Japan Beyond the Kimono: Innovation and Tradition in the Kyoto Textile Industry

Abstract

Everyone who has ever worn a kimono knows how difficult it is to perform simple tasks such as riding a bicycle. However, the ability to ride a bicycle in a kimono depends on one’s notion of convention. If kimono wearers strictly adhere to protocol, small steps are necessary to walk in a kimono, and it is even impossible and deemed inappropriate to ride a bicycle. If kimono wearers, however, redefine conventional rules, the garment becomes wearable, affordable, and suitable for contemporary lifestyles. Cultural anthropologist Jenny Hall returns to this metaphor throughout her book as she addresses the re-definition of rigid etiquette as an essential tool to revitalize an entire industry in decline. Such necessity has sparked producers and designers to develop innovative marketing strategies to survive in a global consumer market and to ‘make kimono ride a bicycle’ (1–2, 33, 156, 157). Hall’s timely book is divided into five chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter provides the theoretical background and introduces Kyoto as the main field site which Hall has approached through a sensory ethnography. Hall engages critically with the concepts of tradition, innovation, authenticity, and fashion. Her main argument, which recurs throughout the book, is that tradition and innovation are not mutually exclusive, but innovation is essential to maintain tradition. From a Western perspective, thinkers such as Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Pierre Bourdieu have investigated the contested concept of fashion in the context of the rise of capitalism, the emergence of distinct classes and conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1994 [1899]). Hall challenges this ethnocentric perspective. She does emphasize the historical significance of wafuku (Japanese clothing) as a symbol of class and socio-economic status, but she also alerts readers to the ‘trickle-up effect’ in the entertainment quarters of Edo, where women and townspeople from lower classes initiated fashion on their own terms as an expression of the ‘aesthetic ideal of iki’ (23). Hall also underlines wearing wafuku fashion as ‘a visual means of representing self’ (36) and as a symbol of national identity since the Meiji period.

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