chatterjee goes on to show that the discourse of nationalist writers connects

Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 the material/spiritual distinction to the distinction between the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’, which is ideologically a far more powerful dichotomy. Applying the inner/outer distinction to the matter of concrete day-to-day living separates the social space into ghar and bahir, the home and the world. The world is the external, the domain of the material; the home represents one’s inner spiritual self, one’s true identity. The world is a treacherous terrain of the pursuit of material interests, where practical considerations reign supreme. It is also typically the domain of the male. The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world – and woman is its representation. And so one gets an identiﬁcation of social roles by gender to correspond with the separation of the social space into ghar and bahir. (Chatterjee 1989: 624)

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Thus the home became the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of the national culture, and women must take the main responsibility for protecting and nurturing this quality. Indian nationalist discourse asserted that the world was where the European powers had challenged the non-European peoples and, by virtue of their superior material culture, had subjugated them. But they had failed to colonize the inner, essential identity of the East, which lay in its distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture. The home is where the East was undominated, sovereign, master of its own fate. Chatterjee emphasizes it is here that the home/world dichotomy and social roles of middle-class women become crucial in Indian nationalist ideology. Some feminist studies also claim that in many nations the regulation of gender is central to the articulation of national identity and cultural difference (see Yuval- Davis and Anthias 1989; Pateman 1988; Walby 1990; Ueno 1998; Koyama 1999; Wakakuwa 2001). Nevertheless, these scholars, like Chatterjee, do not question why it should be women, mothers and wives, who were assigned to the domain of the home in nationalist projects. Carol Delaney, in her chapter examining the role of the symbolism of mother and father in the conception of the nation in Turkey, shows that the symbolism of kinship, especially of the mother, naturalizes the gender division. Delaney states: The language of kinship is so commonplace that most people hardly ever pay any serious attention to it. And anthropologists, for whom kinship has been a major focus of study, often dismiss as merely metaphor its use outside the context of kinship. However, it could also be argued that, because family and kinship relationships are felt to be natural, the imagery of the family used in other contexts helps to naturalize them as well. (Delaney 1995: 177) According to Delaney, her idea about the linkage between the concept of nation and kinship is based upon Anderson’s view of nationalism. Anderson suggests that nationalism should be treated ‘as if it belonged with “kinship” and “religion” rather than with “liberalism” or “fascism”’ (1991[1983]: 5). In his chapter on Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 patriotism and racism, Anderson advances this idea and points out that nationalism describes its object using the vocabulary either of kinship or of home, in order to denote something to which one is naturally tied. In this way, nation-ness is assimilated to ‘skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era – all those things one cannot help’ (ibid.: 143). Delaney argues that the conceptualization of the family as a ‘natural’ unit has been a staple not just of kinship but also of nation, and that it has obscured both the internal stratiﬁcations and the gendered hierarchies in the nation: ‘The notion of family as a natural unit . . . naturalises power as it submerges asymmetries of age and gender as well as differing interests’ (1995: 178). The home/women and world/ men dichotomy is not an accidental feature, but is inherent in the notion of the nation as it has been conceived through the symbolism of family (middle-class

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family), in which father earns and mother saves and spends. Here the division is naturalized by the nationalist project, and the feminine virtues of middle-class women became an essential symbol of tradition and native culture. In Meiji Japan, the division of labour and space by gender was initially caused by state promotions of industrialization and education (see Uno 1991; Notle and Hastings 1991).8 Although early policies did not aim specifically to alter the family roles of women, the separation of school and workplace from the home irreversibly reshaped the daily lives of women in growing numbers of households. State propaganda encouraged women to contribute to the nation through their hard work at home, their frugality, their efficient management, their care of the old, young and sick, and their responsible upbringing of children. Based on this idea, the Meiji leaders denied political rights to women. For example, after 1890 women who tried to organize political associations, join political groups or attend meetings defined by the authorities as political were subject to a fine or impris- onment under Article 5 of the Police Security Regulations (Sievers 1983: 52). As a result, women’s family duties were not only reinforced, but also legitimized. By the end of the nineteenth century, private educators and government officials were deliberately seeking to reshape conceptions of womanhood. Professional educators, including bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education, created a new prescription for Japanese womanhood, as ‘good wives and wise mothers’ (ryo¯ sai- kenbo), in the wake of the 1894–5 Sino-Japanese War. The ideal of good wives and wise mothers, which became the cornerstone of women’s education after 1899, was based on the idea that properly educated mothers could prepare their children to be good subjects of the Emperor by instilling in them diligence, loyalty and patriotism. Nevertheless, the Meiji gender ideology concerning the domestication of womanhood and ‘good wives and wise mothers’ was relevant only to middle-class women. For instance, one education minister stated the necessity of extending education to middle-class females as well as males precisely because households, which were the foundation of the nation, required good wives and wise mothers. The role of the women’s higher schools should be to develop in young women Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 refined tastes and a gentle and modest character. Nevertheless, in opposition to this ideal image of women in the Meiji policies, a great number of girls from impoverished families were mobilized as a part of the workforce just like their male counterparts. Other categories of women, such as rural women, peasants, female factory workers and women involved in the fishing and the mining industries, were ignored and invisible in state policies. By contrast, urban middle- class women came to represent the public image of Japanese women: ‘As Japan passed from the nineteenth century into twentieth, the ideal woman was one who attended girl’s higher school, spent an appropriate amount of time on organized philanthropic and patriotic activities, and used the postal savings system’ (Notle and Hastings 1991: 171). Although, in reality, the state-sanctioned domestication of women could be accomplished only by urban middle-class women, a uniform,

