The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (13 page)

Shoes do not mix with finely woven
tatami
; these straw mats are easily scuffed and soak up dirt. However, leaving one's shoes outside did have its drawbacks. The Jesuits were quick to realize that they could not go anywhere without
komono
(literally “little-people”), child servants responsible for keeping track of their shoes. The problem was not that shoes were stolen, but that they got lost amid hundreds of other shoes at public places. Even today, finding one's shoes at a public function can be like trying to find your car in an airport parking lot. Today, the Japanese generally trade in their shoes for slippers at the office, and both home and office have a special rack or container with slippers for guests. But all is not well, for unlike the open-heeled traditional
geta
or
zori
, the Western shoe, which the modern Japanese seem to be stuck with, does not easily shake off. The sole
exception to the shoes-off-at-the-door rule is when someone dies; those removing the deceased from the house do not remove their footwear.

38a. In order to wash our face and hands, we roll up our sleeves only as far as the wrist; for the same purpose the Japanese strip down from the waist up
.

Stripping to the waist was both easy to do (see
9a
above) and hygienic, inasmuch as it exposed more of the body for washing. Ease of dressing and undressing apparently was one reason the Japanese engaged in bathing as often as they did.

39a. We show obeisance by placing a knee on the floor; the Japanese prostrate themselves with their legs, arms and head virtually flat to the ground
.

“One knee for my lord, two knees for The Lord” is an apt way of conveying European obeisance. Neither Frois nor his equally observant contemporary, Rodrigues, noted the wordless auditory element of Japanese obeisance. The Englishman Saris was the first European to mention these noises, which seem to say “I am tense and awed! I am tense and awed!” Alcock, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, was the first to do the subject justice:

… suddenly, on some signal apparently, there is a general and long-prolonged sibilated sound impossible to describe, something between a ‘hiss'and a long-drawn ‘hish-t.' … It was immediately after one of these rustlings of the breeze of reverence vibrating through the lips of a thousand sibilating courtiers, that I received the signal to advance to the entrance of the council chamber. I have never seen or heard anything like it, or, indeed, in the least resembling this strange but impressive way of bespeaking reverence.
⁵⁹

Today, the Japanese still occasionally suck air and make strange noises in the presence of superiors. However, they no longer prostrate themselves (that custom was given up in the mid-nineteenth century).

40a. We wear angular or rounded hats made of cloth; the Japanese wear silk hats, some of which are pointed and others shaped like bags
.

Round hats of fine cloth or velvet and sombrero-like-hats with narrow brims do seem characteristic of sixteenth century Mediterranean Europe. Japanese portraiture from the sixteenth century includes figures with what might be described as “pointed” and “baggy” hats,
⁶⁰
but the reality might not have been so simple. Japan's most beloved poet, Matsuo Basho (1644–1694), is usually shown wearing a hat shaped like a cake about two layers high.
⁶¹

41a. Among us, patched clothing is considered extremely vulgar; in Japan, princes think very highly of a kimono or dobuku made entirely of patchwork
.

The sixteenth-century Japanese were hardly into grunge. Tea masters and poets were nevertheless wild about patchwork, mostly made of old brocade and other fine materials. Some nobles emulated the “art crowd's” taste for patchwork.
The rage apparently became an aesthetic tradition that was not confined to fine materials. Two hundred years after Frois, Issa celebrated what is probably a poor poet's dress (his own garb): a kimono of paper or
kamiko
that was a collage of
hanko
, i.e., reusable paper from old books, calendars, paintings, manuscripts, etc.

42a. In Europe, all our cloth is cut with scissors; in Japan everything is cut with a knife
.

It is not that the Japanese did not have scissors, but they preferred to cut cloth with a particular knife called a
monotachi
or
monotachi-gatana
, literally “thing-cut-off-sword.” Apparently if a single blade is sharp enough, there is no need for two. Conversely, scissors may have developed further in Europe in order to allow tailors and seamstresses to make “fine cuts,” button holes, “pinking,” and such–functions that were unnecessary for the production of Japanese clothing.

