Kimono's Role In Japanese Feminine Clothing

Kimono in modern Japan has been invented as national attire and as a marked feminine costume. Women have become models of Japanese femininity, as contrasted with men, who have been given the role of models for rational action and achievement.

Japanese people wear traditional clothes only on the ceremonial occasion like wedding, funeral and in an occasion which is celebrated at age of twenty known as coming-of-age, whereas Modern Japanese wear Western clothing. Japanese women was a part of cultural remaking of Japan and in modern times they were clearly and officially defined as benefiting the nation by being wives and mothers. Meiji stated that the role of women by introducing a slogan “good wife, wise mother” whereas he also stated that man

Hendry writes, “Japanese kimonos, perhaps more than any other garments, are literally 'wrapped ' around the body, sometimes in several layers, like the gifts, and they are secured in place by sashes with a wide obi to complete the human parcel." The girls being produced by the experts for the coming-of-age ceremony can indeed be seen as parcels or as packaged products of the vast industry involved in the reproduction of their feminine Japanese image. Western attire is usually adapted to the female body; not so with kimono, where the woman 's body is made to fit an ideal cylindrical body shape considered appropriate for Kimono. Wearing kimono invites the plausible feminist view of clothing as restricting the female body, and therefore a device for the subordination of

One of the main goals of teaching the art of kimono dressing in contemporary Japan is the cultivation of this kind of woman. A critical Japanese feminist writer has described the kind of Japanese woman who picks up courses in order to gain refinement:

She is just like a Japanese box lunch which contains many kinds of food prettily arranged and looks beautiful, but it does not have any distinctive feature or appearance. Whichever restaurant you may order in, they will serve almost the same box.

The kimono-clad Japanese woman has become a symbol in modern Japan. Like cherry blossoms and Mount Fuji, she is one of the best-known symbols of Japan as a nation

The distinction between the Japanese and the Western has been pervasive and diffused to all spheres of Japanese life. The almost obsessive occupation of the Japanese with self-definition has reached the point of self-Orientalism and self-exoticism. The Japanese is now conceived as absolutely and systematically different from the Western. Assigning distinctive qualities, such as Japan being close to nature and feminine and the West as dominating nature and masculine (thus rational and materialistic) has been part of this discourse and has diffused into the world of kimono, where it is regarded as fostering the Japanese unique sensitivity to nature and as a symbol of pure feminine