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idealized image of Japanese women was propagated through edicts and laws to the whole nation in the late nineteenth century. The Meiji government expanded the patriarchal family system of the samurai class to include the entire nation, and it promoted a unified ideal womanhood based on that of samurai women. Nonetheless, the meaning of the family or home and the role of middle-class women in the family or home were transformed from those of the samurai class in the course of the Meiji nationalist project. Before the Meiji Restoration, samurai women did not have any particular responsibility for preserving tradition and cultural identity. Furthermore, in the Edo period (1600–1867), since the social order of the four-class system had been frozen by the first shogun, Ieyasu, the four classes – samurai (shi), peasants (no¯), artisans (ko¯) and merchants (sho¯) – were strictly demarcated in every aspect of their lives. It was, therefore, unlikely that samurai women would become the model for women of other classes. On the other hand, middle-class Meiji women were expected to be responsible, not only for protecting the native cultural identity from Western influences, but also for promoting the image of reformed ‘traditional’ Japanese women by becoming a model for lower-class women. Lower-class women had to keep working outside the home, as farmers, miners or factory workers, and some of them kept their ‘indigenous and backward’ attitudes, being coarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome and sexually promiscuous, from the middle- class point of view. Nevertheless, after the Meiji period, lower-class women (and men) came to know what kinds of images of women were formal, public and Japanese. The feminine virtues of middle-class women as ‘good wives and wise mothers’, which was essential in the preservation, reforming and expression of Japaneseness, came for the first time to be shared by women of all classes. It is here that the representation of the ideal image of women and the representation of Japaneseness were tightly linked.

Women’s white faces and native national culture in the Meiji period The Meiji policies fostered the division of public/private according to gender and Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 uniﬁed the ideal image of Japanese womanhood as represented by urban middle- class women. The gender ideology and Japaneseness evoked by the Meiji nationalist project were condensed into the ideal image of the middle-class Japanese woman. Recent studies on dress suggest that clothing and fashion can play an important role in the making and transformation of politics and thought in a society (see Bastian 1996; Dalby 1993; Tarlo 1996; Weiner and Schneider 1989). Japanese men’s faces, following the example of the Emperor’s face, became quickly assimilated into Western men’s faces. On the other hand, Japanese women’s faces were reformed to be closer to the ideal image of beauty in the West, but were not allowed to assimilate completely into Western women’s faces. Although the Emperor represented the Japanese racial identity through his blood, ironically he could not represent Japanese native culture and values in his face,

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which was modernized and Westernized, in contrast with the West and other Asian countries. Due to their diplomatic tasks, the faces of the Empress, other female nobility and the wives of officials in the Foreign Office too were reformed to assimilate to upper-class Western women’s faces.9 Middle-class Meiji women, on the other hand, came to be responsible for preserving ‘traditional’ Japanese culture through their appearance. The traditional white make-up in contemporary Japan preserves the basic look of pre-modern women’s make-up. However, it does not replicate the make-up style of samurai-class women exactly. Japanese women’s faces were reformed to a great extent during the Meiji period. In 1867, just a year before the start of the Meiji Restoration, a British diplomat wrote in his diary about his surprise on observing a ‘frightening’ and ‘barbarian’ native make-up style practised by Japanese women (Satow 1968[1921]: 192–3). Before the Meiji period, ohaguro (teeth blackening) and eyebrow shaving, which originated in the coming-of-age ceremony among Heian Court nobles, were widespread among nobles and ordinary married women, from samurai women to townswomen.10 The Meiji Restoration was not only a nationalist project but also a process of modernization which involved a large degree of Westernization, especially in the early years of the Meiji period. The government encouraged all Japanese women to abandon the ‘native’ custom of teeth blackening and eyebrow shaving. The reason was simply that this style of make-up looked ‘barbarian’ to Western eyes. It took most of the momentous half-century of the Meiji emperor’s reign (1868–1912) for Japanese women to abandon this native make-up. Yet it can be considered as a drastic change that the Meiji government should have succeeded in eliminating two significant characteristics of Japanese make-up which had existed for at least a thousand years in Japan. Unlike the white make-up, the native make-up style of teeth blackening and eyebrow shaving, labelled as a ‘backward’ and ‘barbarian’ custom, was not recognized as a symbol representing new Japaneseness. In 1873, the Empress appeared publicly for the first time with unblackened teeth, accompanied by the short-haired Emperor. Following their example, Japanese women started to let Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 their eyebrows grow and their blackened teeth turned white. By the end of the Meiji era, middle-class women who had black teeth and no eyebrows were rarely to be seen in urban areas.11 Both teeth blackening and eyebrow shaving are still remembered and well known in contemporary Japan, but only as ‘odd’ customs. Now the white-painted face was alone in representing the ideal image of Japanese womanhood. Most middle-class Meiji women, when they wore make-up, made their face a pure white with the same sort of white-lead powder that the Edo women had applied, and put pure red rouge on their lips, in almost the same way as the Edo women did. Since the Edo period, red rouge had been considered as ‘women’s vanity’, but white powder as ‘women’s moral’ duty. One of the books written to educate women of the samurai class in the Edo period, onna cho¯ho¯-ki (1692)

