Preserving Fire

[swan_tower]

I recently read an article about a museum exhibit in Boston that initially allowed visitors to try on a Japanese kimono. Protesters decried this as racist, exoticizing, Orientalist — and in response, the museum changed the policy, leaving the kimono where people could touch it, but not allowing anyone to wear it.

What struck me in the article was this:

But the reaction to the exhibition from Japan — where the decline in popularity of the kimono as a form of dress is a national concern — was one of puzzlement and sadness. Many Japanese commentators expressed regret that fewer people would get to experience wearing a kimono.

It’s a useful reminder that the American perspective is not universal, and that the identities we construct here (the protestors were not Japanese, but Asian-American) carry their own political baggage that doesn’t necessarily mesh with other parts of the world. It also raises questions of how we should weigh competing concerns: at what point does a movement to oppose colonialism in the United States become, in and of itself, a colonial insistence on making other countries adhere to our standards of proper behavior? If people in Japan are okay with Americans trying on a kimono, should Asian-Americans be standing in the way of that?

It also comes back to the issue of “tradition” and its role in society. I was a folklore major in college and grad school, and since folklore is often defined in ways that put “tradition” at the heart of the field, that means I read a lot of definitions for what tradition is. My favorite, by far, was completely non-technical in origin (it’s a quotation from the composer Gustav Mahler), but I felt it got to the heart of the issue in a way that technical definitions don’t:

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

“Kimono,” as we think of them now, are the fossilized relics of nineteenth century fashion, the domain of specialists who have learned all the rules and can steer clueless modern people through them like dolls. It’s as if a “dress” in Western society meant a corseted garment worn with a lobster tail bustle, made out of fabric that matches the color and pattern aesthetics of 1870, and god help you if you mistakenly wear a day dress to an evening dinner, or a riding dress when you intend to go for a walk in the park.

If that was what a “dress” was in 2015, it would be going the way of the dodo.

So people in Japan are trying to figure out how to preserve fire, instead of worshipping ashes. Part of that means relaxing the rules, so that you no longer have to do things exactly the way they were done in 1870 Japan. Different fabrics, different patterns, different ways of tying obi. Treating kimono like clothing, rather than a symbol of national identity that has to be kept under glass like a dead butterfly. Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing chain, is selling yukata in their American stores, because they want Americans to buy them. (I got one the other day. It isn’t just a bathrobe calling itself a yukata; it comes with an obi and instructions for how to tie it. Though it doesn’t tell you that it’ll look better if you put a towel around your waist to flatten out that curve before you get dressed.) And it isn’t just kimono: when I went to the wedding of an Indian friend from high school, I felt wildly out of place in my appropriate-for-a-Western-wedding dress. All her law school friends, most of whom were not Indian, were there in sari, because she’d offered to pick some up for them when she went to India to buy her own wedding gear. Sari are still going pretty strong because they’re adapting, developing different styles within the broad space of the concept, rather than remaining what they were in the days before the Raj.

There aren’t any easy answers for this. I own a sari now, one I bought in India with the help of a female relative of that high school friend. She not only helped me pick it out, she ran me all over town to make sure I got a blouse and underskirt to match it, and all the right jewelry, too. She’s totally cool with me wearing a sari. But Random Stranger #948 on the street? Might view it differently. Just like those Asian-American protestors thought the museum exhibit was racist cultural appropriation, while people back in Japan made sad faces over Americans not experiencing the beauty of the kimono. People don’t always agree, and you can’t explain to every person you pass on the street that you have the following reasons for believing it’s okay.

There’s one thing I can do, though. This Kickstarter aims to bring a kimono show to New York Fashion Week. The people organizing it seek the recognition of kimono as “a universal formal wear that is beyond cultural and ethnic boundaries.” To me, the key word there is boundaries. Kimono have been fenced in — like an exotic animal at a zoo, for outsider to goggle at and locals to say “yeah, remember when those were all over the place?” I don’t think the exhibit is about erasing the origin of kimono, forgetting their Japanese connections. It’s about knocking down the fence, letting the concept back into our social ecosystem. Letting it adapt to its new environment.

I’m backing the Kickstarter. And I’m thinking a lot of thinky thoughts.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[dhampyresa]

A lot of the issues you've brought up here about bringing forward a traditional clothing style are similar to ones that surround the breton folk costumes. The situations are -- of course -- different, but there are enough similarities that I will be paying close attention to that Kickstarter campaign to see what happens with it.

[swan_tower]

"Folk costumes" in general end up very politically implicated, yeah.

