I recently read the first chapter of a novel called Sanshirō, written by Sōseki Natsume and published in 1908. I found it in an anthology of Japanese short stories within a section called ‘Japan and the West’.

The novel follows the title character Sanshirō Ogawa who has graduated from high-school in a countryside town and is relocating to Tokyo to pursue graduate studies at the University of Tokyo.

In this initial chapter, the story sets the stage for the main overarching theme Japan’s modernisation.

Sanshirō embodies a generation of youth hailing from rural Japan that is standing at the intersection between of traditional Japanese values prevalent in less ‘modernised’ regions and the rapid cosmopolitan transformation that the capital is undergoing.

The first chapter portrays a sequence of encounters that take place during his lengthy train journey to Tokyo.

The first significant encounter concludes with an agitated Sanshirō confronting an unforeseen challenge to his beliefs. He crosses paths with a young woman, engaging briefly in exchanged glances and polite conversation. She asks him to assist her in finding accommodation for an overnight stay while awaiting the next train. Due to a miscommunication during the check-in process, they end up sharing a room at a hotel. While he is taking a bath and later lying in bed, the woman makes advances toward him in a confident and barely concealed way.

He has never experienced such an attitude from a woman. This doesn’t belong to the traditional protocols of male-female interaction that he is used to. He awkwardly deflects the woman’s advances in what in the moment he considers a tempered display of moral virtue. However, as they part ways he finds himself disconcerted when the woman, instead of behaving as if she admired his virtue, unexpectedly points out his lack of courage.

After this event Sanshirō begins to doubt whether he did the right thing or whether the woman had a point. It begins to dawn on him that as he is approaching Tokyo, he is entering a new society where traditional values might be upside-down.

The second encounter is somewhat similar to the previous one, as it exposes Sanshirō, the young man hailing from secluded inner Japan, to new perspectives on society and Japanese culture. In the train, he’s drawn to a man whose nonchalant demeanor, coupled with distinctive attire, leads Sanshirō to assume he’s an intellectual.

Eventually he starts a conversation with him and his expectations are overturned when this seemingly high-ranking man expresses a pessimistic outlook on Japanese culture, foreseeing its imminent end. The man goes on to affirm the importance of individualism and remaining true to one’s own moral compass. This exchange serves as the final catalyst that persuades Sanshirō a new world and a new society await at his arrival to Tokyo station.

This story rightfully finds its place in the “Japan and the West” section of the anthology, as it showcases the disruption that Japan’s opening to the global economy and Western culture meant for the conservative order that had prevailed for centuries. It does so through the eyes of a young man rooted in tradition, yet observing this new world with keen, non-judgmental eyes.

Of course, this disruption set forth by the advent of global mass culture wasn’t exclusive to Japan. It was a phenomenon experienced worldwide as the twentieth century came and went.

I think that one of its great symbols is the standardisation of attire visible across the planet. It’s rare to find places in the world where we don’t see a substantial portion of the population in casual attire wearing jeans, t-shirts, polos, shirts, sweaters, sweatshirts, jackets and sneakers from global brands.

I would venture to say that in most cases this proliferation of certain types of clothing is rather impoverished in meaning, or at least in culture or individual-specific meaning. What does it say that people choose jeans and sneakers over all other available or possible choices? It’s a very complex question to answer, but undoubtedly mass media culture, the accessibility of globalised stores, mass production and the impact of pervasive advertising do play their part.

Now, a detail that caught my attention in Sanshirō’s story was that every character wears a kimono: Sanshirō, the woman, the other passengers and the ‘modern’, urban Tokyo man disparaging Japanese culture (later in the story it is revealed that he is a high-school English teacher). Another detail is that the author describes the colours and patterns of the kimonos when he mentions them. There is a kimono with ‘youthful colours’ and a ‘summer kimono of a blue-and-white splashed pattern’.

I thought about how whereas modern Western clothing overtook the kimono as the attire of choice for the Japanese, people all over the world who are interested in Japan still hold a kind of fascination in them. The kimono is a very simple yet elegant garment, with its square sleeves and rectangular body. One side wraps over the other and then it is secured with a sash.

That’s what it is in its essence, the shape never changes. It is an elemental, simple shape which, as it falls on the human body, doesn’t accentuate any particular feature, flattering or not. What does vary from kimono to kimono are the fabrics, their quality and texture, the colours, the patterns or the prints with which they are made.

I think that part of this fascination could come from a yearning for a kind of simplicity characterised by an aesthetic and functional elegance. What I mean by elegance in this context is very specific: when the most important elements of something are brought forward. And when these elements are allowed to shine at their fullest capacity while the superfluous is pared down to its bare minimum.

Thereby, an exemplary state of elegance would consist in employing the fewest amount of components possible to achieve the most. These elements in a sense follow an 80/20 Pareto ratio as they are the comparatively small amount with the most significant effect by far. Moreover, when we talk about elegance we do not only include those elements that are disproportionately effective. That would be orthodox functionalism. We also keep the elements that constitute the essence of what the thing is, functional or not.¹

Now, alongside elegance there is the quality of beauty. Both overlap in some ways but are not the same. In this case I concentrate on an aspect of beauty that again relates to essence and the Pareto principle. Beauty lies beyond a certain threshold of signal/noise ratio, where the beautiful thing has a sort of perceptual and evocative clarity that contributes to reducing cognitive noise in the space it inhabits.

