White Face Japanese

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The memory of the women's white faces:Japaneseness and the ideal image of womenMikiko Ashikari aa Department of Social Anthropology, University of CambridgeVersion 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 ofwomen, Japan Forum, 15:1, 55-79

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Japan Forum

15(1) 2003: 55–79 ISSN: 0955–5803 print/1469–932X onlineCopyright © 2003 BAJS DOI: 10.1080/0955580032000077739

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

of women

M I K I K O A S H I K A R I

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 theirfaces every day. An examination of changes in clothing and fashion in relation to theMeiji state’s policies on gender reveals that representations of the man’s face and ofthe woman’s face have been differently modernized and Westernized since theencounter with Western culture. The division by gender along the lines of Westernclothing/unmade-up face/men and kimono/white face/women relates to the formationof a national identity in the course of the Japanese nationalist project. An ideal imageof middle-class women became a symbol of tradition and native culture, and it stillsurvives as such in contemporary Japan. A woman can experience and expressJapaneseness through the representation of the ideal image of women by using thewhite face in public. There is a pivotal link between femininity and Japaneseness. Thisarticle explores both why it should be the ideal image of

middle-class women

that hascome to represent tradition and national culture, and how the link between therepresentation of the ideal womanhood and of Japaneseness continues in contempo-rary Japan.

Keywords:

gender, representation, Japaneseness, white face, middle-class women,social memory

Femininity and Japaneseness are conflated into the ideal image of Japanesewomen. Being feminine in contemporary Japan means being a

Japanese

woman,rather than simply being a woman. Recent studies which deal with the contem-porary Japanese woman’s body suggest that there is a pivotal link betweenfemininity and Japaneseness. Both McVeigh (1997), in his study of femininityamong Japanese women’s college students, and Clammer (1995), in his analysisof femininity as represented in women’s magazines, point out that Japanesenessand ladylike behaviour and appearance both contrast with and reinforce one

05 ashikari (jk/d).fm Page 55 Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:19 AM

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The memory of the women’s white faces

another. However, these studies do not focus on the problem of why and howfemininity and Japaneseness are linked. Moreover, much historical research byrecent Japanese scholars discusses the ‘nationalization of women’ (

josei nokokuminka

) (Koyama 1999; Wakakuwa 2001; Ueno 1998).

1

These studies, whichshow how a dominant gender ideology – men working outside the home andwomen managing the home – became essential for Japanese nationalism, basetheir 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 hasbeen able to continue for such a long time. This article questions this continuityand 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 ourknowledge of the present. However, what I argue in this article is that ourexperience or knowledge of the present also largely depends on our knowledgeor memory of the past (or tradition). By focusing on white make-up amongwomen as a means for representing femininity in public, this article both exploresthe origin of the link between femininity and Japaneseness and examines thepervasive 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 tothe geisha’s white-painted face. Most Japanese women have or will have had at leastone experience of the traditional make-up complemented by the traditionalJapanese hairstyle – at their wedding ceremony, when they wear the weddingkimono. A simplified version of the traditional white make-up can be seen onwomen who wear kimono on any formal occasion, such as a graduation ceremonyor a coming-of-age ceremony. The other is an everyday white make-up. The styleof 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, theJapanese make-up style is still characterized by the distinctive ‘white’ face. Both mystreet observation and questionnaire survey suggest that the vast majority of womenwear foundation in public places.

3

Foundation for Japanese women is not onlydesigned to make their skin look lighter than it really is, but also makes theircomplexion look just like everyone else’s. They seem to be using foundation in orderto achieve the ‘right’ face for a Japanese woman. As in most Western societies, incontemporary Japan women wear make-up and men usually do not. Most Japanesepeople believe that white make-up is traditionally women’s make-up. However, inthe pre-modern period, it was the social norm for the male nobility, as well as thefemale nobility, to wear white-lead powder, to shave their eyebrows and to blackentheir teeth. However, Japanese men in all social strata stopped wearing make-up inthe course of the Meiji Restoration, and they started to consider make-up asfeminine, as their European contemporaries did. Are these changes just a questionof the assimilation of Western styles of fashion?

This article, which examines the changes in clothing and fashion since theMeiji 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 havebeen modernized and Westernized since the encounter with Western culture. Thisdivision by gender relates to the formation of national identity in the Japanesenationalist project. Then, it will show that an ideal image of middle-class women

4

became a symbol of tradition and national culture, and that it still survives incontemporary Japan. It is argued that the representation of the ideal image ofwomen in public is related to the representation of Japaneseness. This articleexplores both why it should be the ideal image of

middle-class women

that has cometo represent tradition and national culture, and how the link between the repre-sentation of the ideal womanhood and of Japaneseness continues in contempo-rary 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 mostsuccessful nationalist projects (e.g. Anderson 1991; Smith 1991). These studiesoften attribute the success to a relatively high degree of Japanese ethno-culturalhomogeneity resulting from two and a half centuries of isolation and internalpacification by the Edo shogunate, to the ‘unique’ antiquity of the imperial houseand its emblematic Japaneseness and to the samurai

culture and ethic. On theother hand, recent studies on the nature of Japanese nationalism emphasize theimportance of the ‘invention’ of the Japanese race as a basis, combined with theideology of the family-state of divine origin, for the successful nationalist projectinitiated by the Meiji men (e.g. Yoshino 1992: 26, 90–2, 1997: 200–1; Weiner1997: 101; Siddle 1997: 137; Oguma 1995). Through the Meiji Restoration, thenation came to be conceived of as an extended family, with the Emperor as thesupreme father to the national community and head of the family-state. As aresult, a common perception of a consanguineous Japanese race developed,fostered by the notion of the family-state. This racialized national identity was theother underlying component in the enormous success of the Meiji Restoration asa nationalist project. In this context, how the Emperor was represented in publicbegan to play an essential role in establishing the modern nation.

