The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (16 page)

6. Women in Europe often adorn their heads by covering their hair; Japanese women always leave their hair uncovered, and noblewomen wear their hair loose
.

As the sixteenth century unfolded European women exposed more and more of their hair; large hats and headdresses gave way to smaller hats, veiled headdresses, and hooded garments that revealed more of the forehead and temples.
¹¹

When Frois wrote, most women in Japan wore their hair down. Within one hundred years of Frois' observation, Japanese women wore their hair up with enough hairpins to frighten a porcupine, and the hairpin man, with his straw-wrapped pole stuck full of his wares, was an accepted part of Edo culture.

7. Women in Europe tie their hair by braiding ribbons into it all the way to the ends; Japanese women tie their hair using either a small paper ribbon at a single place in the back or they roll it on top of the head using a paper string
.

This contrast would seem to contradict Frois' previous observation that Japanese women of nobility wore their hair loose. However, there is no contradiction when it is understood that the tie (something like a half bow-tie, with the loop on the left) was either worn so far down the back that, for all practical purposes, the hair above was loose, or tied at the base so the remainder was a loose ponytail. Frois' contrast is between hair kept tightly tied-up (Europe), and hair which, bound at the end or at the top, was free for the rest of its considerable length (Japan). Presumably, Europeans found the latter “loose” in both senses of the word.

8. Women in Europe wear veil-like coverings on their heads; Japanese women wear wataboshi of silk or a piece of white cloth under a mantle
.

Iberian women of means often wore fine
beatilha s
and
volantes
(a large scarf of fine, black lace). Japanese
wataboshi
were made from cloth beaten from substandard silkworm cocoons, and while perhaps not much to look at, they nevertheless were very soft and warm. Similarly, the plain white cloth sometimes worn by Japanese women was absorbent and cool.

9. Women in Europe wash their hair and head in their homes; Japanese women do so in public baths, where there are special lavatories for the hair
.

Frois' reference to both hair and head may strike us as strange; today in English we simply say “wash our hair.” Yet lice were a common problem in early modern Europe and thus one washed one's head (scalp) as well as hair. With respect to Japan, Frois, for a change, is
not
referring here to Japanese noblewomen, who would not be caught dead in a public bath, not because of a different attitude toward nudity than that of the lower classes, but because high status in Japan implied maintaining distance from ordinary folk.

10. Noblewomen in Europe wear their skirts with long trains; Japanese women in the house of the shogun
¹²
wear four or five wigs attached one to another that drag about six feet
¹³
behind them when they walk
.

The clergy denounced dresses with long trains as bestial: “let them go about with breasts covered, and let them not wear tails like cows …”
¹⁴
Still, the dresses worn by European noblewomen not only had trains but often a hoopskirt, which entailed a cloth bolster or one or more hoops of willow or some other lightweight material that lifted and extended the skirt outward, essentially exaggerating a woman's hips.

The wigs here mentioned by Frois were not actually wigs (
katsura
), serially linked, but instead a single long tress (
kamoji
) that was attached with a decorative cord to a woman's real hair a bit below the shoulders. The tress featured decorative paper, half-bows at intervals. Such long tresses presupposed extremely clean surroundings. They generally rested on the long train of the kimono, which in turn, glided on spotlessly clean
tatami
or floorboards.

11. Women in Europe value eyebrows that are well-formed and shapely; Japanese women pluck theirs out with a tweezers
,
¹⁵
leaving not a single hair
.

Frois is essentially correct in highlighting what was an age-old custom in Japan. Japanese feminists point out that a lack of eyebrows, combined with make-up that minimized the size of the mouth, left women bereft of the signs of an outgoing personality.

12. Women in Europe use makeup to whiten their brows; noble
¹⁶
women in Japan paint their foreheads with black paint as decoration
.