[dhampyresa]

My use of "folk costumes" may not have been the best choice, sorry. I should have gone for "traditional clothing" or "traditional costume". I'm not sure what the appropriate term would be in English.

[starlady]

This is one of those things I don't talk about with people, but I will say that everyone I know in Japan was unhappy that people wouldn't get to wear kimono. People here are very enthusiastic about people outside of Japan learning about Japanese culture (and yes, there's whole books to be written about that, but skipping over it for now) and they didn't see any problems with it.

I will say that to me it seemed pretty clueless of the MoFA to let people try on the exact same kimono in a painting which was basically peak Japonisme, at a time when the cultural politics and global position of Japan was very different than now. If they'd given visitors the chance to wear modern kimono I would not have thought anything of it.

[swan_tower]

I really do get the impression that the bigger problem here is the painting, rather than "Americans wearing kimono" as a general thing. I sort of wish the protests had gone in that direction.

[drydem.livejournal.com]

I had an interesting discussion a while back about similar issues with food. The food that many Polish Americans eat here in Chicago is not the same as most Polish people in Poland eat, it's a version of 19th century Polish food. Meanwhile in Poland, they eat 21st century Polish food, which has modern ingredients and such. But the families of the Polish Americans came from 19th century Poland(well, as much as there was a 19th century Poland), not modern Poland.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's fascinating. I know that the regional foods we eat in the U.S. generally differ from what people eat on a daily basis in the countries of origin, but I thought of it mostly in terms of "restaurant food" vs. "home-cooked meals." I hadn't considered the temporal dimension there.

Makes me think of the "punk kaiseki" meal I had in Japan. It followed the general model of the kaiseki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiseki) meal, with a series of tiny courses exquisitely arranged -- but the ingredients were more experimental and the restaurant itself was way more casual.

[drydem.livejournal.com]

It's the same with many 19th century immigrant groups, where the 'traditional' recipes that the parents and grandparents made were passed on, while back in the home country, they got refrigeration and easily shipped fruits and vegetables.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Exhibit A: lutefisk. <lol>

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was about to bring up the lutefisk. Lutefisk was starvation food--originally only the boniest parts of the fish were treated with lye, because my ancestors were that desperate to extract all available protein.

The same way that America has shifted away from "plain meat and potatoes," so has Scandinavia. (Or plain fish and potatoes. Either way: with cream sauce if you were lucky.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Our ancestors lived off subsistence diets because they had to. We can choose to continue that tradition if we want -- but it's good to be aware that hey, they did not douse their food in lye just because they thought that made it taste awesome. And if we think it is sufficiently non-awesome, we are allowed to stop.

[brooksmoses]

There's also all sorts of Americanization in the more-established "imported" cuisines. Italian-American food is the food of Italian immigrants a hundred years ago, and quite a bit different from Italy of then or now. Pasta with bolognese sauce is completely foreign to Italy, as is pizza with tomato sauce.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's another layer to the alteration. Tex-Mex is not Mexican food; it is, by now, its own thing.

[brooksmoses]

This reminds me of an essay I read that about culture and appropriation and identity that was written by a third-generation (I think) Chinese-American. His grandparents emigrated from a China before the Communist Revolution. So his culture-of-family is not only alien to most Americans he interacts with, but also alien to the newly-immigrated Chinese people he interacts with. His grandparents had all these very strong ideas of How We Do Things, and approximately nobody does it that way any more. It was a very poignant and reflective sort of piece.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh man, yeah. The seismic shift in culture there is huuuuuuuge.

[calico-reaction.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for posting this. For starters, I LOVE that quote from Mahler. It's fantastic. Second, the heart of this post is something I wonder about quite often, and you're right, while there are no easy answers, I think it's important to be careful before protesting too quickly and also looking at something from all angles. Asian-Americans should be open and respectful of Japanese perspective on this, and it should be an opportunity to open a dialogue between whatever shared history they have and what's changing, why, and should it, and also, who has "ownership" of such a thing, if ownership even exists?

Great post. Thank you for sharing.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The Mahler quote is really so much better than any attempt to academicize the concept of "tradition." (Now if only I could find something that would, with equal pithiness, sum up "authenticity." Talk about a can of carnivorous, rabid worms.)

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

The Globe (https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/07/18/counter-protesters-join-kimono-fray-mfa/ZgVWiT3yIZSlQgxCghAOFM/story.html) quotes the Japanese Deputy Consul as basically saying "what is this even? I can't tell what their complaint is."