The Meiji Emperor, whose portrait still looks very familiar to present-dayJapanese people, was indeed unknown to the masses at the beginning of the MeijiRestoration. Only very few people knew about or were interested in the Emperor,who lived at the Kyoto Imperial Court. The imperial court, isolated from otherworlds, kept its own culture to a large extent. The courtiers still wore the courtdress that had originated in the clothing codes of the seventh century, and bothmen 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 Emperorfrom 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. Alongwith this change, the Emperor’s Heian culture-derived face was completelytransformed 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 followingthe Meiji Restoration.

In 1868, a British diplomat, Ernest Satow painted a picture of the 16-year-oldEmperor 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, wearinglittle black paper caps and gorgeous brocade robes of various hues. . . . Hiscomplexion was white, perhaps artificially so rendered, his mouth badlyformed, what a doctor would call prognathous, but the general contour wasgood. His eyebrows were shaven off, and painted in an inch higher up. Hiscostume consisted of a long black loose cape hanging backwards, a white uppergarment or mantle and voluminous purple trousers.

(Satow 1968[1921]: 370–1)

Lord Redesdale, who was received in audience at Kyoto in the same year, alsowrote: ‘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 wereblackened’ (Redesdale 1915, cited in Casal 1966: 21). In response to suchWestern visitors’ surprise, in the first year of Meiji (1868), the government firststated that noblemen were no longer obliged to dye their teeth black or to raisethe level of their eyebrows. In 1870, the blackening of teeth and shaving ofeyebrows 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 thegovernment encouraged men to copy the short Western hairstyle.

5

It was in thesixth year of Meiji (1873) that the Emperor appeared publicly for the first timewith short hair. At the same time, the adoption of Western styles of dressoccurred, first among upper-class Japanese people. In 1871, the Emperor andthe courtiers abandoned Japan’s thousand-year-old traditional lacquered capand wide-sleeved court dress, which had been established according to Chinesecustom in the seventh century, and started to wear formal Western clothing forofficial government ceremonies. At this point, the Emperor’s ‘ancient’ face,white-lead powdered with artificial eyebrows and blackened teeth, was aban-doned 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 thepeople. 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, butalso from his ancestors. The military function he had was that of supremecommander of the army and navy. The members of the armed forces were toremain 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 Tohoku areaand Hokkaido in 1876, the Hokuriku and Tokai areas in 1878, Yamanashi, Mieand Kyoto prefectures in 1880 and Yamagata, Akita prefectures and Hokkaido in1881. Furthermore, the government distributed the Emperor’s portrait to everyschool in 1889. After the Sino-Japanese War, the Meiji Emperor consolidated hispower by presenting himself as the ‘symbolical representative of the nation’ (Baelz1974[1932]: 116), and his reformed face, which was circulated through allnational communities, became a symbol that evoked the idea of Japanese nationalidentity.

6

Dalby (1993), in her study

Kimono

, shows that Western clothing came tosymbolize European power, while the traditional courtly robes, which originatedfrom the ancient Chinese court robes, came to reflect the contemporary weaknessof China during the early Meiji period. Dalby cites the Emperor’s proclamationof a clothing reform that rejected the traditional courtly dress as

non-Japanese

:

The national polity [

kokutai

] is firm, but manners and customs should beadaptable. We greatly regret that the uniform of our court has been establishedfollowing the Chinese custom, and it has become exceedingly effeminate instyle and character. . . . The emperor Jimmu, who founded Japan, and theEmpress Jingu, who conquered Korea, were not attired in the present style. Weshould no longer appear before the people in these effeminate styles. We havetherefore 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 ofthe male nobility, complemented by the top-knot hairstyle and make-up, looked‘effeminate’. By contrast, Western clothing and short hair were considered to bemasculine.

Louise Young, in her chapter on the emergence of a Japanese discourse on racein the course of Japan’s empire-building, points out that social interactions withnon-Japanese produced two axes of racial differentiation: Japanese and Euro-peans, on the one hand, and Japanese and Asians, on the other (1997: 158). Theface of the Emperor as head of the family-state was also reformed along with thetwo axes: the Emperor’s face was reformed in order to catch up with the Europeannations, on the one hand, and to stress the idea of Japan’s superiority over otherAsians, 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. Thusthe Emperor’s face worked as a sign which homogenized his subjects and includedthem 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 thepeople to contribute to the nation as members of the family-state. However,the Meiji state’s policies that mobilized the subjects were strictly gendered, andthe new political and economic policies fostered a greater separation of publicand 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 andWesternization.

It is here that the ideal image of middle-class women becamea useful mediator in reforming and preserving traditional Japanese culture andvalues.

The formation of Japaneseness and Japanese identity in the Meiji period seemsto be deeply embedded in the private/public, home/world gender division. ParthaChatterjee (1986, 1989), who has studied colonial discourse, nationalism andcultural modernity in India, argues that this separation is the resolution betweenthe conflicting claims of nationalist ideology and modernization in post-colonialsocieties. Chatterjee (1989) elaborates an ideological framework for analysing theformation of national identity through the dichotomy of gender in the Indiannationalist project of the nineteenth century. According to Chatterjee, a separa-tion 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 oforganizing material life and incorporate them into their own cultures withoutthreatening 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-Europeanpeople and to impose their dominance over the whole world, simply belonged tothe

material

domain. Learning from the West, therefore, should not mean theimitation of the West in every aspect of life.