The same caustic cosmetic (ceruse) that was used to whiten a woman's face also was used by European women to lighten their eyebrows.
¹⁷
Japanese women of the nobility painted the edges of their hairline and also painted stubby false eyebrows on the upper part of the forehead, which, significantly, does not move as much as the lower brow. Children of both sexes sometimes also had what we might call displaced eyebrows. As late as 1868 the youthful Emperor Meiji had high artificial eyebrows painted on his forehead when he received European diplomats.

13. The hair of women in Europe turns white in a few short years; Japanese women who are sixty years old have no gray hair because they treat it with oil
.

If European men were fortunate to have full beards, Japanese women were blessed with hair with lasting beauty. Walnut oil, in particular, was reputed to keep hair black.

14. European women pierce their ears and wear earrings; Japanese women neither pierce their ears nor do they use earrings
.

The Japanese, unlike the Chinese, did not pierce their ears. Perhaps because large ear lobes are synonymous with good fortune the Japanese were hesitant about
puncturing what might be a source of luck. Today, most Japanese women wear earrings, although many still consider ear piercing unnatural and wear only clip earrings.

15. Women in Europe think it unattractive for their face powder and make-up to be noticeable; women in Japan think the more layers of white powder applied, the more genteel
.

Cosmetics as well as jewelry were popular in Europe, although the Church frowned on make up, “Because, to give oneself over to the arts of the toilet pertains to a harlot, and not to a woman who is truly good.”
¹⁸
Certainly Japanese women, on formal occasions, out-did their European counterparts in the foundation department, as the prolific playwright Saikaku has a female character apply two hundred layers of powder. As noted in
Chapter 1
(
#8
), the Japanese from time immemorial have valued white skin, especially for women. Still, it would be wrong to identify Japanese women in masse with heavy make-up. The Spanish merchant Avila Giron, writing a couple decades after Frois, noted that it was primarily married women, “as a mark of honour,” who were accustomed to putting on a little powder and a touch of color on their lips, to hide the dye that came off on their lips when they stained their teeth black.

16. Women in Europe make use of methods and concoctions to whiten their teeth; Japanese women use iron and vinegar to make their mouths and teeth as black as [
missing
]
.

Black as “pitch” is how fellow Jesuit Rodrigues described the teeth of some Japanese women, particularly nobles. Rodrigues noted that some boys also blackened their teeth, but “the practice has now been given up completely by men and largely by women, who now leave their teeth in their natural condition.” As it turned out, the custom of
ohaguro
, which apparently prevented tooth decay, was later revived and continued to the end of the Tokugawa period, with black teeth being the mark of a married woman.

17. Women in Europe wear bracelets of gold and silver on their arms; the noblewomen of Shimo wear thin threads that circle the arm five or six times
.

The Japanese lack of interest in gold, silver, and precious stones is unusual, even in Southeast and Far East Asia. Okada speculates that the thin threads described by Frois refer to a charm worn when the arm or fingers were sore. He does not suggest why they might be sore, but young noblewomen wove clothing for their would-be lovers and often played the
koto
, a zither-like instrument that is one of the most muscularly taxing instruments in the world. There is also the possibility that the strings were charms to help attract or retain a lover.

18. Women in Europe wear jewels and golden chains around their necks; non-Christian women in Japan wear nothing, and those who are Christian wear relics or rosary beads
.

As suggested above, the Japanese have never been particularly interested in precious stones and minerals (there is a correspondingly small vocabulary to discuss gems in Japanese). In ancient Heian times (800–1200 C.E.) Japanese women wore necklaces that were allegorized in Japanese poetry as their lover and their lover's soul. These necklaces, called
tama-no-o
or “
tama
-string,” are based on a homophonic pun:
tama
means soul as well as any round, shiny, or bead-like object.

19. Women in Europe wear sleeves that extend as far as the wrist; women's sleeves in Japan extend halfway down the arm and they do not consider it unchaste to reveal their arms and breasts
.

This distich and those that follow reveal a European preoccupation with women's bodies, which needed to be hidden and fully clothed lest they arouse or excite men's passions.

