Hats and Kimonos:
Cross-Cultural Dressing in Isabella Bird's Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880)
Arisa Nakagoe
Introduction
As George Bigot caricatured the superficial endorsement of Japan's modernisation through his cartoon of Meiji
elites aping European fashion, such scepticism towards Japanese adoption of Western clothing was common among
Westerners who visited Japan at the time. In her travelogue Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Isabella Bird seems to haveshared a similar idea. As an explorer who sought authenticity in her travel experience, she wished Japanese people
to retain their Japanese-ness, and obviously clothes were the most immediately detectible cultural marker.
This presentation unpacks how clothing acts as an interface for Bird to understand and interpret Japan and itspeople. While her habit of cross-cultural dressing can be situated within the conventional context of her ambivalence
about national identity and gender, I also intend to track how she creates herself in the travelogue as a connoisseurof oriental aesthetics and how she presents herself as a cosmopolitan fashionista through mixed dressing. I argue
that the success of her travelogue and her distinctive fame partly owes to her "feminine" interest in dress, strategic
usage of clothes as narrative device, and her visual self-fashioning as the protagonist.
What the Japanese Wear
Bird establishes herself as an oriental fashion guru at an early stage of the travelogue by explaining aboutkimono (1:36-38). Not only describing the kimono as a dressing-gown, Bird also notes the poetical significance ofthe sleeves for wiping away tears. She quotes a translation of a hyakunin-issyu (百人一首) poem, originally by
Kiyohara no Motosuke (清原元輔). Bird's exhibit of literary knowledge somewhat elevates her from a mere
introducer of commodities to a cultured guide to Japanese aesthetics.
Although Bird generally disdains the Japanese in Western fashion, a few are given good verdicts for their tastes.
For example, Arinori Mori (森有礼) is introduced as a progressive politician, "under an Oriental despotism, ... 'an
Advanced Liberal'" (Bird 2:202). Bird explains that "He was in America for some years, speaks English tolerably
well, and, unlike most of his countrymen, knows how to wear the European dress" (Bird 2:202). In a nutshell,through one's success or failure in Western fashion in Bird's eyes, insinuates the inner assimilation — whether
political, philosophical, intellectual, cultural, or spiritual — of Meiji modernisation or Westernisation.
As observed in her travelogue, Bird's discourse on fashion is usually about women. Discussing clothes withJapanese women provides an interesting example of cross-cultural communication of different customs and values.
One vivid case is her visit to Miwa with her friend Mrs Gulick. Bird writes of how the hostess and her daughtersgathered in their room, somewhat creating a Japanese version of a harem. There they talk about clothes, acharacteristically 'feminine' subject: "These [Japanese] women were astonished that we wore our dresses up to ourthroats, and when Mrs Gulick remarked that, according to our ideas, it did not look womanly or 'correct' to wear
them as they do, open to their girdles, they were yet more surprised, and as each new-comer entered, the hostessrepeated to her this singular foreign notion" (Bird 2:258). This conversation points to the varying ideas of femininity
in different cultures. To some extent, "[h]er self-representation looks like a shrewd marketing strategy, allowing her
to exploit the notion that women possess greater expertise in certain areas of ethnographic enquiry (such as thedecorative, the culinary, and the domestic)" (Williams & Clark 8). Bird's knowledge and inquiries into fashion in
her travelogue, hence, could be seen as a self-branding tactic utilising her femininity.
What Bird Wears
Then, what was Bird herself wearing all the time? One of the characteristics of her own fashion is theintegration of Japanese and Western items, a combination which makes her appear visually as a cultural mediator,
as epitomised by her combination of tweed travelling dress with a Japanese hat (Bird 1:80). One interesting
phenomenon in Bird's mixed dressing is the repetitive appearances of her Japanese hat as a paradoxical marker of
her Western culture in relation to the question of gender identity. As Bird herself explains, she "wears a hat, which
is a thing only worn by women in the fields as a protection from sun and rain", and as her "eyebrows are unshaven,and my [her] teeth ... unblackened, so these girls supposed me [her] to be a foreign man" (Bird 1:155). Whereas inVictorian England, where hats would have been deemed as a symbol of properness regardless of gender, in Meiji
Japan, they act as a mainly masculine commodity. Bird is indeed mistaken for a man several times in Japan for her
appearance and attire; Japan somewhat offered her an escape from Victorian social conventions of gender, in which
women were oppressed as the weaker sex.
Bird is a great admirer of Japanese kimonos and what she seems to have wanted to clarify was that her
Japanisation was authentic. Bird describes an instance in Kuroishi (黒石) where she even considers that she has
surpassed her national or racial identity and passes as a Japanese woman in her disguise (Bird 1:290). Bird thus
boasts of her capability in fashioning herself in a kimono, a curious and unfamiliar costume in the eyes of her
Anglophone readers. In Kubota (久保田), she was exclusively invited to a wedding ceremony of the house-master'sniece. She notes of the third wife of the house-master, "from her limitless stores of apparel" (Bird 1:317), picking
an outfit especially for Bird: "an under-dress of sage green silk crêpe, a kimono of soft green, ... with the familybadge here and there upon it in gold" (Bird 1:317). So, Bird wearing a kimono is not a mere cosplay infatuation ofa white tourist, or a reversal of a Japanese uncritically copying Western fashion. She hints that her cross-cultural
dressing comes with class, tradition, quality in taste, and the Japanese's respect towards her.