Chatterjee goes on to show that the discourse of nationalist writers connectsthe 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 livingseparates the social space into

ghar

and

bahir

,

the home and the world. Theworld is the external, the domain of the material; the home represents one’sinner spiritual self, one’s true identity. The world is a treacherous terrain of thepursuit of material interests, where practical considerations reign supreme. Itis also typically the domain of the male. The home in its essence must remainunaffected by the profane activities of the material world – and woman is itsrepresentation. And so one gets an identification of social roles by gender tocorrespond 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 ofthe national culture, and women must take the main responsibility for protectingand nurturing this quality. Indian nationalist discourse asserted that the worldwas where the European powers had challenged the non-European peoples and,by virtue of their superior material culture, had subjugated them. But they hadfailed to colonize the inner, essential identity of the East, which lay in itsdistinctive, and superior, spiritual culture. The home is where the East wasundominated, sovereign, master of its own fate. Chatterjee emphasizes it is herethat the home/world dichotomy and social roles of middle-class women becomecrucial in Indian nationalist ideology.

Some feminist studies also claim that in many nations the regulation of genderis 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 ofthe home in nationalist projects. Carol Delaney, in her chapter examining the roleof 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 thegender division. Delaney states:

The language of kinship is so commonplace that most people hardly ever payany serious attention to it. And anthropologists, for whom kinship has been amajor focus of study, often dismiss as merely metaphor its use outside thecontext of kinship. However, it could also be argued that, because family andkinship relationships are felt to be natural, the imagery of the family used inother contexts helps to naturalize them as well.

(Delaney 1995: 177)

According to Delaney, her idea about the linkage between the concept of nationand kinship is based upon Anderson’s view of nationalism. Anderson

suggeststhat

nationalism should be treated ‘as if it belonged with “kinship” and “religion”rather than with “liberalism” or “fascism”’ (1991[1983]: 5). In his chapter onpatriotism and racism, Anderson advances this idea and points out that nation-alism describes its object using the vocabulary either of kinship or of home, inorder to denote something to which one is

naturally

tied. In this way, nation-nessis assimilated to ‘skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era – all those thingsone cannot help’ (ibid.: 143).

Delaney argues that the conceptualization of the family as a ‘natural’ unit hasbeen a staple not just of kinship but also of nation, and that it has obscured boththe internal stratifications and the gendered hierarchies in the nation: ‘The notionof family as a natural unit . . . naturalises power as it submerges asymmetries of ageand 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 thenation 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 isnaturalized by the nationalist project, and the feminine virtues of middle-classwomen became an essential symbol of tradition and native culture.

In Meiji Japan, the division of labour and space by gender was initially causedby state promotions of industrialization and education (see Uno 1991; Notle andHastings 1991).

8

Although early policies did not aim specifically to alter thefamily roles of women, the separation of school and workplace from the homeirreversibly reshaped the daily lives of women in growing numbers of households.State propaganda encouraged women to contribute to the nation through theirhard work at home, their frugality, their efficient management, their care of theold, young and sick, and their responsible upbringing of children. Based on thisidea, the Meiji leaders denied political rights to women. For example, after 1890women who tried to organize political associations, join political groups or attendmeetings 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). Asa result, women’s family duties were not only reinforced, but also

legitimized

. Bythe end of the nineteenth century, private educators and government officialswere deliberately seeking to reshape conceptions of womanhood. Professionaleducators, including bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education, created a newprescription 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 wivesand wise mothers, which became the cornerstone of women’s education after1899, was based on the idea that properly educated mothers could prepare theirchildren to be good subjects of the Emperor by instilling in them diligence, loyaltyand patriotism.

Nevertheless, the Meiji gender ideology concerning the domestication ofwomanhood and ‘good wives and wise mothers’

was relevant only to middle-classwomen. For instance, one education minister stated the necessity of extendingeducation 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 womenrefined tastes and a gentle and modest character. Nevertheless, in opposition tothis ideal image of women in the Meiji policies, a great number of girls fromimpoverished families were mobilized as a part of the workforce just like theirmale counterparts. Other categories of women, such as rural women, peasants,female factory workers and women involved in the fishing and the miningindustries, were ignored and invisible in state policies. By contrast, urban middle-class women came to represent the public image of Japanese women: ‘As Japanpassed from the nineteenth century into twentieth, the ideal woman was one whoattended girl’s higher school, spent an appropriate amount of time on organizedphilanthropic and patriotic activities, and used the postal savings system’ (Notleand Hastings 1991: 171). Although, in reality, the state-sanctioned domesticationof 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 tothe whole nation in the late nineteenth century.

The Meiji government expanded the patriarchal family system of the samuraiclass to include the entire nation, and it promoted a unified ideal womanhoodbased on that of samurai women. Nonetheless, the meaning of the family or homeand the role of middle-class women in the family or home were transformed fromthose of the samurai class in the course of the Meiji nationalist project. Beforethe Meiji Restoration, samurai women did not have any particular responsibilityfor preserving tradition and cultural identity. Furthermore, in the Edo period(1600–1867), since the social order of the four-class system had been frozen bythe 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 forwomen of other classes. On the other hand, middle-class Meiji women wereexpected to be responsible, not only for protecting the native cultural identityfrom Western influences, but also for promoting the image of reformed ‘tradi-tional’ Japanese women by becoming a model for lower-class women. Lower-classwomen had to keep working outside the home, as farmers, miners or factoryworkers, and some of them kept their ‘indigenous and backward’ attitudes, beingcoarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome and sexually promiscuous, from the middle-class point of view. Nevertheless, after the Meiji period, lower-class women (andmen) came to know what kinds of images of women were formal, public andJapanese. The feminine virtues of middle-class women as ‘good wives and wisemothers’, which was essential in the preservation, reforming and expression ofJapaneseness, came for the first time to be shared by women of all classes. It ishere that the representation of the ideal image of women and the representationof 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 andunified the ideal image of Japanese womanhood as represented by urban middle-class women. The gender ideology and Japaneseness evoked by the Meiji nation-alist project were condensed into the ideal image of the middle-class Japanesewoman. Recent studies on dress suggest that clothing and fashion can play animportant role in the making and transformation of politics and thought in asociety (see Bastian 1996; Dalby 1993; Tarlo 1996; Weiner and Schneider 1989).Japanese men’s faces, following the example of the Emperor’s face, becamequickly assimilated into Western men’s faces. On the other hand, Japanesewomen’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 Asiancountries. Due to their diplomatic tasks, the faces of the Empress, other femalenobility and the wives of officials in the Foreign Office too were reformed toassimilate to upper-class Western women’s faces.

