In Japan one always hears about “the double life,” not as suggestive a subject as it may at first seem to be, and indeed one that can become somewhat tiresome. It refers to the Japanese way of being both foreign and domestic, of wearing shoes and sleeping on floors. The double life is at best an expense and an inconvenience, we are told, and at worst a torment, leading to crises of identity and such things.
Looking about one and seeing the calm, matter-of-fact way in which the Japanese live the double life, one can dismiss the issue as intellectual sound and fury. The world has been racked by changes, such as the change from the rural eighteenth century to the urban twentieth, and, compared to them, the double life does not seem so very much to be tormented by. Yet there can be no doubt that it lies beyond the experience of the West. The West went its own way, whether wisely or not, one step following another. Such places as Tokyo had to—or felt that they had to—go someone else’s way.
The playwright Hasegawa Shigure came home one day and found that she had a new mother. Had her old mother been evicted and a new one brought in to replace her, the change might have been less startling. What Shigure found was the old mother redone. “She performed the usual maternal functions without the smallest change, but she had a different face. Her eyebrows had always been shaved, so that only a faint blue-black sheen was where they might have been. Her teeth had been cleanly black. The mother I now saw before me had the stubbly beginnings of eyebrows, and her teeth were a startling, gleaming white. It was the more disturbing because something else was new. The new face was all smiles, as the old one had not been.”
The women of Edo shaved their eyebrows and blackened their teeth. Tanizaki, when in his late years he became an advocate of darkness, developed theories about the effect of the shadows of Edo upon the spectral feminine visages created by these practices. Whatever may be the aesthetic merits of tooth-blackening, it was what people were used to. Then came a persuasive sign from on high that it was out of keeping with the new day. The empress ceased blackening her teeth in 1873. The ladies of the court quickly followed her lead, and the new way spread downwards, taking the better part of a century to reach the last peasant women in the remotest corners of the land. If the Queen and the Princess of Wales were suddenly to blacken their teeth, the public shock might be similar.
E. S. Morse did not record that his rickshaw runner was other than good-natured at having to stop at the city limits and cover his nakedness. The relationship between tradition and change in Japan has always been complicated by the fact that change itself is a tradition. Even in the years of the deepest Tokugawa isolation there had been foreign fads, such as one for calicos, originally brought in as sugar sacks, and later much in vogue as kimono fabrics. There had always been great respect for foreign things, which needed no justification. The runner probably felt no more imposed upon by this new vestmental requirement than by the requirement that he be cheerful and reasonably honest. There was, moreover, a certain sense of proportion. Hasegawa Shigure’s mother was shamed by the neighbors into thinking that she may have gone too far. She did not return to tooth-blackening, but she did return to a traditional coiffure. The pompadour that had been a part of her new image was a subject of hostile criticism. The neighborhood was not yet ready for it.
If they sought to do what was expected of them, however, the lower orders must have occasionally wondered just what the right thing was. So many acts that had seemed most natural were suddenly uncivilized. A tabulation survives of misdemeanors committed in the city during 1876. “Urinating in a place other than a latrine” accounts for almost half of them. Quarreling and nudity take care of most of the remaining five or six thousand. Not many people were inconvenienced by other proscriptions, but they suggest all the same that one had to tread carefully. Cutting the hair without permission seems to have been an exclusively feminine offense. There is a single instance of “performing mixed Sumō, snake shows, etc.” The same pair of miscreants was presumably guilty of both, etc. There are eight instances of transvestism, a curious offense, since it had long been a part of Kabuki, and does not seem to have troubled people greatly in more private quarters. Hasegawa Shigure tells in her reminiscences of a strange lady who turned up for music lessons in Nihombashi and proved to be a man. The police were not summoned, apparently, nor was the person required to discontinue his lessons.
Mixed bathing was banned by the prefecture in 1869. Indifference to the order may be inferred, for it was banned again in 1870 and 1872. Bathhouses were required to have curtains at their doors, blocking the view from the street. Despite these encumbrances, the houses were very successful at keeping up with the times. Few plebeian dwellings in the Low City had their own baths. Almost everyone went to a public bath, which was a place not only for cleansing but for companionship. The second floors of many bathhouses offered, at a small fee, places for games and for sipping tea poured by pretty girls. These facilities were very popular with students. From mid-Meiji, the nature of bathhouses seems to have become increasingly complex and dubious. The bathing function lost importance as private domestic baths grew more common, while second floors were sometimes converted to “archery ranges” (the pretty girls being available for special services) and drinking places. The bathhouse had earlier been a sort of community center for plebeian Edo, a relief from crowding and noise, or, perhaps, a place that provided those elements in a form somewhat more appealing than the clamor of home and family. Now it was a new and rather less innocent variety of pleasure center.
In the fiction of late Edo the barbershop, like the bathhouse, had been a place for watching the world go by. The new world spelled change here too. Western dress was initially expensive, but the Western haircut was not. The male masses took to it immediately; the other masses, as the example of Hasegawa Shigure’s mother tells us, more slowly. The Meiji word for the most advanced way of cutting the hair was zangiri or jangiri, meaning something like “random cropping.” The old styles, for aristocrat and commoner alike, had required shaving a part of the head and letting the remainder grow long, so that it might be pulled into a top-knot. Already in 1873, the sixth year of Meiji, a newspaper was reporting that about a third of the men in the city had cropped heads.
“If you thump a jangiri head,” went a popular ditty of the day, “it sounds back ‘Civilization and Enlightenment.’” The more traditional heads echoed in a more conservative way, and some even carried overtones suggesting a revocation of the Restoration and a return to the old order.
The first new-style barbershop opened in 1869. It was in Ginza, which had new things even before the fire. The barber had learned his trade in Yokohama, and his first customer is said to have been the chief of a fire brigade. This seems appropriate. Firemen were among the more traditional of people, noted for verve and gallantry, and figuring prominently in the fiction and drama of Edo. So it often seems in Meiji: tradition and change were not at odds; the one demanded the other.
Up-to-date geisha, by Ogawa Isshin, 1902
By 1880, two-thirds of the men in the city had randomly cropped heads. The figure had reached 90 percent a scant six years later, and by 1888 or 1889 only the rare eccentric still wore his hair in the old fashion.
The inroads of the Western barber were far more rapid than those of the Western tailor. It was not until the day of the flapper that women really began to cut their hair and let it down. Liberated Meiji women went in for a pompadour known as “eaves,” from its way of projecting outwards in a sheltering sweep. A few geisha and courtesans adopted Western dress from mid-Meiji, and several wore what was known as the “shampoo coiffure,” from its resemblance to hair let down for washing and not put back up again. The first beauty school was opened early in the Taishō Period, by a French lady named Marie-Louise. Others quickly followed.
The English expression “high-collar” came into vogue from about the turn of the century. At first it was derisive, signifying the extremely and affectedly foreign. A lady’s coiffure was high-collar if it was thought to he too sweeping and eaveslike. A suggestion of dandyism still clings to the expression.
Some rather surprising things were high-collar, in the broad sense of innovative. Items and institutions which one might think to be