The kimono is an iconic garment with a history as rich and colourful as the textiles from which it is crafted. Deeply associated with Japanese culture both past and present, it has often been thought of as a highly gendered, rigidly traditional and unchanging national costume. This book challenges that perception, revealing the nuanced meanings and messages behind the kimono from the point of view of its wearers and producers, many of whom – both men and women – see the garment as a vehicle for self-expression. Taking a material culture approach, The Social Life of Kimono is the first study to combine the history of the kimono as a fashionable garment with an in-depth exploration of its multifaceted role today on both the street and the catwalk. Through case studies covering historical advertising campaigns, fashion magazines, interviews with contemporary kimono designers, large scale and small craft producers, and consumers who choose to wear them, The Social Life of Kimono gives a unique insight into making and meaning of this complex garment.

Matthews Hamabata got off to an unpromising start when he first arrived in Japan to study influential business families. An unmarried, third-generation Japanese-American graduate student, he was there to learn about business executives in their roles as male principals and heads of households. Some Japanese were less than hospitable and often downright rude to him, and the souvenirs bearing the Harvard University emblem that he had brought along for gifts proved to be inappropriate within the highly ritualized system of Japanese gift-giving. In this engaging and personal narrative, we watch Hamabata in the first disappointing six months of his fieldwork as he attempts to map the boundaries of culture, class, and sexuality. "I became my own biggest fieldwork problem," he writes. "Was I inside or out? When I thought I was in, I was actually out, but when I acknowledged the fact that I was out, I was let in." He soon recognized the importance of marital and filial relations in transmitting power in the business world, and he began to direct his study to examining the social and emotional lives of all members of the Japanese ie (household) and the way they affect business activity and ownership. He takes us behind the scenes of the family enterprise to see how the multiple "layers of reality"--biological, social, religious, emotional, and symbolic--relate and cause dilemmas for ie members. (Names, locations, and other details have been altered for the sake of anonymity.) We meet the Moriuchis, the Itoos, the Okimotos--people who must constantly balance their own personal desires against the good of the ie. Many telling vignettes illustrate a central tension in their lives--their need for love, power, and emotional expression versus the constraints of traditional attitudes toward their ancestors, public honor, the economic enterprise, and the obligation to continue the ie over time. A grandfather stubbornly refuses to hand over the reins of succession to the next generation, creating an impossible situation that eventually tears apart an economic empire, as well as the fabric of various interrelated families. Economic, familial, and religious factors figure in a clash for succession between the person who possesses the ancestral tablets and the head of the enterprise. A daughter must reconcile personal love with arranged marriage. Ambitions for the son in line for succession war with the realization that this spoiled, incompetent young man may well ruin the ie. A fascinating portrait of everyday life told with vibrant sensitivity as well as humor, this book is full of the vitality of common concerns: life choices, love and commitment, confrontations with death. It is about very real people trying to make sense of their lives--trying to reconcile the roles and duties dictated by custom and tradition with rapidly changing expectations in the international milieu of contemporary Japan.

"The life of Shibue Io and her family, a kind of Japanese Buddenbrooks, may be unknown in the West, but her rich and engaging story marks the intersection of a remarkable woman with a fascinating time in history."--Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha "It stands clichÈs about traditional Japan on their heads. . . .Together with the people she knew, Io lives on in this literary album of old family pictures. It is well worth looking at."--Ian Buruma, New York Times Book Review "A most engaging book. Seeing Shibue Io through the various lenses of her husband, her son, Tamotsu (from whom much information is gleaned), the novelist Ogai, and the biographer McClellan is an interesting, moving, disarming experience."--Donald Richie, Japan Times "McClellan. . . has created a lively world, populated by women of various classes, samurai, doctors, poets, merchants, juvenile delinquents, and old eccentrics. The various incidents in which these people become involved provide a vivid picture of late Tokugawa society. This is a remarkable accomplishment."--Nakai Yoshiyuki, Monumenta Nipponica "An engrossing, informative, and extremely useful book. . . . Woman in the Crested Kimono is not simply the account of one unusual Tokugawa woman. It is an evocation of a family, and through a family the entire samurai class, going from the comparative affluence of the late Tokugawa period through the turmoils of the restoration and beyond."--Susan Napier, Journal of Asian Studies Daughter of a merchant family in nineteenth-century Japan and wife of a distinguished scholar-doctor of the samurai class, Shibue Io was a woman remarkable in her own right for her exceptionally keen mind and fearless spirit. Edwin McClellan now draws on the biography of her husband, written by Mori Ogai, to tell the story of Shibue Io, her society, and her times.