9

Middle-class Meiji women, onthe other hand, came to be responsible for preserving ‘traditional’ Japaneseculture through their appearance.

The traditional white make-up in contemporary Japan preserves the basic lookof pre-modern women’s make-up. However, it does not replicate the make-upstyle of samurai-class women exactly. Japanese women’s faces were reformed toa great extent during the Meiji period. In 1867, just a year before the start of theMeiji Restoration, a British diplomat wrote in his diary about his surprise onobserving a ‘frightening’ and ‘barbarian’ native make-up style practised byJapanese women (Satow 1968[1921]: 192–3). Before the Meiji period,

ohaguro

(teeth blackening) and eyebrow shaving, which originated in the coming-of-ageceremony among Heian Court nobles, were widespread among nobles andordinary married women, from samurai women to townswomen.

10

The MeijiRestoration was not only a nationalist project but also a process of modernizationwhich involved a large degree of Westernization, especially in the early years ofthe Meiji period. The government encouraged all Japanese women to abandonthe ‘native’ custom of teeth blackening and eyebrow shaving. The reason wassimply that this style of make-up looked ‘barbarian’ to Western eyes. It took mostof the momentous half-century of the Meiji emperor’s reign (1868–1912) forJapanese women to abandon this native make-up. Yet it can be considered as adrastic change that the Meiji government should have succeeded in eliminatingtwo significant characteristics of Japanese make-up which had existed for at leasta thousand years in Japan.

Unlike the white make-up, the native make-up style of teeth blackening andeyebrow shaving, labelled as a ‘backward’ and ‘barbarian’ custom, was notrecognized as a symbol representing

new

Japaneseness. In 1873, the Empressappeared publicly for the first time with unblackened teeth, accompanied by theshort-haired Emperor. Following their example, Japanese women started to lettheir eyebrows grow and their blackened teeth turned white. By the end of theMeiji era, middle-class women who had black teeth and no eyebrows were rarelyto be seen in urban areas.

11

Both teeth blackening and eyebrow shaving are stillremembered and well known in contemporary Japan, but only as

‘odd’ customs.Now the white-painted face was alone in representing the ideal image of Japanesewomanhood.

Most middle-class Meiji women, when they wore make-up, made their face apure white with the same sort of white-lead powder that the Edo women hadapplied, and put pure red rouge on their lips, in almost the same way as the Edowomen did. Since the Edo period, red rouge had been considered as ‘women’svanity’, but white powder as ‘women’s moral’ duty. One of the books written toeducate women of the samurai class in the Edo period,

onna choho-ki

(1692)


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explains that ‘putting white powder on the face is a law which all women shouldobey. 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 whitepowder 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 torepresent the ideal image of Japanese womanhood during the Meiji period. Inthe 1880s, lead poisoning from the white-lead powder became publicly recog-nized 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 moreimportant 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 asJapanese women.

The political and economic policies of the Meiji government, intended toestablish the modern nation, fostered the public/private distinction by gender.This division was accompanied by the separation of Western modes and (thereformed and invented) native traditional modes by gender. Middle-class Meijimen, who worked outside the home, were encouraged to adopt Western fashionand clothing, while middle-class Meiji women, who stayed at home, wereencouraged to wear native clothing with

nihon-gami

(traditional Japanese hair-styles for women) and a white painted face. It became Meiji women’s respon-sibility to preserve native traditional modes. Dalby’s

Kimono

(1993), whichshows how the division of clothing by gender (Western clothing for men andkimono for women) occurred in the course of the nationalist project, empha-sizes that the kimono, originally a garment for urban middle-class people,became a symbol of Japaneseness as well as traditional feminine virtue. Nativeclothing in its broadest sense includes numerous traditional types of Japanesework clothes, jackets, aprons, pants and skirt-like garments. Nevertheless, aspecific type of native clothing that was worn by

middle-class women

became thenational dress of Japan (see Plates 1 and 2).

Nihon-gami

and white make-upwere basically available only for middle-class women. Lower-class women, whohad to keep working as farmers, miners or factory workers, could not afford toput 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 properJapanese woman should look. The representation of Japanese women wasstandardized and unified into the image of middle-class women, and women ofany class, who did not always conform to the dominant gender ideology, learnedhow to represent themselves as Japanese women in public. Middle-class Meijiwomen became an essential symbol of tradition and native culture, as distinctnot only from Western women but also from lower-class ‘indigenous andbackward’ women.


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Source

: Smith and Wisewell (1982)

Plate 2

Work clothes for farm women in the early Showa period

Source

: Pola Bunka Kenkyusho

Plate 1

Kimono worn by a Meijimiddle-class beauty


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Mikiko Ashikari

67

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 nationand strengthen the army’ (

fukoku-kyo hei

),

was a period during which suchconcepts as individual rights, freedom and democracy flourished in the intellec-tual and cultural realms. Under this relatively free atmosphere of the Taisho andearly Showa periods, the influence of Western popular culture became larger thanit had ever been. The First World War, the growing economy and the popularityof moving pictures all propelled the Japanese towards Western modes of life.Many more varieties of Western fashions became available at this time, andWestern clothing started to become Japanese women’s everyday wear. It is in thiscontext that the ideal image of middle-class Meiji women could consolidate itsstatus 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. Theterm

shokugyo-fujin

was invented to refer to middle-class working women at thattime. The entry of middle-class women into the labour market became prominentin the late 1920s. Nevertheless,

shokugyo-fujin

,

middle-class working women,were a clear minority of the total female population in Taisho and early ShowaJapan. Japanese women in the labour force numbered only 3.5 million, out of anestimated total female population of 27 million in mid-Taisho; only a quarter ofemployed women were engaged in intellectual or white-collar work, and theremaining 2.6 million women were classified as manual workers (Nagy 1991:202). The gender ideology of ‘good wives and wise mothers’

continued to bedominant throughout the inter-war years, and the government policy on womenshowed little change.

