The Ironies of Japan Going into Trousers

This paper examines a particular period in Japanese history. when clothing was systemically changed through government policy. It demonstrates the complex relationships between an Eastern nation and a Western clothing system. It also explores the complexity of roles which clothing plays in society, clothing which brands a nation as masculine, but which resists the discourses of modernity, which were found on native clothing. It demonstrates that native, Japanese clothing has always been developing to meet the needs of its wearers, according to technology, sumptuary laws and prevailing tastes, and therefore that fashion is not any more a product of Europe than it is of the East. It reveals the Japanese fashion system as a complex and multi-dimensional one, about surface design rather than change in shape, bur also being about inner and deep surfaces as well as outer surfaces for public presentation, and thus being a carrier for private as well as public discourses. This examination also demonstrates that whilst fashion may be intimately bound up with the forces of society and also politics, it is also a force which resists outside control, and develops because of the signification with which the embodied wearers endow it.