What the Ainu WearIn the 19th century, the Ainu people of Hokkaido were rumoured to be racially close to the Europeans for theirstrong built bodies, fairer skins, and chiselled features in contrast to the Wajin (和人) Japanese. Several scholars
have already engaged in studying how Bird examines the bodily features of the Ainu like an anthropologist, but notmuch has been discussed in terms of their well-known unique fashion culture. In fact, Bird's attention to Ainu's
clothing comes with her effort to reconcile its refinement in romanticised expressions with the Ainu's savagenessthat she emphasises throughout the narration. Intriguingly, as she tries to depict Ainu fashion, her descriptions turnout to be cross-cultural, for example, observing similarities with "Panama canvas" (Bird 2:82) and "Greek frets"(Bird 2:83). Bird thus identifies the Ainu with another culture of a colonised region (in this case, Panama is under
Spanish control) that has already been recognised in European society. Moreover, by associating the Ainu motifwith Ancient Greece, Bird infuses a sense of antiquity and civilized sophistication that complicates the text with her
reference to the Ainu as "savages" or more like the "noble savage."Though she may not be an expert of Ainu fashion (for instance, Bird fails to see through the cultural
significance and historical context of Ainu accessories), there is an instance in which Bird's use of clothing allows
an attempt at sympathetic communication: "The [Ainu] women have a perfect passion for every hue of red, and I
have made friends with them by dividing among them a large turkey-red silk handkerchief, strips of which are
already being utilised for the ornamenting of coats" (Bird 2:83). Through Bird's act of sharing, it is divided into
fractions for further border-crossing distribution and the strips of it ends up intermingling with Ainu coats. In otherwords, not only does Bird herself dress cross-culturally, but she also realises a kind of cross-cultural dressing on
the bodies of cultural others.
Conclusion: What Ito Wears
Let us divert our attention to the other main character in the travelogue: Ito, Bird's interpreter. This young man,
who was about twenty years old when he met Bird, is recorded to be Tsurukichi Ito (伊藤鶴吉). When choosing
her travel companion, Bird originally had three candidates, and she carefully observes them, taking notice of theirgarments. At the very last minute, however, Ito jumped in without any recommendation letter. Curiously, Bird does
not make any remark whatsoever about the clothes he was wearing, but instead observes his face, bodily features,
attitude, manner, and what he seemed to be like on the inside. Throughout the travelogue too, Ito's fashion is hardly
taken notice of (partly perchance because he is not wearing anything worth mentioning, but even so); Bird's
depiction of Ito is inclined to delineate his personality, actions, and words. Although her early commentary on him
is harsh (calling him "stupid-looking" [Bird 1:47] and so on), he gradually grows on her and becomes anindispensable companion for her journey.
Although this presentation has so far investigated how clothing acts as an interface for Bird to come into contact
with Japan and its people, the tendency is that she writes more eloquently about the clothes of the people about
whom she does not know much as an individual on the inside. The fact that her eyes are drawn to clothes, or thesurface, may lead her to a better understanding of the couture and culture, but it may also signify the generaldifficulty for Bird, as a temporary guest to the places she visits, especially with her limited linguistic ability, topenetrate into what is deep inside of the wearer or the locals. Some may criticise such limits of her travelogue in a
postcolonial light. Nonetheless, the text and the image of a Victorian woman in a mishmash of a Western dress,boots, and a Japanese hat, sometimes in kimono, roaming through Meiji Japan including the northern interiors,fascinates the reader to this day. In other words, she was very successful at creating her self-image via cross-cultural
dressing and her work has endured the test of time.
Selected Bibliography
Bird, Isabella. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior, Including Visits to the Aboriginesof Yezo and the Shrines of Nikko and Ise. 2 vols. John Murray, 1880.
Kanasaka, Kiyonori. Isabella Bird and Japan: A Reassessment. Translated by Nicholas Pertwee. Renaissance Books,2017.
Kumojima, Tomoe. Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship. Oxford UP, 2021.
Spiker, Christina M. "'Civilized' Men and 'Superstitious' Women: Visualizing the Hokkaido Ainu in Isabella Bird'sUnbeaten Tracks in Japan, 1880." Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East
Asia, 16th–20th Centuries. Edited by Kristen L. Chiem and Lara C.W. Blanchard. Brill, 2017, pp. 287-315.
Williams, Laurence, and Steve Clark. "Isabella Bird, Victorian Globalism, and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880)."
Studies in Travel Writing, 2017, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 1-16.