Regardless of the small numbers involved, the phenomenon of middle-classworking women created profound anxieties among government officials andopinion makers. According to Nagy, as a result of worries about the future offamily life and social stability that might have been caused by the rise of middle-class working women, numerous bureaucratic surveys were undertaken. Thesesurveys were designed to investigate the possible effects of employment onwomen’s ‘

tenbun

’

(mission in life) as wives and mothers. They questioned ‘thepossible 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 modelfor the lower class if it, too, sent its women to work to supplement the earningsof a household head’ (ibid.: 200). These surveys, carried out in the 1920s, suggestthat the government viewed the middle-class family as a bastion of national unityin an era of radical social and economic change, and that they consideredthe middle-class woman’s role in the family as a key to maintaining the familysystem. Responding to the surveys,

shokugyo-fujin

themselves expressed theirdoubts about their new roles as paid employees and their desire to ‘cultivate


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68


accomplishments as a future housewife in a family and to fulfil their vocation aswomen’ (ibid.: 213). At the same time, the government also launched severalcampaigns to rationalize home management by training middle-class women tobe economical housewives. A further objective of these campaigns was to incul-cate in middle-class women a broader societal view that would encourage themto make home management decisions based on the well-being not only of theirown households, but of the family-state as well, and to motivate them to becomegood role models for the lower classes.

The rise of

shokugyo-fujin

is one of main causes of the growing popularity ofWestern-style clothing for women, together with the Great Kanto Earthquake of1923, which accelerated the Westernization process. Western clothing styles forwomen became more popular after the earthquake. This was not only becausewomen had lost their kimono in the disaster, but also because many of them cameto perceive Western clothing as more rational. Most urban middle-class Japanesewomen 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 and1930s affected growing interest in Western clothing. Middle-class workingwomen, most of whom were fairly affluent and fashionable, chose to wear Westernclothing when they went to work, as did their male counterparts. A lot of articleson Western clothing fashion and beauty for shokugyo-fujin began to appear inwomen’s lifestyle magazines in the 1930s and led the fashion among urbanmiddle-class women. The number of middle-class women wearing Westernclothing increased, but this does not mean that the importance of women’s nativeclothing, the kimono, as a symbol of ideal womanhood and Japaneseness, wasdegraded. On the contrary, as Dalby argues, the Taisho period was the turningpoint when the kimono consolidated its function of representing tradition, bybeing separated from fashion (1993: 129). Just as fashion thrives on change, so,from Taisho on, Western clothing continued to change according to fashion. Bycontrast, the kimono froze into the type we see today, and thus it became morepowerful as a representation of tradition. Although the domain of kimono inJapanese women’s daily life was shrinking, the kimono, which preserves itsoriginal style as a garment of Meiji middle-class women, gained power as an iconrepresenting the traditional ideal image of Japanese women with their femininevirtues.

Along with this shift, Meiji women’s make-up styles and hairstyles were alsoseparated from fashion in the Taisho period, and have been preserved as thetraditional white face. Nihon-gami, which goes only with kimono, lost its popu-larity with the changeover to Western clothing. Instead, sokuhastu (literally,bundled hair: a Western hairstyle for women) became the everyday hairstyle, andthen 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 ofWestern film actresses and information on Western fashions also made an impact


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Mikiko Ashikari 69

on Japanese women’s hair and make-up styles. Women began to put rouge ontheir cheeks, stopped painting their lips to make them look smaller than they reallywere and shaped their eyebrows in the fashionable Western way of the day. Somebecame aware of the importance of eye make-up from looking at pictures ofWestern 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 lookcloser to pure white rather than the white created by Western skin-colour foun-dation.13 But many of them started to use non-lead white powder which produceda more transparent pure white complexion, giving up the Meiji white-leadpowder, which completely hid women’s real skin tone. However, women went onarranging their hair into nihon-gami and following the Meiji women’s make-upstyle with heavy white foundation on special occasions when they wore the formalkimono. In short, neither nihon-gami nor the Meiji make-up style became extinct.Instead, they became part of tradition, complementing the kimono as the Japanesetraditional costume. They still survive today on some formal occasions, such asthe marriage ceremony.

Thus the white face as everyday make-up and the traditional white face wereseparated in this period. However, this does not mean that the everyday whiteface was freed from the task of representing feminine virtue in everyday life. Thedebates concerning shokugyo-fujin revealed the way in which women’s everydaywhite faces and their feminine virtue were related. The economy needed middle-class women in the labour force, but public discourse was generally critical ofshokugyo-fujin, stereotyping them as atarashii onna (new and progressive women).Women’s life-style magazines regularly introduced new styles of Western clothingand make-up styles for shokugyo-fujin, but simultaneously warned that a shokugyo-fujin needed to choose her Western clothing and make-up style more carefullythan 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 andMurata 1993: 44–8). One article even called on shokugyo-fujin not to makethemselves look like shokugyo-fujin: ‘Only if the shokugyo-fujin do not look liketypical shokugyo-fujin, can they become truly thoughtful (so mei-na) and aware(jikaku-shita) women’ (Oguchi 1930, cited in Tsuda and Murata 1993: 45). Thesearticles suggest that shokugyo-fujin could show their respect for the dominantmodel 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 copiedfrom that of Western actresses, involving the application of eyeliner, eye-shadowor false eyelashes, was popular among bar hostesses and dancers, but it wasregarded as the ‘wrong’ make-up for middle-class women. There was a certainstyle of make-up that made women look like katei-fujin, proper housewives. It wasthe ‘right’ make-up for middle-class women. This everyday white face, which wasseparated from the traditional white face, continued to represent the dominantfemininity in everyday life, as the traditional face did on the special formaloccasions in women’s lives.