Cognitive noise is every element in a space surrounding our perception that is meaningless enough that its predominant function is to claim parts of our attention without adding up to the forming of any useful thought. For example, if we choose to look for beauty in tidiness, a well arranged, tidy and not haphazardly furnished room can be very low in cognitive noise, because everything has its place, there’s a rationale behind the placement of everything in the space, there is a consistency in the similarity or complementarity of shapes and colours. And those items that might seem out of place in this tidy order, such as a work of art or an ‘ugly’ sentimental object are full of meaning in a way that they are true to their essence.

I think that Kimonos are an expression of such aesthetic and functional elegance. Their shape is simple and it does only what it is supposed to do. It expresses a few clear, elemental shapes (the square, the rectangle and the drape) and it simplifies the outer appearance of the human body as well. Functionally, they wrap themselves around the body to cover it, although I would go further than that and say that functionally they also express a simplicity of not being willing to communicate through dress anything more than what’s necessary.

There is a fashion adage that says that not expressing anything through your choice of attire is an impossibility. Every kind of dress or lack of dress creates a message and one can choose to claim ownership of this communicative resource or allow it to express anything out of one’s control. Thus, conceptually a kimono strikes a balance where we are inevitably expressing something but the framework is so simple that we can claim as much control as possible of how we steer that communication. Of course, if we take the kimono historically and culturally-situated, then it gets messier in that it can express for example that one is participating in a traditional Japanese ceremony.

Where, according to the pareto equation for elegance that I described above, the ‘most effective’ aspect of the kimono lies is in the content it expresses. Kimonos manifest in the world in endless variations of content restricted within their simple shape, which makes the communicative effectiveness and meaning-clarity of these objects the more effective. There is no middle-ground between expressing something or nothing, what the kimono is meant to show it does so unambiguously. This comes in contrast to a sweatshirt from a known brand where a specific fit, logos, it’s place within current trends, its relation to popular culture and how it compares visually with all the surrounding haphazard combinations of shapes, fabrics, clothes and logos that others are wearing muddle its meaning and distance it from the wearer’s identity.

The ultimate consequence of this muddling of meaning is that a discordance is born between who the wearer really is, or what identity they set forth into society, and what their garments communicate to others: others make false assumptions about the wearer almost as if the wearer was himself communicating it with words. To take this situation further, the communicative tools that typical commercialised modern clothing provide are not so much up to us (unless we make a dedicated, time and attention-consuming effort to develop discernment in our choices) but come from the coarse set of options that we are bound to play with and that is provided to us by profit-driven corporations.

In the story, the author Sōseki describes a kimono in this way:

“He had no idea what the color of her kimono should be called. It was like the shadowy reflection of evergreens in the University pond. Vivid stripes ran the length of it from top to bottom. In their course they moved in waves, drawing together, moving apart, overlapping in broad bands, separating into twin lines.”

The author Sōseki, when describing kimonos, has no choice but to describe their content, because that’s where meaning emerges from them. That is the elegance and beauty of the kimono. The colour that the woman wearing the kimono chose, and the wavy pattern that covers it, take the spotlight. Colour and pattern, and possibly fabric, transmit a neat and effective message to the protagonist Sanshirō. There are no superfluous elements that might get in the way of these few elements. Moreover, the kimono adds beauty to the space where both characters are situated, because at least in the small portion that it occupies, it contributes to reducing its share of cognitive noise.

With their simplicity, Kimonos are like an empty canvas of fixed dimensions, a positive constraint set by a form. A form that becomes so familiar and unassuming that all attention can be directed to the content. It is a constraint like poetic forms, such as the Shakespearean Sonnet with its distinctive form that was enough for the dramaturg to imprint a large collection of beautiful, condensed expressions of meaning. That’s why kimonos are unlike uniforms. Such as with poems constrained within an unyielding, preset poetic form, variations exist in kimonos and they are almost endless despite the fewer variables at the wearer’s disposal. It is rather a narrowing down of variables to fewer ones, to a scale that is more suited for our ability to create and process meaning with complete intent.

I think that it’s important to make clear that the point is not that everyone would be better off wearing kimonos. The point is to pay more attention to not only the symbolic content of the garments we wear, or other objects that we choose to surround ourselves with, but also what part of it is essential and what is superfluous. The intricacy of this situation lies in the fact that the superfluous is never innocent, as it might eclipse the essential.

The second point is that likewise, aside from the content itself, it is valuable to be aware of how much content do we really deem preferable to be in something. The simplicity that constrains such as those of the kimono provide an opportunity to find out what’s really important and deserves to fill one of those limited spots so that it can be communicated. After all, the act of choosing deep down is always an act of defining values.

1. Essential: that when removed from a whole, the whole becomes something else that is not quite what it was. For example, if we remove the reflective surface from a mirror it is not a mirror anymore, or if we remove the cold from the fridge it’s not a fridge anymore. ↩︎