Whole thing strikes me as "cultural appropriation" touchiness run amok.

[brooksmoses]

Possibly, but I will also note that Japanese-Americans are coming at this from the point of view of being a minority culture, whereas the people in Japan are coming at it from the point of view of being a very dominant culture.

Cultural appropriation matters when it takes something away from a person's ability to hold onto parts of their culture that are important to them -- specifically, when their own narrative about their cultural artifacts/traditions is drowned out by a narrative of how that artifact or tradition has been subsumed into a larger culture (edit: and specifically when the subsumed version is a very diminished version of the original and/or has elements of exoticisization). That's not going to be an issue for Japanese people in Japan, because the larger culture is their culture.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It's unclear from the two articles whether the protestors were largely Japanese-American, or (say) Chinese-American or Korean-American or some other form Asian-American. Which is another wrinkle in the whole thing: if it's Chinese-American protestors objecting to this on the basis of pan-Asian diasporic solidarity, then that's rather different from Japanese-American protestors objecting on the basis of their own cultural connection.

It's especially interesting that protest organizer they quote is, judging by the name, not Asian himself*. Is that just a result of the reporter's bias in choosing who to talk to? Or a consequence of who among the organizers was willing to talk to a reporter? Whatever the conditions that led to the result, it has the effect of appearing to showcase a non-Asian saying "this is cultural appropriation!" while a bunch of Japanese-Americans say "we're totally okay with it."

The distinction between being a member of a minority group within a larger culture and being a member of a dominant culture elsewhere in the world sort of echoes what other people have mentioned in the context of food: "Polish cuisine" as performed as an aspect of Polish-American identity is not the same as "Polish cuisine" performed as an aspect of Polish identity, because the former grows out of a specific immigrant context, and as such tends to have a more conservative bent.



*Usual caveats apply here re: the difficulty of guessing at such things on the basis of names alone.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I have limited Globe article access, but I thought it indicated young white and Japanese-American protesters (so I'd assume born here or mostly raised here, possibly N-th generation). While everyone directly from Japan seems to be bemused or counter-protesting.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The exact phrasing I keep seeing is "Asian-American." Which, for an issue like this, is not specific enough.

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

I actually heard about this issue from Japanese-Americans, and the main point I heard was "Japanese people in Japan don't have to suffer with having their culture exoticized, dismantled, and picked over by the same people who tell you that you can never belong." So while I can't speak to the protesters, I do know of Japanese-Americans who are not okay with Americans essentially Americanizing the kimono.

(I say, as an American who was given a yukata by a Japanese-American friend and her grandmother when I went to Tokyo during Bon.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure that Japanese-Americans across the U.S. are not in lockstep on this, on either side. The reason I'm particularly concerned with who's there on the ground is because they're the ones who have seen the situation first-hand, rather than reacting to what they heard through the grapevine. It isn't that the more distant reaction doesn't matter -- it does -- but the lack of clarity as to who began the protests bugs me.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Hmm. You raise an interesting point I feel I can't dismiss in general. OTOH, in this case, I still suspect it's more like "this looks like cultural appropriation so we'll protest without doing the research". I mean, we're not talking about highly charged ritual clothing, like Indian (Native American) headdresses; AIUI the kimono used to be daily clothing, before Westernization. Now it's more formal, but it's like wearing a tuxedo or fancy dress.

[pameladean]

This reminds me of the assertion that certain east-coast or Appalachian dialects are much closer to the English of the time of colonization than any remaining accents in actual Britain. Once separated from its original culture, perhaps nothing goes in the same direction as the original culture does. And really, why should it? So much is contingent.

P.

[dr_whom]

(This is probably not true though)

[pameladean]

*sadface*

P.

[scribblemyname]

Actually, in a generalized way at least, it is true. Language diversifies more closer to the source. When searching for linguistic sources, linguists look for where it diversifies the most. That's because both the tendency to preservation in those that move outward, but also the factor of the source having been there longer and thus having time to develop more offshoots. I wouldn't be surprised if that principle extends to more than language.

[dr_whom]

I don't know what you mean by "in a generalized way".

Don't confuse diversification with change! Yes, there will be a greater number of distinct dialects closer to the source, probably; but that doesn't mean the smaller number of dialects in farther-flung locations will have undergone fewer changes and remained closer to the ancestral language.

[scribblemyname]

Meaning, the principle is correct, but I don't know about your specific example/case.

There is also a greater number of mutually unintelligible dialects, which does fall under the heading of change, from what I can tell.