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explains that ‘putting white powder on the face is a law which all women should obey. White powder is not only for make-up, nor only decorating yourself. . . . Since you were born a woman, you should not show your face without white powder even for just one day in your life’ (cited in Murasawa and Tsuda 1990: 114, author’s translation). There is an incident that shows how the white- painted face had been working as one of the most important elements to represent the ideal image of Japanese womanhood during the Meiji period. In the 1880s, lead poisoning from the white-lead powder became publicly recognized and thought of as a social problem. Debates on the prohibition of white- lead powder among female college students attracted a lot of people’s interest. Some intellectuals, both male and female, argued that women’s virtue was more important than their health: it was immoral for women to abandon this ‘women’s art’ because of their fear of lead poisoning (Tsuda and Murata 1993: 20–1). The white faces of women came to represent their feminine virtue as Japanese women. The political and economic policies of the Meiji government, intended to establish the modern nation, fostered the public/private distinction by gender. This division was accompanied by the separation of Western modes and (the reformed and invented) native traditional modes by gender. Middle-class Meiji men, who worked outside the home, were encouraged to adopt Western fashion and clothing, while middle-class Meiji women, who stayed at home, were encouraged to wear native clothing with nihon-gami (traditional Japanese hairstyles for women) and a white painted face. It became Meiji women’s responsibility to preserve native traditional modes. Dalby’s Kimono (1993), which shows how the division of clothing by gender (Western clothing for men and kimono for women) occurred in the course of the nationalist project, emphasizes that the kimono, originally a garment for urban middle-class people, became a symbol of Japaneseness as well as traditional feminine virtue. Native clothing in its broadest sense includes numerous traditional types of Japanese work clothes, jackets, aprons, pants and skirt-like garments. Nevertheless, a speciﬁc type of native clothing that was worn by middle-class women became the Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 national dress of Japan (see Plates 1 and 2). Nihon-gami and white make-up were basically available only for middle-class women. Lower-class women, who had to keep working as farmers, miners or factory workers, could not afford to put on white make-up with kimono and nihon-gami in everyday life. Neverthe- less, during the Meiji period, lower-class women came to know how a proper Japanese woman should look. The representation of Japanese women was standardized and uniﬁed into the image of middle-class women, and women of any class, who did not always conform to the dominant gender ideology, learned how to represent themselves as Japanese women in public. Middle-class Meiji women became an essential symbol of tradition and native culture, as distinct not only from Western women but also from lower-class ‘indigenous and backward’ women.

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Source: Pola Bunka Kenkyu¯sho Plate 1 Kimono worn by a Meiji middle-class beauty Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013

Source: Smith and Wisewell (1982) Plate 2 Work clothes for farm women in the early Showa period

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The separation of the traditional white face and the everyday white face in the Taisho and early Showa periods The Taisho period (1912–26), freed from the desperation of ‘Enrich the nation and strengthen the army’ (fukoku-kyo¯ hei), was a period during which such concepts as individual rights, freedom and democracy flourished in the intellectual and cultural realms. Under this relatively free atmosphere of the Taisho and early Showa periods, the influence of Western popular culture became larger than it had ever been. The First World War, the growing economy and the popularity of moving pictures all propelled the Japanese towards Western modes of life. Many more varieties of Western fashions became available at this time, and Western clothing started to become Japanese women’s everyday wear. It is in this context that the ideal image of middle-class Meiji women could consolidate its status as Japanese tradition. One of the most significant changes to affect middle-class women in this period is that some of them started to take paid jobs and work outside the home. The term shokugyo¯-fujin was invented to refer to middle-class working women at that time. The entry of middle-class women into the labour market became prominent in the late 1920s. Nevertheless, shokugyo¯-fujin, middle-class working women, were a clear minority of the total female population in Taisho and early Showa Japan. Japanese women in the labour force numbered only 3.5 million, out of an estimated total female population of 27 million in mid-Taisho; only a quarter of employed women were engaged in intellectual or white-collar work, and the remaining 2.6 million women were classified as manual workers (Nagy 1991: 202). The gender ideology of ‘good wives and wise mothers’ continued to be dominant throughout the inter-war years, and the government policy on women showed little change. Regardless of the small numbers involved, the phenomenon of middle-class working women created profound anxieties among government officials and opinion makers. According to Nagy, as a result of worries about the future of family life and social stability that might have been caused by the rise of middle-

Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 class working women, numerous bureaucratic surveys were undertaken. These surveys were designed to investigate the possible effects of employment on women’s ‘tenbun’ (mission in life) as wives and mothers. They questioned ‘the possible effect of middle-class working wives and daughters on male unemploy- ment’, and they asked ‘how the middle-class family could serve as a role model for the lower class if it, too, sent its women to work to supplement the earnings of a household head’ (ibid.: 200). These surveys, carried out in the 1920s, suggest that the government viewed the middle-class family as a bastion of national unity in an era of radical social and economic change, and that they considered the middle-class woman’s role in the family as a key to maintaining the family system. Responding to the surveys, shokugyo¯-fujin themselves expressed their doubts about their new roles as paid employees and their desire to ‘cultivate

