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From the immediate post-war years through the late 1980s, Japanese primary
schoolage boys were set off from men and older boys by one overwhelmingly
obvious fashion characteristic: they wore short pants. In this, Japan
matched and even surpassed European countries where the fashion originated. Shorts for men and older boys were strictly athletic wear, but the great majority of younger Japanese boys wore short pants in winter and summer, for play and for school, and for every conceivable cermonial occasion. And while longer baggy styles prevailed in the 1940s and the 1950s, by the early sixties, hemlines began to climb; by the early 1980s, short pants were as short as they could possibly be, leaving not just the knees but pretty much the entire leg bare. The one concession to cold weather was knee socks.
Exceptions to the ubiquity of shorts were the colder parts of northern
Japan where the wearing of shorts would actually have invited frost bite,
and in some rural areas. (See school uniform discussion below.) As a
long archipelago in roughly the same latitudes as the east coast of the
United States, Japan has comparable weather patterns. Thus northern
Japan has cold winters similar to those of New England; Tokyo's climate is much like Washington's--winters perhaps a bit milder with typical January weather ranging from around freezing at night to 9-10�C-- upper 40s--at mid-day; Osaka/Kobe more like Atlanta.)
From the immediate post-war years through the late 1980s, Japanese primary
schoolage boys were set off from men and older boys by one overwhelmingly
obvious fashion characteristic: they wore short pants. In this, Japan
matched and even surpassed European countries where the fashion originated. Shorts for men and older boys were strictly athletic wear, but the great majority of younger Japanese boys wore short pants in winter and summer, for play and for school, and for every conceivable cermonial occasion.
Not only was the wearing of shorts nearly universal, but the transitions into and out of them happened at just about the same ages. Preschool boys might wear jumper suits with long tights, but once the boy went into kindergarten, he was expected to bare his knees until he entered middle school. To enter first grade in Japan; one must be 6 years old. To enter middle school, one must be 12. Thus the transition to long trousers happened at age twelve.
The one concession to cold weather was knee socks.
Exceptions to the ubiquity of shorts were the colder parts of northern
Japan where the wearing of shorts would actually have invited frost bite,
and in some rural areas. (See school uniform discussion below.) As a
long archipelago in roughly the same latitudes as the east coast of the
United States, Japan has comparable weather patterns. Thus northern
Japan has cold winters similar to those of New England; Tokyo's climate is much like Washington's--winters perhaps a bit milder with typical January weather ranging from around freezing at night to 9-10�C-- upper 40s--at mid-day; Osaka/Kobe more like Atlanta.)
The year-round wearing of trim short pants by Japanese boys was often noted in reports on Japan by typically parochial American journalists, unaware that until fairly recently, boys in many other countries besides Japan (as HBC clearly shows) wore short pants in the winter and for dress-up wear. Nonetheless, the fashion prevailed in Japan so long after
it pretty much died out in the countries where it orginated that it
requires some explanation.
A variety of factors explain why a fashion of short short pants was
adopted for boys and lasted so long when boys in other countries were
wearing long pants and jeans.
The notion deeply embedded in Japanese culture and noted above that one
should act (and thus dress) in accordance with one's station in life in a
predictable, socially accepted manner. Short pants served as perfect
attire to set off pre-pubescent boys both from young girls (who wore
skirts, dresses or culottes) and from adolescent boys and men, and were
deemed universally appropriate as "boys' clothes". Even today, a Japanese
man taking his 6 year old son for a placement interview at an exclusive
primary school would no more think of putting the boy in long pants than
he himself would contemplate wearing short pants to a job interview.
As the Japanese economy began to pick up after the post-war shortages and depression, prosperity began to sweep Japan. Consumers found cthemselbes with increasing discretionary. Consumers by the early 1950s were making more money than ever before. Women started to want to dress fashionably. Japanese mothers looked to Europe for their own fashion trends. While the Japanese were fascinated with Ametica and all things America, for clothing most wanted to follow trends in France and Italy which were know for women's fashions. We can not yet substantiate this process, but we believe that in this process, Japanese mothers were also exposed to Italian an Frencg children's styles. As they largely chose their children's clothes with little input from the child, they also looked to Europe for children's fashions. American mothers also looked to Europe, but American boys had more to say about their clothes and largely rejected Euoropean fashions. While Japanese teenage boys and many men tend to take fashion cues from the States, Japanese women tend to look to Europe, particularly France and Italy. Thus in the late 1950s and early 1960s when families for the first time had enough money to afford dressier clothes, Japanese women chose for their sons clothes that (as HBC clearly demonstrates) were in fashion on the Continent--short, snug shorts, often paired with white knee socks. These were styles that were being worn in Europe during the early 1950s. A reader writes, "Japan was occupied by the US from 1945 to 1952. Wouldn't American fashions have come in with the Japanese youngsters at this time? This is when baseball became popular in Japan." [HBC response: Yes you would think so, and the baseball cap clearly appears at this time. We believe that this was an item that the boys may have demanded themselves. But clearly American fashions like long pants blue jeans did not catch on in Japan in the 1950s. Some boys got jeans, but many did not. And the ones that got them did not wear them to school. American boys at the time wore long pants often jeans. I think what happened is that Japanese mothers heard a lot about Paris and Milan as world fashion centers and when they looked for dresses there they were exposed to French and Italian children's clothes. That of course is just a
theory as to what happened. I'm open to alternative explantions.]