[dr_whom]

But, again, having a smaller number of dialects doesn't mean there's been any less change.

[scribblemyname]

No, having more mutual unintelligibility does. Wasn't an accidental adjective phrase. Nevertheless, I have nothing invested in you agreeing with or disagreeing with the concept. It's a principle that occurs, and that's all I was mentioning.

[dr_whom]

No, having more mutual intelligibility among dialects doesn't mean that they have changed less since the ancestral language. It just means that they've changed together.

[sidhe-uaine42.livejournal.com]

One person I'd like to "hear" the opinion of is George Takei. He is what I would call a "bridge person" between the Japanese and the Japanese - Americans, plus he's someone whose opinion I mostly respect.

Another thing that seems to colour Western opinions (if not all outsiders') is what we see in anime/manga that gets distributed outside of Japan. I can't count how many scenes where the characters are walking around in different kimono styles, especially if they're at the ubiquitous onsen. I cannot think of any offhand that doesn't have an onsen scene thrown in, unless it's a "period" series, and sometimes even then.

I apologize for the dreaded wall - of - text. *blush*

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

. . . you call that a wall of text? pfffffffff. :-)

X: 1999 doesn't have an onsen scene that I recall. The characters are too busy being traumatized by the end of the world!

[sidhe-uaine42.livejournal.com]

That's one of two or three that I can think of offhand doesn't have any characters that wear kimono the others are Combination and the other is Karnival.

There was a photo shoot of cute kittens in kimono, some with kitten - size wigs (I believe it was posted on lj, but don't quote me.)

Oh, and concerning the warning: I wasn't sure if it could be considered wall - of - text, so my warning was posted just in case.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It ain't a wall of text until it rivals the original post for length. :-P

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Bath or festival scenes probably feature a yukata, which is kimono-like but simpler and cheaper (made of cotton, not silk.)

[(Anonymous)]

I mostly agree with you as far as the clothing as artifact goes. What I think is missing here is the notion of clothing as a proxy for cultural identity; dressing up in a kimono is one thing, using a kimono to dress up as a Japanese person is another. Especially given the painting, I think the protesters - rightly or wrongly - viewed the exhibit as the latter. As a Chicano, I have no problem with someone wearing a serape because they are awesome; last year when someone wore one at a Halloween party to dress "as a Mexican" it was intensely uncomfortable. Context is everything here.

You raise some great points regarding our own policing of cultural appropriation becoming a sort of colonialism in itself - but this incident occurred in the US, which has a massive history of using costume as way to erase rather than celebrate culture, and it's difficult to ignore that context. I think there's fertile middle ground here, but the Asian-American concerns arise from their history and experience here, and need to be given some weight when considering how cultural artifacts are experienced by other cultures in the US.

~Ariel

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Part of the difficulty, of course, is that we can't see inside other people's heads. That person over there in the serape: why did they put it on? How do they see themselves at this moment? We can only derive clues from context. Wearing ethnically-significant clothing to a Halloween party is a context that definitely suggests problematic thinking -- and yeah, I suspect that had they kept the "try on a kimono!" part but not staged it in front of that particular painting, the reaction would have been different.

What I keep coming back to is the ambiguity, not yet resolved by any of the articles I've read, as to how many of the protesters were Japanese-American, as opposed to (say) Chinese-American. I know that there were J-A counter-protestors, and as a result, thus far the impression I've gotten has been "people with no Japanese ancestry have gotten up in arms about something that isn't really bothering the group most directly affected." Which sounds an awful lot like an attempt to police their culture and its usage from the outside. But I don't know for certain whether that's the case, because none of the articles have been specific enough as to the identity of the protestors. And I do have to account for possible bias there, that the media may (consciously or unconsciously) be skewing toward presenting details that show the J-A community as being more chill about this than they really are. I do wish the article writers would be more specific.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

I suspect that had they kept the "try on a kimono!" part but not staged it in front of that particular painting, the reaction would have been different.

ooookay this was the first i saw mention of a painting and had to read the original article more closely. because a museum hosting a "try on a kimono" exhibit really really does not seem like cultural appropriation (because at that point why not protest literally any interactive museum display focused on culture). but in the context of "famous painter paints non-Japanese wife in kimono hey other white people you should try this too," the protests make a little more sense.