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68 The memory of the women’s white faces

accomplishments as a future housewife in a family and to fulfil their vocation as women’ (ibid.: 213). At the same time, the government also launched several campaigns to rationalize home management by training middle-class women to be economical housewives. A further objective of these campaigns was to incul- cate in middle-class women a broader societal view that would encourage them to make home management decisions based on the well-being not only of their own households, but of the family-state as well, and to motivate them to become good role models for the lower classes. The rise of shokugyo¯-fujin is one of main causes of the growing popularity of Western-style clothing for women, together with the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which accelerated the Westernization process. Western clothing styles for women became more popular after the earthquake. This was not only because women had lost their kimono in the disaster, but also because many of them came to perceive Western clothing as more rational. Most urban middle-class Japanese women had had at least some experience of Western clothing by the late 1920s.12 Some of them even began to wear Western clothing most of the time. In addition, the rise in the numbers of middle-class working women during the 1920s and 1930s affected growing interest in Western clothing. Middle-class working women, most of whom were fairly affluent and fashionable, chose to wear Western clothing when they went to work, as did their male counterparts. A lot of articles on Western clothing fashion and beauty for shokugyo¯-fujin began to appear in women’s lifestyle magazines in the 1930s and led the fashion among urban middle-class women. The number of middle-class women wearing Western clothing increased, but this does not mean that the importance of women’s native clothing, the kimono, as a symbol of ideal womanhood and Japaneseness, was degraded. On the contrary, as Dalby argues, the Taisho period was the turning point when the kimono consolidated its function of representing tradition, by being separated from fashion (1993: 129). Just as fashion thrives on change, so, from Taisho on, Western clothing continued to change according to fashion. By contrast, the kimono froze into the type we see today, and thus it became more powerful as a representation of tradition. Although the domain of kimono in Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 Japanese women’s daily life was shrinking, the kimono, which preserves its original style as a garment of Meiji middle-class women, gained power as an icon representing the traditional ideal image of Japanese women with their feminine virtues. Along with this shift, Meiji women’s make-up styles and hairstyles were also separated from fashion in the Taisho period, and have been preserved as the traditional white face. Nihon-gami, which goes only with kimono, lost its popularity with the changeover to Western clothing. Instead, sokuhastu (literally, bundled hair: a Western hairstyle for women) became the everyday hairstyle, and then a certain number of trend-setting women, such as intellectuals, actresses, college students and shokugyo¯-fujin, began to go in for short hair. The images of Western film actresses and information on Western fashions also made an impact 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 69 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

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on Japanese women’s hair and make-up styles. Women began to put rouge on their cheeks, stopped painting their lips to make them look smaller than they really were and shaped their eyebrows in the fashionable Western way of the day. Some became aware of the importance of eye make-up from looking at pictures of Western beauties, but only a few women used eyeliner or eye-shadow at that time. The majority of middle-class women kept trying to make their complexions look closer to pure white rather than the white created by Western skin-colour foundation.13 But many of them started to use non-lead white powder which produced a more transparent pure white complexion, giving up the Meiji white-lead powder, which completely hid women’s real skin tone. However, women went on arranging their hair into nihon-gami and following the Meiji women’s make-up style with heavy white foundation on special occasions when they wore the formal kimono. In short, neither nihon-gami nor the Meiji make-up style became extinct. Instead, they became part of tradition, complementing the kimono as the Japanese traditional costume. They still survive today on some formal occasions, such as the marriage ceremony. Thus the white face as everyday make-up and the traditional white face were separated in this period. However, this does not mean that the everyday white face was freed from the task of representing feminine virtue in everyday life. The debates concerning shokugyo¯-fujin revealed the way in which women’s everyday white faces and their feminine virtue were related. The economy needed middle- class women in the labour force, but public discourse was generally critical of shokugyo¯-fujin, stereotyping them as atarashii onna (new and progressive women). Women’s life-style magazines regularly introduced new styles of Western clothing and make-up styles for shokugyo¯-fujin, but simultaneously warned that a shokugyo¯- fujin needed to choose her Western clothing and make-up style more carefully than a katei-fujin (woman who stays at home; housewife) in order to display her ‘modesty and chastity’ (seiso-sa) through her appearance in public (Tsuda and Murata 1993: 44–8). One article even called on shokugyo¯-fujin not to make themselves look like shokugyo¯-fujin: ‘Only if the shokugyo¯-fujin do not look like typical shokugyo¯-fujin, can they become truly thoughtful (so¯ mei-na) and aware Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 (jikaku-shita) women’ (Oguchi 1930, cited in Tsuda and Murata 1993: 45). These articles suggest that shokugyo¯-fujin could show their respect for the dominant model of ‘good wives and wise mothers’ by choosing the right clothing and make- up style or the right manners in public. The make-up style that was copied from that of Western actresses, involving the application of eyeliner, eye-shadow or false eyelashes, was popular among bar hostesses and dancers, but it was regarded as the ‘wrong’ make-up for middle-class women. There was a certain style of make-up that made women look like katei-fujin, proper housewives. It was the ‘right’ make-up for middle-class women. This everyday white face, which was separated from the traditional white face, continued to represent the dominant femininity in everyday life, as the traditional face did on the special formal occasions in women’s lives. 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 70 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

