Page 1 of
4 How
beauty shapes power in China and
Japan By Cho Kyo and Koko
Selden
An oblique tooth is viewed in the
United States as requiring straightening, but in
Japan it may be thought of as emblematic of a
young woman's charm. While a slim body is a
prerequisite for beauty today, plump women were
considered beautiful in Tang Dynasty China and
Heian period Japan.
Starting from around the 12th
century in China, bound feet symbolized the
attractiveness of women. But Japan, which received
sundry influences from China, never adopted
foot-binding. Instead, shaving eyebrows and
blackening teeth became markers of feminine
beauty. Before modern times, neither Japanese nor
Chinese paid much attention to double eyelids, but
in the course of the long 20th century they
became a standard for distinguishing beautiful
from plain women. Thus, criteria of beauty greatly
differ by era and culture, and therein lie many
riddles.
Focusing on changing
representations of beauty in Chinese and Japanese
cultures, Cho Kyo, in The Search for the
Beautiful Woman, attempts to clarify such
riddles from the angle of comparative cultural
history. Before modern times, Japanese culture was
profoundly shaped by Chinese culture, and
representations of feminine beauty too received
continental influences. In considering Japanese
representations of feminine beauty, the author
examines literary and artistic sources scattered
across historical materials and classical literary
works.
Are there universal criteria for
beauty? What constitutes a beautiful woman?
Intrinsically, criteria vary greatly depending
upon peoples and cultures. A woman thought of as a
beauty in one culture may be considered plain in
another. This is not normally in our
consciousness. Rather, images of beauty are
thought to be universal across all cultures.
Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn gain worldwide
fame as beauties, not simply in American eyes but
in Asian and African eyes. But on what criteria?
Princess Shokushi from One
Hundred Poets by Katsukawa Shunsho.
Tokugawa, private collection.
Have
universal standards for determining beauty emerged
with the global reach of consumer culture and of
the media? As products of multinational
enterprises transcend national boundaries to
spread worldwide, people of different races and
nations have come to use the same cosmetics, and
people of different skin colors and facial and
bodily features have come to don similar fashions.
As a result, the fact that different cultures have
different standards of beauty was forgotten before
we realized it.
In earlier epochs,
different cultures shared no common conception of
beauty. In ancient times, each culture held a
different image of beautiful women. This was
naturally so when cultures were widely different,
say, between Western Europe and East Asia, but
images were not identical even between closely
connected cultures.
Niimura Nobu,
consort of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last
Shogun. In the possession of Ibaraki
Prefecural Museum of History. Pola Research
Institute of Beauty and Culture (ed),
Bakumatsu-Meiji bijincho (Shin Jinbutsu
Oraisha, 2002).
Both Chinese and Japanese
are Mongoloid. Moreover, in pre-modern times China
and Japan shared Confucian culture. Despite the
fact that cultural ties between the two countries
were extremely close, however, images of beauty in
Edo Japan (1600-1868) and Qing China (1644-1911)
were strikingly different.
At present,
with the advance of globalization, the same
commodities are not only distributed throughout
the world but information easily transcends
cultural walls. Boundary crossings represented by
satellite television, film and the Internet have
greatly changed values and aesthetics of the
non-Western world, but also of the Western
world... such that the very categories of East and
West, and perhaps North and South, are
problematized. As American visual culture is being
consumed at the global level, the Western sense of
beauty inevitably penetrates today's developing
countries. But Chinese and Japanese conceptions of
beauty have also, at various times, made their way
across the globe through art, literature, film,
commodities and communications.
Despite
the rapidly advancing standardization of aesthetic
sensibility, however, criteria of beauty have not
necessarily become uniform. In Sichuan province, a
young medical student from the Republic of Mali
became acquainted with a Chinese woman. They fell
in love and eventually married, the bridegroom
staying on in China and becoming a doctor.
A reporter from China's state-run People's
Daily who interviewed him asked: "Would you let us
know the secret for winning a beauty like your
wife?" "We Mali people have a completely different
sense of beauty from yours. A person you regard as
a beauty isn't necessarily always beautiful in our
eyes," he said by way of preface before answering
the reporter's question.
The absence of universal
standards for physical beauty was recognized early
on along with the discovery of "the
intercultural". Ever since Darwin stated that "It
is certainly not true that there is in the mind of
man any universal standard of beauty with respect
to the human body," [1] many researchers have made
the same point. Claude
Levi-Strauss, who observed the body drawings of
the Caduveo tribe in Brazil and described them in
his memoir Tristes Tropiques, conjectured
as to why many men belonging to other tribes came
to settle and marry Caduveo women at Nalike:
"Perhaps the facial and body paintings explain the
attraction; at all events, they strengthen and
symbolize it. The delicate and subtle markings,
which are as sensitive as the lines of the face,
and sometimes accentuate them, sometimes run
counter to them, make the women delightfully
alluring." [2]
When he wrote this, the
aesthetics that greatly differed from Western
sense of beauty did not shock his readers. In
their daily lives, however, most people still
believe that essential physical beauty exists
universally.
Utagawa Kunimasa,
Young Woman and a Cat at a Kotatsu.
Tokyo National Museum. Ukiyo-e, Nihon
bijutsu zenshu, Tokugawa, (Comprehensive
Collection of Japanese Art) vol. 20 (Kodansha,
1991).
How foreign races were
regarded It was in the 20th century that
images of beauty became homogenized from the West
to Asia and Africa. Before then, aesthetics of
facial features not only differed, but, with some
exceptions, different peoples thought one another
ugly. The Portuguese Dominican friar Gaspar da
Cruz (1520-1570), who visited China in the
mid-16th century, portrayed Chinese people, in his
South China in the 16th Century, as having "small
eyes, low noses, large faces."[3] Matteo Ricci
(1552-1610), the Italian Jesuit priest who stayed
in China from 1552 to 1616, wrote, "Men's beards
are thin and meager and at times they have none at
all. Their hair is rough and straight... . The
narrow, elliptical eyes are noticeably black. The
nose is small and flat. ... "[4] While neither
missionary directly says Chinese are ugly,
discomfort lurks between the lines.
Kitagawa Utamaro, Array of Supreme Beauties
of the Present Day: Takikawa. Tokugawa,
Tokyo National Museum. Ukiyo-e.
Japanese faces looked the same way to
Westerners' eyes. The German doctor Philipp Franz
Balthasar von Siebold (1796-1866), who resided in
Japan in 1823-29 and 1858-62, states of people of
inland Kyushu, "their faces are flat and wide,
with small and wide noses, large mouths, and thick
lips", "wings of the nose pressed deep, eyes wide
apart, cheek bones protruding". [5]
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