43a. In Europe it would be considered effeminate for a man to carry and use a fan; in Japan a man always carries a fan in his belt and he would otherwise be considered base and wretched
.

If you ever have been stared at by a barracuda fanning its fins you can imagine that a samurai with a fan could look menacing, even if the fan itself rarely was used as a lethal weapon (as in Japanese TV “Easterns”). The Dutch physician Philipp Franz von Siebold, who lived in Japan for six years between 1823 and 1829, nicely captured some of the fan's uses:

Among the men, the fan serves a great variety of purposes: visiters [sic] received the dainties offered them upon it; and the beggar, imploring charity, holds out his fan for the alms his prayers may have obtained. The fan serves the dandy in lieu of the whalebone switch; the pedagogue instead of a ferule for the offending schoolboy's knuckles; and, not to enumerate its many other uses, a fan, presented upon a peculiar kind of salver to the high-born criminal, is said to be the form of announcing his death-doom, his head being struck off the moment he stretches it towards this emblem of his fate.
⁶²

Fans are still common in Japan and are distributed free for use in folk dances (
bon
) that are held throughout Japan during the summer, although today little children and elderly women dominate the “fan dancing.”

44a. Among us, lords and princes are preceded by [retainers carrying] torches of wax; in Japan they use bundles of old, dried lengths of bamboo, or bundles of straw
.

Quality candles and torches of beeswax were important to Europeans, especially religious men like Frois (Catholicism, then as now, involved considerable sacrifices of candles as part of religious ritual). The common Japanese term for torch is
taimatsu
or “pine-light,” reflecting the fact that pine resin was the principal combustible used to “light the way” for nobility. Ideally, the resin was applied to straw and bound up within a bamboo (
yadake
) framework.

45a. In Europe baring even one's foot before a fire to get warm would be considered strange; in Japan anyone standing before the fire to get warm unabashedly bares his entire backside
.

The Zen abbot, Sengai, painted himself with his testicles in plain view, and punning on their euphemistic name, “golden gems,” wrote an accompanying poem about breaking out the gold for the entire world to share! (
kintama-o uchi-akete
…). This lack of shame with respect to revealing one's private parts in a non-sexual context survived the long feudal era to shock the nineteenth-century West. Conversely, the nineteenth-century Japanese were equally shocked by the
décolletage
of Western women, not to mention corsets and other devices that emphasized the “female figure.” The Japanese also took umbrage with nudes in painting exhibitions, because they had no similar tradition of showcasing the naked body. Thus, while they could look at pornography in private with little if any of the guilt attached to it by Westerners, the idea of displaying the human figure as a beautiful ideal was so far from their mind that they could only see this Western art as vulgar or “low-culture.”

46a. We consider it effeminate for a noble to look in the mirror; Japanese nobles ordinarily all get dressed in front of a mirror
.

The mirror had negative and positive connotations for Europeans as a function of how much time one spent looking into it: a brief glance could reveal virtue and remind the viewer of the transient nature of life, while prolonged scrutiny bespoke one or more of the “seven deadly sins.”
⁶³
As Frois' comment implies, women in Europe were perceived as being particularly prone to vanity. Of course, it is ridiculous to believe that European men, particularly nobles, did not prune themselves before venturing out to “perform” in public, as per Castiglione or Machiavelli. Correspondingly, Okada has pointed out that
Hagakure
, the classic manual for the samurai revival of the Edo era (1603–1868), advises warriors to use a mirror to make certain that they are properly dressed and groomed. In Shinto, the mirror is revered as a gift from the gods for our spiritual edification; in Buddhism, it was identified with the redeeming light of the moon. Its use by either sex was not thought to be narcissistic, but reflective, in the best meaning of the word (i.e., as an instrument of self-knowledge, purity, or cleansing). Philosophy apart, however, Japanese men spent so much time grooming that the presence of a mirror was hardly surprising.

