Takasawa Keiichi’s “Kimono”: An Artistic-Cultural Treatise from Occupied Japan

Cultural relations between the United States and Japan in the twentieth century are today best remembered for two periods of hostility. In the 1940s the countries were enemies in World War II, and in the 1980s the strong postwar cross-Pacific alliance was strained due to manufacturing and trade policies that in some ways prefigured today’s rivalry between the US and China. Although President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro were both personally and ideologically close, many Americans thought of Japanese people in insecure, envious, and hostile terms.

However, between these two periods, there was a flowering of American Japanophilia influenced partly by American servicemen’s experiences in Japan during the prolonged Allied occupation of the country. The 1950s saw the Japanese printmaker Wada Sanzō (whose “Greenhouse Workers” from his Occupations of Shōwa Japan series hangs in my parents’ living room) win an Academy Award for costume design and the actress and singer Umeki Miyoshi win one for Best Supporting Actress. Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder admired (what they knew of) Japanese Buddhism, and D.T. Suzuki became a more famous and respected figure stateside than in his home country. It was in the earliest days of this midcentury Japanophilia that Takasawa Keiichi wrote and illustrated Kimono: A Pictorial Story of the Kimono.

Kimono is a 40-page book printed on Japanese paper, featuring Takasawa’s drawings and photographs of women in traditional Japanese dress supplemented by his own commentary (or an English translation thereof). The publisher has the unsurprising name Japan Travel Bureau, and the book was printed in Occupied Japan in 1948. It retailed for ¥250, and, I would guess, has been out of print since the early 1950s or so.

  I ran across Kimono while searching for a Takasawa work to buy that lacked some of the questionable artistic qualities of much of his oeuvre. As a visual artist he is best known for a massive body of portraiture most of which focuses on the same rail-thin, wry-faced model, who is generally thought to have been his wife. Many of his paintings and drawings of this woman are sexually charged or even pornographic; a common Takasawa subject is his wife having sex with other women. The illustrations in Kimono, on the other hand, are generally of a sort that one would feel comfortable showing one’s grandmother: the women are fully dressed and attractively but not sexually posed. They also show a broader range of ages and attitudes than the model of Takasawa’s other work; one drawing is captioned “Miss Teen-Ager learns the intricate steps of the classical dance,” and the women’s facial expressions range from contented to annoyed (“I wonder if my obi is on straight!”). The drawings are well-executed and done in an appealing palette, a sort of subdued four-color of charcoal grey, indigo, deep red, and pale gold. The photographs in the book, on the other hand, often suffer from the over-luridness of midcentury color photography, in a way that reminds me a little of the contemporaneous Chiquita Banana commercials with Carmen Miranda.

  The book was intended to capture the kimono as a “symbol of Japanese women” for a Western audience, and contains very lucid and easy-to-follow descriptions of what different types of traditional Japanese womenswear are, what events or times of year one wears them for, and how they are made and sold. The only section that tripped me up was one discussing how properly to put on an obi (sash), an aspect of kimono-wearing that has stymied me in life as well as in art. If anyone can ever explain to me what exactly is meant by “Make a little fold at the end of the long end of the obi, tuck the other end of the obi into the bow, and fasten all these tightly together with the obi-dome which is also taken around in front of the obi and tied there,” that person will have my heart for life.

  Takasawa’s politics, which do make it into the book, are “reconciliatory” and focused on a revivification of Japanese society, including traditional arts and customs, after the traumatic war years. The implication is that he, like many other small-c conservative Japanese artists and writers, was unhappy with the war primarily because of the way it destroyed Japan’s Meiji- and Taishō-era civilian culture. This is a position shared with, among others, the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, whose family saga The Makioka Sisters was censored during the war for its focus on “the soft, effeminate, and grossly individualistic lives of women.” Something very similar, or at least similarly sexist, could well have been said about Kimono had Takasawa written it five years earlier.

Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles introduces to Japanese literature the somewhat self-conscious distinction between feminists and “woman-worshipers,” who idealize women but have no particular respect for their opinions or their values. Kimono outs Takasawa as a woman-worshiper of the old school, as if his later paintings of his wife weren’t enough. The copy accompanying his drawings idealizes women and states several very strong preferences about female dress and behavior as if those preferences are facts. One passage makes an absolute statement about the female love for changing one’s clothes that a butch lesbian or even a vowed religious sister of the period could and probably should have disabused him of immediately had he asked.

However, I don’t mean to suggest that Kimono is a uniquely misogynistic work; I don’t think it is. The premise itself, and Takasawa’s breadth of knowledge about women’s clothing, show an interest in women’s lives completely absent from truly woman-hating Japanese art of the period, such as Confessions of a Mask (a novel of whose misogynistic homoeroticism, or homoerotic misogyny, I was strongly reminded when I finally sat down and read American Psycho). It’s easy to imagine a version of Takasawa alive today as a sort of male Karolina Żebrowska or Safiya Nygaard, taking to YouTube and Instagram to share his interest in traditional womenswear with the world.

Kimono can be found used on Biblio and similar websites for roughly between $30 and $100. My copy was on the expensive end because several of its pages are signed by Takasawa (in an idiosyncratic format with “Keiichi” in kanji and “Takasawa” in roman letters). I would recommend the book to those interested in Japan’s presentation of itself to the West at this point in the country’s long history, provided they can put up with some of the author’s less-than-feminist sentiments and views.