Kimono: A Modern History by Terry Satsuki Milhaupt (review)

Kimono: A Modern History. By Terry Satsuki Milhaupt. Reaktion Books, London, 2014. 312 pages. £22.00, paper.

Kimono: A Modern History provides a helpful and insightful overview of the history of one of Japan’s most significant categories of material culture. The narrative extends from the growth of the Edo-period clothing market to the early twenty-first-century emergence of kimono designers as influential agents in the field of fashion. The book does not offer a new vision of clothing, of modern Japan, or of the relationship between material culture and national identity, but its clear account and beautiful illustrations will prove extremely useful in the classroom.

Kimono is divided into an introduction and six chapters. The introduction sets out to define the kimono as an everyday garment while also calling attention to its material and symbolic mutability. The author introduces a variety of postwar publications, ranging from Fujin no tomo to Kimono, kiyō, yo!, making the point that the largely female readership of these texts has always been quite diverse and that wearing a kimono does not fulfill a single function in the lives of women. “Whether young or old, rural or urban, wealthy or middle class, kimono wearers convey multiple messages to viewers” (p. 9). The author also introduces some sources available for the study of kimono history from the late Edo period to the present, including pattern books and heirloom objects; curiously absent are documentary sources such as diaries, which would help situate kimono in the lived experiences of producers, consumers, and collectors. (The book in general relies more on English-language secondary sources than on Japanese materials.) The chapter concludes by reviewing the late nineteenth-century history of Japan’s dialectical relationship with Western fashion and the resulting construction of a binary opposition between yōfuku and wafuku. This is one of the most interesting themes that runs throughout the book: “how Japan manipulated the kimono in its quest to establish a recognizable national identity in an increasingly cosmopolitan world” (p. 25).

Chapter 1, “The Foundations of a Kimono Fashion Industry,” employs woodblock prints and printed pattern books to argue (following Monica Bethe and others) that multiple early modern industries “collaborated to set and stimulate fashion trends, thereby increasing the desire for new kimonos, pattern books and single-sheet prints depicting popular courtesans and actors modeling the most novel designs, colours and fabrics” (p. 55). The chapter helpfully reviews (and illustrates) the garments that were most common in the early modern period: the farmer’s jacket, kosode (the kimono prototype), furisode (with longer sleeves, worn by unmarried women), uchikake (overrobe), katabira (light summer garment), hitoe (another light summer garment), and jinbaori (military coat). The hierarchy articulated in the status system was increasingly disconnected from the economic means of those active in commercial activities, and this opened up the possibility that wealthy commoners could use consumption and fashion as tools of competition in their relatively “circumscribed world.”

Chapter 2, “Modernizing the Kimono,” examines the adoption of Western technology and materials in the Japanese textile industry from the 1850s to the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter begins by reviewing the growth of the Japanese silk and cotton industries, stimulated by import-substitution policies under the Tokugawa regime, as well as domestic dyeing innovations that set the stage for the encounter with Western textile products. Next, it examines the process by which this domestic base of industry and artistry implemented the use of Western looms, sample books, designs, and new fabrics. Privately owned cotton mills and silk factories became, by the early twentieth century, foundational structures in the growing Japanese economy. Kimono designers adapted and adopted many new technologies, including stencils and chemical dyes, and a range of new regional textile designs, styles, and techniques emerged in kimono manufacture. The key insight of this chapter is that the importation of Western technology, designs, and materials stimulated and diversified kimono culture.

Chapter 3, “Shopping for Kimonos, Shaping Identities,” is somewhat misleadingly titled. The narrative occasionally includes the agency of consumers but is primarily focused on the strategies employed...