If the Japanese sleeve was long in the sense that it was wide enough to hang almost to the ground (see
Chapter 1
,
#5a
), it was short in length as measured from the shoulder to the hand. Thus, if a woman were to extend her arm or arms, one might glimpse the woman's breast through the arm-hole. Note, however, that this was probably more titillating to European men than it was to Japanese men; the latter were more likely to be aroused by the sight of a woman's nape than her breasts.

20. Among us, a woman would be considered mad or shameless if she went barefoot; Japanese women, be they nobles or commoners, walk about barefoot during most of the year
.

Europeans turned a woman's feet as well breasts into a fetish, thus explaining Frois' preoccupation here with exposed feet. Note that Frois' Portuguese usage is misleading, as the term
descal
ç
as
(“barefoot”) implies that Japanese women wore nothing on their feet. What Frois meant to say was that they rarely wore “socks” or
tabi
. They did, however, wear sandals or clogs, which, from a European perspective, exposed too much of the foot. As a literal antipode to Japan, China would seem better than Europe. In China, feet were a woman's surrogate private part! If Japanese women could be considered loose with their feet, Chinese women were tight, and Europeans somewhere in between. This is not only true for the degree of exposure, but for the degree to which the feet were tortured. The Japanese were kind to them, the Europeans, with their pointed and symmetrical toes, hard on them, and the Chinese, with their foot-binding, downright sadistic.

21. Women in Europe wear their belts very tight; Japanese noble women tend to wear them so loosely that they are always falling down
.

The belts and girdles worn by elegantly-dressed European women were not only tight, but during some periods the style was to wear them so high that they cinched the bust.
¹⁹

Okada
²⁰
has pointed out that the reason the
obi
(bands of cloth as stiff and “wide as a horse's girth strap,” according to de Avila Giron
²¹
) was tied loosely, was because of its greater width and the fact that it was wrapped around the body several times. (In television “Easterns,” the bad guys strip women by spinning them like tops.) Judging from artwork, the
obi
was usually worn lower in Frois' time than in the twentieth century, when it was so high and so tight that it could literally squash the breasts (an interesting change in fashion that paralleled the loss of freedoms once enjoyed by Japanese women).

22. European women wear gemstone rings and other jewelry; Japanese women wear no adornment or jewelry made of gold or silver
.

Marques notes that those Portuguese who could afford it spent enormous sums on jewelry, including rings that decorated all the joints of the fingers.
²²
Finger rings seem so natural to Europeans and Americans that it is hard to imagine a people who would have nothing to do with them. The Japanese called rings “finger-metal” (
yubigane
) and acquired them from the Dutch in the seventeenth century to fasten the strings of a pouch (one area where a certain amount of ornamentation was traditional).
²³
How times have changed; today most Japanese wear “finger-rings” (
yubiwa
) as in the West.

23. European women wear purses or keys on their chords or belts; the Japanese tie some strips of thin silk painted with golden leaves [around their obi bands], but they do not attach anything to them
.

The image of a housewife or maid with keys dangling from her waist is very European. Japanese houses could only be locked from the inside, and there were no locked rooms or cabinets. Thus, Japanese women had no use for keys. This is not to suggest, however, that theft was not of some concern in Japan. Rather than lock one's home, the Japanese employed a
rusu-ban
or “remain-guard duty” in the house (again locking the doors from the inside) to guard against theft. Purses were not needed, for the partially sewn sleeve ends served in that capacity.

24. The dresses of European women are closed in the front and cover their feet all the way to the ground; those of Japanese women are completely open in the front and extend to the ankle
.

During the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) prostitutes on parade walked on high-teethed
geta
, wearing a half dozen or more layers of clothing, all of which were open in the front. However, this was not ordinary women's wear, which usually had inner layers that wrapped around to the side, keeping the legs well covered. In this case “open” does not mean cut away or slit, thus revealing the legs, but that the overlapping panels of the dress separate as a Japanese woman walks, revealing a woman's foot and ankle. Japanese women also walked in short,
mincing steps, with their toes inward as if consciously hiding their insteps, which, together with the nape of the neck, were the focus of men's ogling.