Shin, Gyō, Sō — The Folded Back

Ogasawara Hyakkajō — the hundred articles of the Ogasawara school, in a manuscript dated to the ninth year of Kan'ei, 1632. The Tokugawa peace was not yet three decades old. The booklet has no cover; only fine cursive on thin washi, instructing how to hand over a long sword, how to carry a letter box, how to bow when one meets a palanquin in the street.

The bow itself is not illustrated. The character rei recurs throughout, but always as a situation, not a posture — which knee on the ground, which hand bearing which object, in which direction. About the angle of the back, the book says nothing.

It did not yet need to. The body came before the book.

Two and a half centuries pass. In December 1889 — the twenty-second year of Meiji — a small woodblock booklet appears under the imprint of Satō Seizaburō: Ehon Onna Reishiki, the Picture Book of Women's Etiquette. It is no longer a warrior's transcript. It is sold to households for the instruction of girls.

Open it, and there are illustrations: how to sit, to stand, to walk, to open a fusuma, to bow. Every figure is drawn in kimono. The fall of the sleeve. The folding of the hem. The placing of the knees. The book repeats them in word and picture. "Let the fingertips of both hands point forward; lower the head; bring the tip of each thumb to meet its forefinger; press the forehead upon them; flatten the back so the hips do not rise. That is the bow."

The book existed because the bow had begun to need to be drawn. The body of the warrior had become illegible without a picture.

1934. The editorial office of Shūbunsha publishes a manual whose title carries a word not yet found in earlier etiquette books: gendai-shiki, “modern-style.” Aisatsu no Kotobazukai o Kihon to Shitaru Gendai-shiki Reigi-sahō — Modern-Style Etiquette, Based on Forms of Greeting.

Inside, the table of contents places kimono formal dress and Western formal dress side by side. Japanese cooking and Western cooking, side by side. A page on greeting the visitor in the parlour is followed immediately by a page on greeting the visitor in the Western-style room. “How very kind of you to come” — the same phrase, in either dress.

The bow is still alive at this point. But it is no longer threefold. Shin, gyō, and sō are no longer distinguished. There is “polite” and there is “casual,” and not much else. The graduation on the back has become coarse.

When the Western figure entered the page, something quieter was also happening. Once the sleeve was shortened, the handling of the sleeve was gone. Once the obi was set aside, the upper body had nothing to fold against. The garment that had been the grammar of the gesture had been quietly removed.