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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, thedevastation of the war almost put an end to women’s fashions. Any cosmetics,including white powder, were banned and permed hair, which had beencommon among women since the 1930s, was denounced. The kimono wasfrowned on as an expression of unpatriotic indulgence in luxury, and baggytrousers, or monpe, which were made out of old kimono, became women’severyday wear, as recommended by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Boththe traditional white face and the everyday white face disappeared from thepublic space during the wartime. Nevertheless, ultra-nationalism did not elimi-nate the feminine virtue represented by the white face. When the war was overin 1945, the post-war government immediately fired about three million womenin order to open their jobs up to returning soldiers. This policy resulted fromthe assumption that women’s husbands and fathers should provide for them,although this was possible only for upper-middle-class families. The belief thatwomen’s real identity lies in the family has been shared by the State, trade unionsand probably the majority of middle-class women themselves since the Meijiperiod. White faces came back in public right after the war. One Japanese scholarwho conducted street observations reported that the percentage of made-upwomen on the streets of the Ginza in Tokyo was 62 per cent in June 1946, justten months after the end of the war, and 75 per cent in July 1947 (Hirosawa1993: 208).

Western clothing has almost completely taken over in most areas of Japaneselife since the war. Western women’s hairstyles and ways of using make-up havealso been assimilated by Japanese women, who follow changes in fashion in thesame way as their Western counterparts. If one were to watch women on theirway to the office on the streets of London and Tokyo, you would have difficultyfinding any differences in women’s fashion between the UK and Japan. Westernfashion has become a part of everyday life in post-war Japan, and most Japanesedo not even realize that their fashion is ‘Westernized’.14 By the 1990s, theeveryday white face had been even more widely adopted by middle-class womenin their everyday lives, while the traditional white face remained to serve as a signof Japaneseness and traditional feminine virtue for special occasions, such aswedding ceremonies and coming-of-age ceremonies. The everyday white face hasgreatly changed its styles according to fashion. For example, skin-colour founda-tion, which was introduced in the Meiji period, finally became popular amongJapanese middle-class women after the Second World War and the ‘white’ facechanged in colour from pure white to skin-colour, assimilating to Westernwomen’s made-up faces. Nevertheless, this study suggests that the everyday whiteface, as well as the traditional white face, was still used as a means of representingthe feminine virtues based on the gender ideology in the everyday life of contem-porary Japan.


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Mikiko Ashikari 71

Street observation surveys suggest that the vast majority of women wear make-up in public spaces. The surveys were conducted in Osaka, in November 1996and June 1997, and the numbers of made-up and unmade-up women werecounted for an hour in three different places: at a local grocery store, in front ofa department store in central Osaka and outside an office building in the financialdistrict of Osaka. A total of 796 women were observed over five days, and weredivided into three groups: a casual group, a dressed-up group and a group ofwomen wearing a company uniform. Of the women observed during the two daysnear the department store, 3.5 per cent wore no make-up. At the local grocerystore, the equivalent figure was 3.9 per cent and in front of the office building therate dropped to only 0.6 per cent (see Table 1). There were no unmade-up womenamong the dressed-up group and the uniform group. In sum, between 96.5 and99.4 per cent of the women observed on these occasions were wearing make-up.

Also, the results of a questionnaire survey suggest that Japanese women havea kind of ‘shuchaku’ (obsession) with wearing foundation: 93.7 per cent ofrespondents answered that they always put on foundation when they wore make-up. Wearing eye-make-up or lipstick without facial foundation is common amongwomen in the UK and the US, but this is rarely seen in Japan. For most maturemiddle-class Japanese women, kesho suru (making up) actually means putting onfoundation. Foundations produced for the domestic market are available in six or

Table 1

Casual group Dressed-up group Uniform group TotalNo make-up/

make-upNo make-up/

make-upNo 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 2/103Department store(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 5/142Office 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, whosehair 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 abucket. 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.


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seven subtly different shades that are based on a standard colour. The differencesin shade are not to enhance one’s natural skin tone but to obliterate it. Forexample, if the natural colour of a woman’s skin is more reddish than the standardcolour, she would be advised to use a yellowish foundation, so that the reddishtone of her face would be weakened. In this way, complexions observed in thesurvey and created by Japanese foundation inevitably looked closer to thestandard colour, regardless of whether the women intended it or not (see alsoKesho bunka 1987: 6–7). This is not to say that presenting a particular skin toneas a standard colour is important. According to the domestic cosmetics firms, thestandard colour of foundation is not fixed, but rather changes every few yearsaccording to fashions in make-up. What is important is to present the same facecolour as the other women do. For Japanese women, making their complexions lookthe same as other women’s complexions, and, through this standardized whiteface, making themselves look ‘normal’ and ‘right’ in public, is one of the impor-tant functions of foundation.