70 The memory of the women’s white faces

Women’s white faces in Japan in the post-Pacific War period In 1940, when Japan’s involvement in the Second World War was deepening, the devastation of the war almost put an end to women’s fashions. Any cosmetics, including white powder, were banned and permed hair, which had been common among women since the 1930s, was denounced. The kimono was frowned on as an expression of unpatriotic indulgence in luxury, and baggy trousers, or monpe, which were made out of old kimono, became women’s everyday wear, as recommended by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Both the traditional white face and the everyday white face disappeared from the public space during the wartime. Nevertheless, ultra-nationalism did not elimi- nate the feminine virtue represented by the white face. When the war was over in 1945, the post-war government immediately fired about three million women in order to open their jobs up to returning soldiers. This policy resulted from the assumption that women’s husbands and fathers should provide for them, although this was possible only for upper-middle-class families. The belief that women’s real identity lies in the family has been shared by the State, trade unions and probably the majority of middle-class women themselves since the Meiji period. White faces came back in public right after the war. One Japanese scholar who conducted street observations reported that the percentage of made-up women on the streets of the Ginza in Tokyo was 62 per cent in June 1946, just ten months after the end of the war, and 75 per cent in July 1947 (Hirosawa 1993: 208). Western clothing has almost completely taken over in most areas of Japanese life since the war. Western women’s hairstyles and ways of using make-up have also been assimilated by Japanese women, who follow changes in fashion in the same way as their Western counterparts. If one were to watch women on their way to the office on the streets of London and Tokyo, you would have difficulty finding any differences in women’s fashion between the UK and Japan. Western fashion has become a part of everyday life in post-war Japan, and most Japanese do not even realize that their fashion is ‘Westernized’.14 By the 1990s, the

Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 everyday white face had been even more widely adopted by middle-class women in their everyday lives, while the traditional white face remained to serve as a sign of Japaneseness and traditional feminine virtue for special occasions, such as wedding ceremonies and coming-of-age ceremonies. The everyday white face has greatly changed its styles according to fashion. For example, skin-colour foundation, which was introduced in the Meiji period, ﬁnally became popular among Japanese middle-class women after the Second World War and the ‘white’ face changed in colour from pure white to skin-colour, assimilating to Western women’s made-up faces. Nevertheless, this study suggests that the everyday white face, as well as the traditional white face, was still used as a means of representing the feminine virtues based on the gender ideology in the everyday life of contemporary Japan. 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 71 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

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Street observation surveys suggest that the vast majority of women wear make- up in public spaces. The surveys were conducted in Osaka, in November 1996 and June 1997, and the numbers of made-up and unmade-up women were counted for an hour in three different places: at a local grocery store, in front of a department store in central Osaka and outside an office building in the financial district of Osaka. A total of 796 women were observed over five days, and were divided into three groups: a casual group, a dressed-up group and a group of women wearing a company uniform. Of the women observed during the two days near the department store, 3.5 per cent wore no make-up. At the local grocery store, the equivalent figure was 3.9 per cent and in front of the office building the rate dropped to only 0.6 per cent (see Table 1). There were no unmade-up women among the dressed-up group and the uniform group. In sum, between 96.5 and 99.4 per cent of the women observed on these occasions were wearing make-up. Also, the results of a questionnaire survey suggest that Japanese women have a kind of ‘shu¯chaku’ (obsession) with wearing foundation: 93.7 per cent of respondents answered that they always put on foundation when they wore make- up. Wearing eye-make-up or lipstick without facial foundation is common among women in the UK and the US, but this is rarely seen in Japan. For most mature middle-class Japanese women, kesho¯ suru (making up) actually means putting on foundation. Foundations produced for the domestic market are available in six or

Table 1

Casual group Dressed-up group Uniform group Total No make-up/ No make-up/ No make-up/ make-up make-up make-up

Grocery store (1996 14 November 12 pm) 0/20 6*/76 0/0 6/96 (1997 23 June 12 pm) 2/32 0/71 0/0 2/103 Department store

Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 (1996 18 November 2.45 pm) 4**/25 0/73 0/6 4/104 (1997 23 June 4.35 pm) 5/36 0/106 0/0 5/142 Ofﬁce building (1996 11 November 12.15 pm) 0/20 0/121 0/79 0/220 (1997 26 June 12 pm) 2/7 0/48 0/57 2/112

Total 13/196 6/439 0/142 19/777 (2.4%)

Notes * Five out of six were women who looked over 70 years old, and the other was a woman in her forties, whose hair looked uncombed. She was screaming at her two small children. ** Two out of four had no prominent characteristics. Another woman was a cleaning lady with a mop and a bucket. The other was a young woman who wore jeans and a denim jacket. The same day, I saw one male cross- dresser with no make-up and one woman wearing kimono with heavy make-up. 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 72 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