47a. Among us, to wear clothing made of paper would be considered a joke or madness; in Japan, bonzes and many nobles dress in paper [kimonos] with silk fronts and sleeves
.

As noted above (see
41a
), paper kimonos were becoming high fashion in Frois' time, particularly those made of fancy paper, which had a fine, lacquered finish made of persimmon sap. During the seventeenth century, paper robes called
kamiko
came to be associated with poets and prostitutes, who could not afford silk. Like many homeless in America today, the Japanese understood that many
layers of paper make good insulation in the winter, particularly in Japan where those months are the driest part of the year. During the eighteenth century only the elderly were allowed to use paper kimonos.

48a. What we consider a dressing robe for wearing around the house, the Japanese wear [in public], with sleeveless dobukus over their katabiras
.
⁶⁴

Here Frois seems to be suggesting that the Japanese wear their light robes outside whereas Europeans do not. The
dobuku
vest, which during the seventeenth century became the sleeveless
haori
, was
de rigeur
in Japan during Frois time for men who would be called professionals: magistrates, doctors and tea-masters.
⁶⁵
These professionals generally worked indoors.

49a. We wash clothes by scrubbing them by hand; in Japan clothing is washed by stomping on it with the feet
.

Okada has taken issue with Frois and argues that the Japanese generally washed clothes by hand and less frequently did so using their feet. As it happens, some people in the West also used their feet: Thomas Hood wrote a poem in 1815 about women in Edinburgh who used their feet. While not stomping, pounding new silken cloth with sticks to soften it (called
kinuta
or “clothes-board”) is perhaps the most common human sound found in haiku (no matter where a poet hears it, he thinks of mother). It may well be that
kinuta
was once the preferred Japanese method of cleaning all laundry, as was the case in Korea.

50a. We carry handkerchiefs and tissues in our sleeves or pockets; the Japanese tuck theirs into their breasts, and the higher up, the dandier
.
⁶⁶

The broad sash worn by the Japanese turned the entire garment above the waist into an enormous pocket, and the contents were by no means limited to tissue. Okada cites two Tokugawa-era sources (one Japanese and one Russian) who marveled at the way Japanese men turned their kimonos into “warehouses,” filled at times with “cakes from receptions” and sundry other items that would put a contemporary woman's purse to shame. While sleeves apparently were fairly short, i.e., narrow, at the time the
Tratado
was written, in earlier centuries they sometimes held more than the body of the kimono.

51a. We use pockets
⁶⁷
; the Japanese use a purse hung from their belt
.

Europe at this time was in the midst of transitioning from an external purse to an internal pocket; the first such pockets were often purses worn within one's clothing that were accessed by reaching through a slit or open side seam.

Purses worn by Japanese of both sexes were made of leather, cotton, and occasionally wood. While the sleeves served for coins and other little trinkets, the dangling body purses mentioned above served to carry paper, books, and more specialized items: nosegays, writing equipment, medicine, tobacco, fire-making
kits, and so forth. The purse string usually was wrapped around the obi, or sash, rather than being tied to it. To prevent them from slipping off, a counter-weight was tied to the end of the purse string. This counterweight, or
netsuke
, forms the main body of perhaps the finest Japanese miniature sculptures. It kept the purses from falling not so much by its weight as by the fact that, small or not, it was big enough to catch on the upper or lower edge of the belt (depending on which way it was wrapped). Unlike most pockets, the dangling container has the advantage of not spilling its contents when one sits or lies down.

52a. In Europe purses are used to carry money; in Japan the purses of nobles and soldiers are used to carry scents, medicines and flint
.

Japanese men, especially nobles, were very big on scent. The
Tale of Genji
tells of nobles who roamed about all night visiting women and leaving behind a scent trail that was still detectable a day later. A generation after Frois wrote, tobacco appears to have been the main scent left by all men, gentry or peasant.

53a. Among us people bathe at home, well hidden from the eyes of others; in Japan, men, women, and bonzes use public baths or bathe at night by their doorstep
.