Suki's very favorite thing is her blue cotton kimono and she is determined to wear it on her first day back to school--no matter what anyone says.

Oceans and decades apart, two women are inextricably bound by the secrets between them. Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage to the son of her father’s business associate would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man—an American sailor, a gaijin—and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it’s learned Naoko carries the sailor’s child, she’s cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences that will ripple across generations. America, present day. Tori Kovac, caring for her dying father, finds a letter containing a shocking revelation—one that calls into question everything she understood about him, her family and herself. Setting out to learn the truth behind the letter, Tori’s journey leads her halfway around the world to a remote seaside village in Japan, where she must confront the demons of the past to pave a way for redemption. In breathtaking prose and inspired by true stories from a devastating and little-known era in Japanese and American history, The Woman in the White Kimono illuminates a searing portrait of one woman torn between her culture and her heart, and another woman on a journey to discover the true meaning of home.

This book combines sociological insights in organizations with cultural history.

This work traces the history of the Kimono - its designs, uses, aesthetics and social significance - and in doing so explores the world of the geisha, last wearers of the kimono. The colourful and stylized kimono, the national garment of Japan, expresses Japanese fashion and design taste, and also reveals the soul of Japan. Many today consider the kimono impractical, discarded by men for suits and ties a century ago, it is now only worn occasionally by women.

From the refined homes of Tokyo to the nightclubs of Kyoto; from gangster chic to Harajuku street style; from ateliers and catwalks to city sidewalks and religious festivals--this book shows how the kimono has continued to be one of Japan's most exciting wardrobe elements. Interviews with important industry figures, including clothing manufacturers and fashion designers, reveal how this traditional dress, with its simple and elegant form and timeless textile production methods, is as relevant today as ever.

With exquisite close-up photography of some of the most fascinating pieces in the V&A’s collections, this book reveals the full scope of Japanese dress over the past three centuries. A unique insight into the history and key themes of Japanese dress from the eighteenth century to the present, Japanese Dress in Detail reveals the elaborate embroidery, precise folds, and sophisticated dyes that form some of the most beautiful garments in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s unparalleled Japanese dress collection. This book provides readers with the rare opportunity to examine historical clothing, from breathtaking Edo-period kimono, court robes, and No— theatre costumes to indigo-dyed utilitarian garments and exciting contemporary designs. Featuring both garments and accessories, this book is an extraordinary exploration of the beauty and complexity of Japanese fashion. Specially commissioned close-up photography and authoritative texts accompany each garment, and front-and-back line drawings make this publication an invaluable resource for students, collectors, designers, fashion lovers, and Japanophiles.

Often considered an exotic garment of "traditional Japan," the kimono is in fact a vibrant part of Japanese modernity, playing an integral role in literature and film throughout the twentieth century. Reading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film is the first extended study to offer new ways of interpreting textual and visual narratives through "kimono language"--what these garments communicate within their literary, historical, and cultural contexts. Kimonos on the page and screen do much more than create verisimilitude or function as one-dimensional symbols. They go beyond simply indicating the wearer's age, gender, class, and taste; as eloquent, heterogeneous objects, they speak of wartime and postwar histories and shed light on everything from gender politics to censorship. By reclaiming "kimono language"--once a powerful shared vernacular--Michiko Suzuki accesses inner lives of characters, hidden plot points, intertextual meanings, resistant messages, and social commentary. Reading the Kimono examines modern Japanese literary works and their cinematic adaptations, including Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's canonical novel, The Makioka Sisters, and its film versions, one screened under the US Occupation and another directed by Ichikawa Kon in 1983. It also investigates Kōda Aya's Kimono and Flowing, as well as Naruse Mikio's 1956 film adaptation of the latter. Reading the Kimono additionally advances the study of women writers by discussing texts by Tsuboi Sakae and Miyao Tomiko, authors often overlooked in scholarship despite their award-winning, bestselling stature. Through her analysis of stories and their afterlives, Suzuki offers a fresh view of the kimono as complex "material" to be read. She asks broader questions about the act of interpretation, what it means to explore both texts and textiles as inherently dynamic objects, shaped by context and considered differently over time. Reading the Kimono is at once an engaging history of the modern kimono and its representation, and a significant study of twentieth-century Japanese literature and film.