72 The memory of the women’s white faces

seven subtly different shades that are based on a standard colour. The differences in shade are not to enhance one’s natural skin tone but to obliterate it. For example, if the natural colour of a woman’s skin is more reddish than the standard colour, she would be advised to use a yellowish foundation, so that the reddish tone of her face would be weakened. In this way, complexions observed in the survey and created by Japanese foundation inevitably looked closer to the standard colour, regardless of whether the women intended it or not (see also Kesho¯ bunka 1987: 6–7). This is not to say that presenting a particular skin tone as a standard colour is important. According to the domestic cosmetics firms, the standard colour of foundation is not fixed, but rather changes every few years according to fashions in make-up. What is important is to present the same face colour as the other women do. For Japanese women, making their complexions look the same as other women’s complexions, and, through this standardized white face, making themselves look ‘normal’ and ‘right’ in public, is one of the important functions of foundation. As a reason for wearing make-up, many of those questioned mentioned that they wore make-up because make-up was ‘etiquette’ for mature women. They emphasized that no matter how beautiful a woman is, she will look ill to them if she does not wear make-up outside the home, and that wearing make-up is a question of reigi (good manners) and omoiyari (consideration) towards other people. Wearing make-up in public is one of the norms for middle-class women in contemporary Japan. A middle-class woman who happens to go to work without make-up one day is irritated to find herself being questioned by her colleagues, both male and female, who want to know what is wrong with her, why she is not wearing make-up and whether she is feeling ill. Middle-class men and women take it for granted that a woman will wear make-up in public places. In other words, since the great majority of women wear make-up in public, if a mature middle-class woman appeared without make-up in a public place, she would inevitably be making a statement. The unmade-up middle-class woman gives the impression, regardless of her intentions, that she does not appreciate the values of traditional feminine virtues and that she is challenging not only Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 social norms in general, but also the ideal womanhood. One woman questioned stated that an unmade-up woman in public must be a feminisuto (feminist), a member of a grass-roots organization or a non-Japanese Asian woman. The woman’s kimono was revived in the 1950s and 1960s, a period of rapid growth in the Japanese economy. The image of the traditional Japanese woman in her kimono becomes a more potent icon of feminine virtue and Japaneseness in the reduced domain of the kimono in contemporary Japan. Whereas the kimono was resurrected in modern Japanese women’s life as tradition, neither nihon-gami nor the traditional white face was revived in the same way. In present- day Japan, the traditional Japanese make-up style, complemented by nihon-gami (which is, in fact, replaced by a nihon-gami wig these days) is only seen on brides wearing the traditional bridal kimono – with the exception of geisha and maiko 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 73 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

Mikiko Ashikari 73

(apprentice geisha) at work or onna gata (kabuki actors who play women’s roles) in the theatre. However, women questioned in the survey believed that everyday make-up and hairstyles did not go with the kimono. In most cases, when they wore the kimono, they went to a beauty salon to get assistance in putting it on, and asked to have their hair arranged into a modern Japanese hairstyle. Most informants opted for a simpliﬁed version of the traditional make-up style, which consisted of lighter-coloured foundation, dark eyebrows, no eye-shadow and reddish lipstick. They also said that they should not wear any accessories, such as earrings, necklaces, bracelets or even glasses with kimono, all of which they would wear with Western clothing. The women surveyed insisted that the kimono goes best with a white face, and their preparation for wearing a formal kimono sometimes started a few months before the day they planned to wear it. For example, most informants have had the experience of being told by older women, usually their mothers, to avoid getting a tan so that they would look right when they wore the furisode (literally, swinging sleeves; the most formal kimono for unmarried women) at seijin-shiki (coming-of-age ceremony). When middle-class women are planning to don the traditional bridal kimono at their wedding ceremonies, the preparation becomes more extreme. A bride is advised by the beauticians working for the wedding section in a luxury hotel, in which both the wedding ceremony and reception are held, to make at least three or four visits to their beauty salons in the hotel for skin care, and to shave her face a week before the day of her wedding ceremony. One 30-year-old secretary, working for a university, told me that she had started to avoid tanning in preparation for her wedding ceremony, which was four months ahead. The informant, who looked very white already, also regularly visited an esute (beauty salon) for buraidaru ko¯su (bridal courses), which consisted of various treatments to whiten the face and make it smooth. At a wedding ceremony, not only the bride but also married women attending the wedding as relatives of the new couple or as nako¯do (go-betweens) are usually expected to appear wearing the tomesode (literally, truncated sleeves; the most formal kimono for married women), rather than Western dress. One woman in Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 her early forties, the wife of a business executive in a big company, decided to stop playing tennis when she and her husband were asked to be nako¯do by one of her husband’s male colleagues. Although playing tennis was her main hobby, she always got a tan as a result of it. She had never worried about tanning, nor even realized that she was tanned, until she tried on the tomesode a few months before the day of the wedding ceremony. She looked at herself as she held the tomesode up to herself in the mirror, and was surprised to see how dark she looked. After that, she devoted herself to whitening her face, buying a series of whitening cosmetics, until her face came to ‘match the kimono’. The kimono needs the traditional white face in order to be a national dress that represents traditional feminine virtues and Japaneseness. One popular Okinawan girl singer, who was famous for her dark skin and her long bleached hair, became 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 74 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

74 The memory of the women’s white faces

the face of a campaign for a big kimono company in the winter of 1996. Posters appeared in public in which the girl was wearing the furisode with modern make- up and long straight bleached hair. Many women said they felt that there was something wrong or strange about the poster. One of them said she thought it was a joke. The modern kimono worn by a popular singer with trendy make-up and hairstyle is fashionable but not traditional. Not wearing kimono properly is one of the most effective ways in which Japanese women can protest against the ideal image of traditional Japanese womanhood. The singer in the poster inevitably expresses her indifference to the values of feminine virtue or Japaneseness regardless of her intentions. The Japanese women’s face (and body) itself, rather than the kimono, is the essential locus of the displaying of Japaneseness and feminine virtue based on the idealized traditional image of Japanese womanhood.15