As a reason for wearing make-up, many of those questioned mentioned thatthey wore make-up because make-up was ‘etiquette’ for mature women. Theyemphasized that no matter how beautiful a woman is, she will look ill to them ifshe does not wear make-up outside the home, and that wearing make-up is aquestion of reigi (good manners) and omoiyari (consideration) towards otherpeople. Wearing make-up in public is one of the norms for middle-class womenin contemporary Japan. A middle-class woman who happens to go to workwithout make-up one day is irritated to find herself being questioned by hercolleagues, both male and female, who want to know what is wrong with her, whyshe is not wearing make-up and whether she is feeling ill. Middle-class men andwomen take it for granted that a woman will wear make-up in public places. Inother words, since the great majority of women wear make-up in public, if amature middle-class woman appeared without make-up in a public place, shewould inevitably be making a statement. The unmade-up middle-class womangives the impression, regardless of her intentions, that she does not appreciatethe values of traditional feminine virtues and that she is challenging not onlysocial norms in general, but also the ideal womanhood. One woman questionedstated that an unmade-up woman in public must be a feminisuto (feminist), amember 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 rapidgrowth in the Japanese economy. The image of the traditional Japanese womanin her kimono becomes a more potent icon of feminine virtue and Japanesenessin the reduced domain of the kimono in contemporary Japan. Whereas thekimono was resurrected in modern Japanese women’s life as tradition, neithernihon-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 brideswearing the traditional bridal kimono – with the exception of geisha and maiko


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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 everydaymake-up and hairstyles did not go with the kimono. In most cases, when theywore 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. Mostinformants opted for a simplified version of the traditional make-up style, whichconsisted of lighter-coloured foundation, dark eyebrows, no eye-shadow andreddish lipstick. They also said that they should not wear any accessories, suchas earrings, necklaces, bracelets or even glasses with kimono, all of which theywould wear with Western clothing.

The women surveyed insisted that the kimono goes best with a white face, andtheir preparation for wearing a formal kimono sometimes started a few monthsbefore the day they planned to wear it. For example, most informants have hadthe experience of being told by older women, usually their mothers, to avoidgetting 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 thetraditional bridal kimono at their wedding ceremonies, the preparation becomesmore extreme. A bride is advised by the beauticians working for the weddingsection in a luxury hotel, in which both the wedding ceremony and reception areheld, to make at least three or four visits to their beauty salons in the hotel forskin 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 startedto avoid tanning in preparation for her wedding ceremony, which was four monthsahead. The informant, who looked very white already, also regularly visited anesute (beauty salon) for buraidaru kosu (bridal courses), which consisted of varioustreatments to whiten the face and make it smooth.

At a wedding ceremony, not only the bride but also married women attendingthe wedding as relatives of the new couple or as nakodo (go-betweens) are usuallyexpected to appear wearing the tomesode (literally, truncated sleeves; the mostformal kimono for married women), rather than Western dress. One woman inher early forties, the wife of a business executive in a big company, decided tostop playing tennis when she and her husband were asked to be nakodo by one ofher husband’s male colleagues. Although playing tennis was her main hobby, shealways got a tan as a result of it. She had never worried about tanning, nor evenrealized that she was tanned, until she tried on the tomesode a few months beforethe day of the wedding ceremony. She looked at herself as she held the tomesodeup to herself in the mirror, and was surprised to see how dark she looked. Afterthat, she devoted herself to whitening her face, buying a series of whiteningcosmetics, until her face came to ‘match the kimono’.

The kimono needs the traditional white face in order to be a national dress thatrepresents traditional feminine virtues and Japaneseness. One popular Okinawangirl singer, who was famous for her dark skin and her long bleached hair, became


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the face of a campaign for a big kimono company in the winter of 1996. Postersappeared 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 wassomething wrong or strange about the poster. One of them said she thought it wasa joke. The modern kimono worn by a popular singer with trendy make-up andhairstyle is fashionable but not traditional. Not wearing kimono properly is one ofthe most effective ways in which Japanese women can protest against the idealimage of traditional Japanese womanhood. The singer in the poster inevitablyexpresses her indifference to the values of feminine virtue or Japaneseness regard-less of her intentions. The Japanese women’s face (and body) itself, rather thanthe kimono, is the essential locus of the displaying of Japaneseness and femininevirtue 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 courseof the Meiji nationalist project. The Meiji government used the ideal image ofwomen as ‘good wives and wise mothers’, in order to unify gender ideologieswhich varied according to classes and regions before the Meiji period, to protectnative cultures and values from Western influences and to motivate all nationalsto contribute to the family-state. Japanese identity, which is largely based on racialidentity, is shaped by both the positive identification of self and the exclusion ofothers (see Yoshino 1992, 1997: Oguma 1995: Wagatsuma and Yoneyama 1967:Weiner 1997). The representation of the ideal womanhood plays a crucial role inthis process.

Body decoration as a means of communication has been the focus of severalrecent anthropological studies of dress in various societies (e.g. Abu-Lughod1986: 159–67; Barnes and Eicher 1992; Eicher 1995; Hendry 1993: 70–97;Macleod 1991). These studies show that, through body decoration, peoplecommunicate their gender and ethnicity. In contemporary Japan, the everydaywhite face has become a norm for the Japanese woman, while the traditional whiteface still serves as a symbol of the ideal image of the traditional Japanese womanon formal occasions. Both the traditional white face and the everyday white facestill convey the ideal of feminine virtue and Japaneseness. However, the pervasivepower of the white face should not be understood as if it automatically comesfrom an innate symbolic meaning of white faces. This article suggests that thispower of the white face as an icon of the ideal Japanese woman is authorized andrevitalized through the actual use of the white face in everyday life.16 What thewhite face symbolizes in a community and how and in what context it is used asa means of communication in everyday life are not independent, but dependheavily on, and interact with, each other.17

The pervasive power of the white face as a symbol of the traditional ideal ofwomanhood cannot be attributed simply to its origin. It relies largely on how the


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Mikiko Ashikari 75

white face is remembered by the contemporary Japanese. It is common forwomen, but not in general for men, to wear kimono and decorate their faces withtraditional 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 (thecoming-of-age ceremony) and the wedding ceremony. Also when a womanreaches the age of 20 (or when a woman graduates from university), she isencouraged to wear make-up in public. If a mature woman appears withoutmake-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 therepresentation of the ideal image of women is enmeshed in the representation ofJapanese identity.

Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

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

Notes1. 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 goodhousehold 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 Japanesenationals who support their husbands and reproduce loyal nationals (soldiers) for the nextgeneration. Ueno (1998), discussing the role and position of women and the possible responsi-bility of feminist scholars during the Second World War, suggests a dilemma in the Japanesenation: jenda (gender) is ignored and ‘oppressed’ by Japanese nationalism, but the Japanesenation needs jenda in order to establish and maintain Japanese nationalism.

2. There is the other white make-up for kozoku (the Imperial lineage) women. They have to wearan ancient court dress, juni-hitoe (twelve-layered court dress originating in the Heian period)complemented by the appropriate hairstyle, which is different from nihon-gami, for their weddingceremony.

3. The fieldwork research was undertaken in Osaka and Kobe between September 1996 and July1997. The fieldwork consisted of: participant observation in several settings; life histories ofwomen; 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 middleclass. Some might even point out that there was no middle class in the Marxist sense until sometime after the Meiji Restoration. The character and viability of the ‘middle class’ have beendiscussed in many social theories of modern societies, but the limits of this class or its size alwaysremain ambiguous. Furthermore, since Bourdieu (1984) showed that class can be determined


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by taste, the definition has become vaguer than ever. In this article, the term ‘middle-classwomen’ is used to refer only to women in relatively wealthy families where the salaries earnedby male members (husbands or fathers) sufficed to support their wife and children as depend-ants, so that they could stay at home. In the Meiji period, there were, in fact, quite a largenumber 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 householdscontinued to work outside the home to supplement the low, irregular income of husbands inunskilled 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 Japaneseindustrial economy by the 1890s (1991: 153). Indeed female workers outnumbered males inlight industry, especially in textiles, where the workforce produced 60 to 90 per cent of theforeign exchange during the late nineteenth century. The workers in the silk and cottonindustries were mainly poorly paid female workers, in most cases very young women fromimpoverished rural communities. The country girls worked outside the home, for their peasantparents, 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 daringwomen, 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 Showa, but it was reformed againstraight after the defeat in the Second World War. In November 1945, the official portrait ofthe Emperor in military uniform was withdrawn from display in all schools, government officesand overseas embassies and consulates. Emperor Showa abandoned the uniform of supremegeneralissimo in order to extinguish his military image, and started to wear Western businesssuits in public in 1945 (for more details, see Bix 1995). However, since then, the mass mediahave 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 (seeHane 1982: Kondo 1990: 264–72; Uno 1991: 22–35).

8. The wealthy could have maintained children as dependants before the Restoration, but childrenof 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 poorfamilies to send their young children to factories to do menial work. The government broughtin a factory act that set the minimum age of employment at 12, with the exception of lightwork, for which the limit was 10 (Hane 1992: 148–9). Also, in ordinary farm households, olderchildren, as well as mothers- and fathers-in-law, minded infants and toddlers in order to freethe mothers to engage in other skilled activities. Besides this, farmers’ children gathered grassand 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 appearedin an official capacity at the Imperial Court. The Empress appeared publicly for the first timein Western dress in that year.

10. The origin of ohaguro in Heian (794–1185) court culture is unknown. Some studies suggestthat ohaguro had already been an ‘indigenous’ custom among the Japanese people before theassimilation of Chinese civilization in the fifth and sixth centuries, but there is so far no definiteproof 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, drewtheir eyebrows and changed their hairstyle for the first time. With this make-up, they wereconsidered to be mature women. Later in the Heian period, this custom was passed down tonoble boys, and in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), to samurai boys. By the end of the Edoperiod, the make-up style of ohaguro and eyebrow shaving as a part of the coming-of-age


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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 gotmarried or engaged. Before the Meiji period (1868–1912), these two make-up styles indicatedthat a townswoman was married.

11. Indeed, teeth blackening was still popular among the wives of commoners in urban areas untilaround the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) (Takahashi 1997: 228). After that, teethblackening was abandoned, although it survived in rural areas until a much later time. Themost recent example, reported in 1977, was that of a 96-year-old woman in Akita whoblackened her teeth every other day (ibid.: 235–40).

12. Once tailoring of the simplest summer Western clothing was introduced to Tokyo housewivesin 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, calledniku-iro (flesh colour) foundation, not hada-iro (skin colour), by the Japanese women of thattime, and did not gain much in popularity until the 1950s. For them, hada-iro meant the colourof 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 modifiedto 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 beenadopted into English by the nineteenth century. However, many of the women questionedcriticized both the kimono produced for gaijin and Japanese kimono worn by gaijin, saying thatgaijin misunderstood the kimono or that the Western kimono is ‘fake’. On the other hand, theyhad different feelings towards the kimono wearing of non-Japanese Asians, who cannot bedistinguished 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 Japanesewomen 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 suggeststhat Japaneseness, represented by the ideal image of women, can include racial identity asJapanese.

16. Connerton, in his How Societies Remember (1989), articulates the relationship between the bodyand social memory, and argues that the social memory of the past is conveyed by bodilypractices in public.

17. Moore (1986) shows, in her analysis of space as text, that the meaning of symbolic elementsof space makes sense only through the individual’s practice in everyday life. Later, she arguesthat:

Meaning does not inhere in symbols, but must be invested in and interpreted from symbolsby acting social beings. Interpretation is the product of a series of associations, convergencesand condensations established through praxis, and not the result of an act of decoding byan observer.

(Moore 1994: 74)

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Mikiko Ashikari is a post-doctoral research associate at the Department of Social Anthropologyin 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]


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