Nagajuban, or the Layer That Shows

In the thirty-second year of Meiji — 1899 — the Mitsui Drapery issued a single sales catalogue. Natsugoromo: summer clothes.

Turn to the page of nagajuban and there are no product names. In their place stand kotobagaki, the captions one finds written beside a painting: Flower Cart. Peony. Butterfly. Double Cherry. The prices are set small at the edge; the text itself runs in the cadence of short verse.

One line reads:

Double cherry, scattering senseless as snow at the dead of night — and even the moon dyed clear across.

It is the midnight moon being dyed. Not onto the outer robe, but onto the nagajuban, the layer that was not meant to be seen.

A draper was selling a night scene on a garment that might, at most, be glimpsed. "All of these," it says at the foot of the page, "are patterns of pure refinement."

Forty-one years later. Ministry of Commerce and Industry Notice No. 339.

In the column of goods forbidden to manufacture, the nagajuban stands fourth, gathered under a single character: 同 — ditto, the same as above.

What in 1899 had been called out one by one — Flower Cart, Butterfly, Double Cherry — was here only 同. Same as above.

On why the notice was set to take effect on the seventh of July, the official commentary allows itself one sentence: that the anniversary of the China Incident, it is surmised, was deliberately chosen. Three years, by then, from the Marco Polo Bridge.

The notice carries a proviso. A pattern is exempt if it rises less than two shaku from the hem, or less than one shaku three sun from the lower edge of the sleeve — measured in kujira-jaku.

The kujira-jaku is a rule used nowhere but in the cutting of kimono. On the tailor's table, at the wholesaler's accounting desk, a craftsman lays cloth against these graduations.

On that scale, the state drew a line.

Up to here is not luxury. From here on, it is. Two kujira-shaku: about seventy-six centimetres.

The notice carries an exception as well. Against an application, the competent minister or a regional governor might grant a special licence — for eight kinds of thing, set down in order:

(a) goods for export; (b) things for which a technique had to be preserved; (c) supplies for foreign embassies; (d) articles used in the formal rites of shrines and temples; (e) stores for ships on foreign routes; (f) materials for scholarship, testing, research; (g) costumes for Noh, Kabuki, and the dance; (h) supplies for the military and for the press, the news agencies, the camera.

The costumes of Noh, of Kabuki, of the dance stand in that list beside goods for export, beside the supplies of embassies, beside the rites of shrines and temples.

From the everyday nagajuban the dyed eba disappeared. What was left — only what had passed through an application — was left for the stage alone. If the eba nagajuban is now something one sees mostly in the world of the classical theatre, one of its beginnings is here.