Conclusion: Japaneseness and the ideal image of women The pivotal link between feminine virtue and Japaneseness began in the course of the Meiji nationalist project. The Meiji government used the ideal image of women as ‘good wives and wise mothers’, in order to unify gender ideologies which varied according to classes and regions before the Meiji period, to protect native cultures and values from Western inﬂuences and to motivate all nationals to contribute to the family-state. Japanese identity, which is largely based on racial identity, is shaped by both the positive identiﬁcation of self and the exclusion of others (see Yoshino 1992, 1997: Oguma 1995: Wagatsuma and Yoneyama 1967: Weiner 1997). The representation of the ideal womanhood plays a crucial role in this process. Body decoration as a means of communication has been the focus of several recent anthropological studies of dress in various societies (e.g. Abu-Lughod 1986: 159–67; Barnes and Eicher 1992; Eicher 1995; Hendry 1993: 70–97; Macleod 1991). These studies show that, through body decoration, people communicate their gender and ethnicity. In contemporary Japan, the everyday white face has become a norm for the Japanese woman, while the traditional white Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 face still serves as a symbol of the ideal image of the traditional Japanese woman on formal occasions. Both the traditional white face and the everyday white face still convey the ideal of feminine virtue and Japaneseness. However, the pervasive power of the white face should not be understood as if it automatically comes from an innate symbolic meaning of white faces. This article suggests that this power of the white face as an icon of the ideal Japanese woman is authorized and revitalized through the actual use of the white face in everyday life.16 What the white face symbolizes in a community and how and in what context it is used as a means of communication in everyday life are not independent, but depend heavily on, and interact with, each other.17 The pervasive power of the white face as a symbol of the traditional ideal of womanhood cannot be attributed simply to its origin. It relies largely on how the 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 75 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

Mikiko Ashikari 75

white face is remembered by the contemporary Japanese. It is common for women, but not in general for men, to wear kimono and decorate their faces with traditional white make-up for certain ceremonial occasions, such as shichi-go-san (the rite-of-passage ceremony for 3-, 5- and 7-year-old children), seijin-shiki (the coming-of-age ceremony) and the wedding ceremony. Also when a woman reaches the age of 20 (or when a woman graduates from university), she is encouraged to wear make-up in public. If a mature woman appears without make-up in public places or on formal occasions, she is likely to be criticized as ‘cheeky’ or ‘impolite’. Through the experience of white faces, Japanese women (and men as well) are socialized to understand that being formal, being polite, being feminine and being traditionally Japanese must all be linked. Thus the representation of the ideal image of women is enmeshed in the representation of Japanese identity. Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Acknowledgements My ﬁeldwork in Japan was funded by the Matsushita International Fund and the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee. Jean Lloyd kindly proof-read this article. I should also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided me with very useful comments.

Notes 1. Koyama (1999), examining state policies on the family in the course of the Meiji nationalist project, shows how women were deployed to contribute to the nation through their good household management. Wakakuwa (2001), who analyses the portraits of the Meiji Empress, argues that the image of the Empress was adopted to promote the ideal image of female Japanese nationals who support their husbands and reproduce loyal nationals (soldiers) for the next generation. Ueno (1998), discussing the role and position of women and the possible responsibility of feminist scholars during the Second World War, suggests a dilemma in the Japanese nation: jenda (gender) is ignored and ‘oppressed’ by Japanese nationalism, but the Japanese nation needs jenda in order to establish and maintain Japanese nationalism. Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 2. There is the other white make-up for ko¯zoku (the Imperial lineage) women. They have to wear an ancient court dress, ju¯ni-hitoe (twelve-layered court dress originating in the Heian period) complemented by the appropriate hairstyle, which is different from nihon-gami, for their wedding ceremony. 3. The fieldwork research was undertaken in Osaka and Kobe between September 1996 and July 1997. The fieldwork consisted of: participant observation in several settings; life histories of women; unstructured interviews with women and men; structured interviews with representa- tives of cosmetic companies; observation of women in the street; and a survey by questionnaire. My subjects are so-called urban middle-class women. 4. In Japan, as elsewhere, it is very difficult to describe exactly who constitutes the female middle class. Some might even point out that there was no middle class in the Marxist sense until some time after the Meiji Restoration. The character and viability of the ‘middle class’ have been discussed in many social theories of modern societies, but the limits of this class or its size always remain ambiguous. Furthermore, since Bourdieu (1984) showed that class can be determined 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 76 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

76 The memory of the women’s white faces

by taste, the definition has become vaguer than ever. In this article, the term ‘middle-class women’ is used to refer only to women in relatively wealthy families where the salaries earned by male members (husbands or fathers) sufficed to support their wife and children as dependants, so that they could stay at home. In the Meiji period, there were, in fact, quite a large number of women who could not be counted as ‘middle class’ by this definition. Uno (1991) points out that lower-class urban women or women in middling and poor rural households continued to work outside the home to supplement the low, irregular income of husbands in unskilled and semi-skilled occupations because husbands could not support the family alone. Notle and Hastings point out that women had become the backbone of the developing Japanese industrial economy by the 1890s (1991: 153). Indeed female workers outnumbered males in light industry, especially in textiles, where the workforce produced 60 to 90 per cent of the foreign exchange during the late nineteenth century. The workers in the silk and cotton industries were mainly poorly paid female workers, in most cases very young women from impoverished rural communities. The country girls worked outside the home, for their peasant parents, whose daughters’ wages were an essential source of income. 5. On the other hand, the government banned danpatsu among women in 1872, since a few daring women, most of whom were said to be geisha, started to crop their hair. 6. This Emperor’s face was taken over by Emperors Taisho and Sho¯wa, but it was reformed again straight after the defeat in the Second World War. In November 1945, the official portrait of the Emperor in military uniform was withdrawn from display in all schools, government offices and overseas embassies and consulates. Emperor Sho¯wa abandoned the uniform of supreme generalissimo in order to extinguish his military image, and started to wear Western business suits in public in 1945 (for more details, see Bix 1995). However, since then, the mass media have frequently presented images of the Emperor with traditional costume and hairstyle. 7. Some works suggest that the domestic/public, reproductive/productive division by gender was, in any class of the late Tokugawa period, more ambiguous than in contemporary Japan (see Hane 1982: Kondo 1990: 264–72; Uno 1991: 22–35). 8. The wealthy could have maintained children as dependants before the Restoration, but children of poor and middling farmers, merchants and artisans helped to sustain the household. Households gained income by indenturing children as apprentices or servants in others’ establishments. After the industrialization of the Meiji period, it became common for poor families to send their young children to factories to do menial work. The government brought in a factory act that set the minimum age of employment at 12, with the exception of light work, for which the limit was 10 (Hane 1992: 148–9). Also, in ordinary farm households, older children, as well as mothers- and fathers-in-law, minded infants and toddlers in order to free the mothers to engage in other skilled activities. Besides this, farmers’ children gathered grass

Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 and firewood, plaited ropes and weeded fields (see Hane 1982; Uno 1991). 9. In 1886, the government stated that women such as female members of the royal family, noblewomen and their female attendants were to wear Western-style dress when they appeared in an official capacity at the Imperial Court. The Empress appeared publicly for the first time in Western dress in that year. 10. The origin of ohaguro in Heian (794–1185) court culture is unknown. Some studies suggest that ohaguro had already been an ‘indigenous’ custom among the Japanese people before the assimilation of Chinese civilization in the fifth and sixth centuries, but there is so far no definite proof of this. Heian literature suggests that ohaguro was originally associated with the coming- of-age ceremonies for upper-class girls. At these ceremonies, girls blackened their teeth, drew their eyebrows and changed their hairstyle for the first time. With this make-up, they were considered to be mature women. Later in the Heian period, this custom was passed down to noble boys, and in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), to samurai boys. By the end of the Edo period, the make-up style of ohaguro and eyebrow shaving as a part of the coming-of-age 05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 77 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

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ceremony had become widespread among women of all classes (except for outcaste women). Edo townswomen started to shave their eyebrows and blacken their teeth when they got married or engaged. Before the Meiji period (1868–1912), these two make-up styles indicated that a townswoman was married. 11. Indeed, teeth blackening was still popular among the wives of commoners in urban areas until around the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) (Takahashi 1997: 228). After that, teeth blackening was abandoned, although it survived in rural areas until a much later time. The most recent example, reported in 1977, was that of a 96-year-old woman in Akita who blackened her teeth every other day (ibid.: 235–40). 12. Once tailoring of the simplest summer Western clothing was introduced to Tokyo housewives in the year of the earthquake, summer Western clothing for women soon became very popular (Hirosawa 1993: 35–6). 13. Different shades of skin-colour foundation, other than the pure white oshiroi (white powder), had become available by this period. However, skin-colour foundation was, in fact, called niku-iro (ﬂesh colour) foundation, not hada-iro (skin colour), by the Japanese women of that time, and did not gain much in popularity until the 1950s. For them, hada-iro meant the colour of pure white. 14. Joseph Tobin describes this process as ‘domestication’ (1992: 4), distinguishing it from simply ‘Westernization’ or ‘imitation’, since the fashions or products of the West are always modiﬁed to meet the culture, environment and physique of the Japanese (see also Suga 1995: 97). 15. The kimono has spread outside Japan since the Meiji period, and the word kimono had been adopted into English by the nineteenth century. However, many of the women questioned criticized both the kimono produced for gaijin and Japanese kimono worn by gaijin, saying that gaijin misunderstood the kimono or that the Western kimono is ‘fake’. On the other hand, they had different feelings towards the kimono wearing of non-Japanese Asians, who cannot be distinguished from Japanese by their appearance. They felt that it was ‘degraded’ and ‘cheap- ened’, rather than simply ‘funny’ or ‘strange’. The Japanese believed that it is only Japanese women who are able to wear kimono: ‘you should be born Japanese in order to wear kimono.’ The kimono as Japanese tradition and culture demands that the wearer be racially Japanese. The representation of Japaneseness through the kimono with the traditional white face suggests that Japaneseness, represented by the ideal image of women, can include racial identity as Japanese. 16. Connerton, in his How Societies Remember (1989), articulates the relationship between the body and social memory, and argues that the social memory of the past is conveyed by bodily practices in public. 17. Moore (1986) shows, in her analysis of space as text, that the meaning of symbolic elements

Downloaded by [89.250.189.218] at 05:44 26 March 2013 of space makes sense only through the individual’s practice in everyday life. Later, she argues that: Meaning does not inhere in symbols, but must be invested in and interpreted from symbols by acting social beings. Interpretation is the product of a series of associations, convergences and condensations established through praxis, and not the result of an act of decoding by an observer. (Moore 1994: 74)

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Mikiko Ashikari is a post-doctoral research associate at the Department of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include gender relations, Japanese identity, representation of body, space and memory, and media and consumer culture in Japan. Her article, ‘Urban middle-class Japanese women and their white faces: Gender, ideology and representation’, will appear in Ethos (forthcoming: 31:1). E-mail: [email protected]