[xahra99.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure I can express my thoughts on this issue properly, so here's some random thoughts:
The book Kimono, by Lisa Dalby, though written by an American,is endlessly fascinating. I find there's no better way to escape from a stressful day then reading about the color combinations of Heian Japanese robes or the different weights of silk for summer and winter kimonos.
We have an exhibit in Dunedin where visitors can dress up as immigrants circa 1900s. As a person of Scottish extraction, I have no issues with anyone dressing up in a plaid, but then that's a dominant culture, and I might feel differently if I was a nonwhite immigrant to New Zealand.I might also feel differently if someone accessorized the plaid with a tam-o-shanter, a ginger wig, some bagpipes and a bottle of whisky. So trying on a kimono in a museum as a way of learning about different cultures would I think would be mroe appropriate than say, wearing a kimono as part of a 'sexy geisha girl' Halloween costume.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my initial thought when I heard about this was "dude, I hope it wasn't one of those things where they also give you a 'geisha wig' to wear."

[gelsey.livejournal.com]

I've always very much wanted a sari. I grew up among a plethora of people - in the middle east, with Muslims and Indians and all sorts of other nationalities. I'm hoping to get a friend to buy me some veils from Bahrain; and someday I'd love to have someone do like they did for you with the sari. Definitions are changing. And with our melting pot, I would like to think we can mix more than before without the protests.

[calcifermagnet.livejournal.com]

When I think of Kimono, I think of summer festivals and fireworks. Of course, that is because I think of Yukata, not Geisha. I've never worn a Yukata before, but because of this protest I actually caved in to my friends who've been trying to get me into a Yukata for the Bon Festival for years.

I guess this protest really gets to me because Japan is misrepresented in the media all the time. Constantly. And *this* is what gets protested and recognized? Sigh.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

Very nice, thoughtful post.

And

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire"

is great.

I have thinky thoughts too?

[linnyus.livejournal.com]

Cultural costume is a really touchy subject for Asian Americans because the United States has a long history of forced assimilation. We have a culture that penalizes acting in ways that aren't white-american... that is, until those behaviors are assimilated into mainstream culture and become acceptable. (This happens a lot to African-American culture especially.) Your Indian-American high school friend reminds me of this girl I knew in high school (I grew up in predominantly/historically white suburb), she was also Indian-American and wore a salwar kameez every day. Some people spread a rumor around the school that she "smelled" (because cultural/fobby = dirty) and a girl actually once asked a teacher to switch seats on the seating chart so she wouldn't be "downwind" of this girl. She didn't smell.

Most of my friends and I begged our parents to make us sandwiches because otherwise lunch was an embarrassment of opening tupperware containers and having our classmates wrinkle their noses. My mother used to deconstruct my sandwiches and wrap the vegetables in saran wrap because she never got the hang of assembling a sandwich without the bread getting soggy by lunchtime. "Nice" boys from my neighborhood used to prank call my house pretending to be from the local Chinese restaurant with heavy fake asian accents ("You forget spring roll order!")

I'm telling you this because this is the casually racist environment we all grow up in. I lived in a suburb of Portland surrounded by nice liberal people who abhorred racism, and all of that... it was unintentionally racist. Anyway, in contrast to this is the white women who wear qipaos to parties (hello 90s hollywood) or go on Eat, Pray, Love journeys and are lauded and celebrated for it. It's not really an indictment of the individual, but the system we are all part of.

Mainland Japanese/Chinese/etc people don't have the same context and therefore they will obviously have different opinions of it. I'm not sure I agree with protesting the exhibit (would probably have side-eyed that painting though), but I also don't really think either side is *wrong* per say.

(Also, asian countries in general kind of have a history of racism too that isn't really addressed in the way that it is in America because they tend to be racially monolithic. I mean, the radio host Glynn Washington has this incredibly sad story about how when he was living in Japan he was invited on a talk show and was made to look stupid and brutish through video edits.)

I'm not even someone who takes the hard line against white people wearing asian cultural costume. I just wonder why people are so resistant to discussing the fact that these things are complicated and just dismissing how, say, Random Stranger #948 might feel about it in a "you don't know my life!" kind of way. I once saw an old white lady wearing an honest to goodness rice paddy hat and carrying a bamboo rucksack while at the airport, what should I think? Where is the line where we are "allowed" to point out that things are whack?

Also, a comment on NWFW: during Men's fashion week this year, the designer Thom Browne sent this down the runway: http://www.style.com/fashion-shows/spring-2016-menswear/thom-browne (did he really need to go full kimono and an all white cast of models?) and, in contrast, Japanese designer Junya Watanabe sent down this http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/spring-summer-2016/mens/junya-watanabe-man (which might be a comment about British colonialism in Africa or might not).

Isn't that something we should discuss and think about?