The Edo Period: The Shinokosho Class System

The Edo period was established by Tokugawa Ieyasu after the Sengoku Period of “warring states”. That was the time of nation-wide stability coupled with stringent social order adopted from China to prevent social chaos of previous years. This led to the creation of a Shinokosho class system which was the “theory classifying people into four major functional categories. In order of importance, they were the samurai, peasants, artisans and the merchants. Movement between classes was restricted and ‘status was hereditary’ (Sheldon 1971 pg 196). In the early Edo period, merchants established a different style of kosode from the Muromachi Period.

Firstly, the kimono was indicative of changes in the social dynamics in the Edo period. The method

With the stability of trade returning to Japan, the return of the merchants and artisans to the cities, and a policy known as sankin-koutai ('alternate attendance'), the arts became accessible to the common man. (Armstrong, Katie. History of Kimono. Nebraska: HubPages, 2014) With sankin-koutai, daimyo had to maintain two residences--one in Edo capital, and the other in their feudal domain. This movement of the entire court to the capital occurs every alternate year. In order to prevent the daimyo from accumulating excessive assets and power, this travel which drained their energy and resources was mandatory.This movement towards the capital resulted in a surge of wealth into the economy as the daimyos’ processions stopped to

This was in accordance with the traditional family structure that was deeply embedded in the roots of the Japan. The women of the Tokugawa Shogun resided in the Ooku and there were restrictions on the clothes worn based on rank, season and occasion (Cecilia Segawa Seigle 2014, pg2-4). For example, the lower ranking women were allowed to wear thin summer fabric like sukiya earlier in the year than the higher-ranking staff were. There were also regulations about personal crests. Above-audience women could not wear apparel with their own family or individual crests, so they wore kimonos that bore neither. On certain festive occasions, they wore the Tokugawa crest of heartvine leaves. The converse scenario applied to the below-audience women. “Whatever they wore, the women were under a strictly regulated dress code, whether regarding the type of fabrics, color, size and type of print pattern or embroidery.” (Cecilia Segawa Seigle 2014, section 8). This shows that even in specific classes, regulations were put into place to distinguish within an internal political