Japanese men believing boys needed "toughening". While mothers may have chosen the fashion, it was Japanese men in their role as fathers or as school principals who usually insisted that boys wear short pants straight through the winter. Japanese are given to worry that the younger generation is becoming soft, and the wearing of shorts and the concomitant discomfort during cold weather was often cited approvingly as a way of keeping boys from going too soft. One HBC correspondent notes that English boys with knee socks, long flannel shorts and coats often had little actual skin exposed, but this was emphatically not the case in Japan. Many school uniforms (see discussion below) seem almost deliberately designed to expose as much of a boy's legs as possible; some not even allowing knee socks. Some schools that do not have uniforms nonetheless require short pants year round, and often insist (even today when the fashions have changed--see below) that the shorts be very short. It was ery common in Tokyo in the 1980s to see tall boys of 11 and 12 on bitterly cold winter days shivering in extremely short corduroy or wool shorts. They might have been wearing thick sweaters or even down jackets, but their legs would be blue with cold.
Many Japanese believe strongly in the healthy and
purifying effects of exposure to cold. It
is tempting to regard the practice of forcing Japanese boys to wear shorts
in cold weather as verging on the sadistic, and there is no question but
that a streak of more or less unacknowledged sadism exists in Japanese
culture, particularly in relations between younger and older males ("their
mothers liked it" may be an adequate explanation in other countries for
the wearing of shorts, but not in Japan). But there is also a deeply held
belief that cold is postively good for you, as anyone who has ever been
involved in any of the Japanese martial arts knows. Pilgrims regularly
stand under freezing waterfalls in the midwinter, shrines have their
so-called "naked festivals" where hordes of drunken young men clad in
nothing but loin cloths carry huge portable altars through the snow, and
Japanese parents are encouraged by their schools not to "overdress" their
children. This applies to girls as well as boys, although there seems
more zealousness in enforcing shorts on boys in the belief that they need
to train their bodies to resist cold. There is much wringing of hands in
Japan today about the deleterious effects of heating and air-conditioning
on children.
Shorts are thought to project energy and vitality. A
pretigious department store noted in a pamphlet complete with pictures
aimed at parents worried on how to
dress their children for placement interviews at prestigious primary
schools. The store suggested that they would naturally want to put boys
into "genki ga ippai no hanzubon" (literally, "short pants full of energy").
The standard response on seeing a boy wearing shorts in cold weather is
"wakai desu ne" (how nice and young) or "genki desu ne" ("how peppy and
energetic"). Traditional Japanese culture places high value on energy and
enthusisam, particularly among boys and young men, and shorts are thus
valued not so much because they are "cute" as was true for those American
mothers who managed to succeed in putting their (usually complaining and
resistant) sons into short pantss, but because they are thought to project
youthful energy and vitality.
An American HBC contributor who has provded these fascinating insights
into Japanese boys clothes, says that "on browsing through the personal
accounts HBC and recalling the taunts I
endured as a an American boy on the occasions when I wore shorts to school, I
I'm struck by how American boys resisted shorts because they were thought
of as "sissy"; of how British boys resisted shorts after a certain age
because they felt short trousers pegged them as little boys. In Japan
since all boys shifted out of shorts at the same time, I don't believe
there was the ambiguity that made the transition difficult for some British
boys. And because shorts were valued not so much because they made boys
look cute but because they were thought to make boys look energetic, I
don't believe there was much resistance from the boys to shorts per se.
(Although I have lived in Japan for nearly 20 years and spent a year in a
Japanese high school--decked out in the black serge uniform--I am not
Japanese. I hope to read some accounts by Japanese contributors and if
I've gotten things wrong--particuarly with respect to how individual boys felt about wearing shorts--I'm eager to be corrected). One Japanese friend told me that in her primary school (given her age, this would have been the early 70s) two boys would switch to long pants when the weather got cold; they were regarded as odd and sissyish. Even in the 1980s when a lot of older boys began donnning jeans in the winter, you could see that it was often the tougher, more macho looking boys who stuck with shorts (sometimes matched with simple T-shirts or even tank tops in near-freezing weather). I once asked a big, tough 11-year old who would have terrified me when I was his age why he was wearing shorts on a cold winter day. He said long pants were hot and uncomfortable."
We note that Japanese boys continued to wear the rather long style of shorts pants immediately afyetyhr War. While longer baggy styles prevailed in the 1940s and the 1950s, by the early sixties, hemlines began to climb; by the early 1980s, short pants were as short as they could possibly be, leaving not just the knees but pretty much the entire leg bare. We see no significan difference for several years. Then in the early 1950s, trim cut shorts bgin to appear. We are not sure precisely when this occurrd, probably about 1953 or 54. Short pants themselves were uniformly short until the early 1990s, but they came in a wide variety of styles and fabrics. In the summer, light colored cotton, linen blends and khaki were popular; darker wool, flannel and corduroy prevailed in the winter. For casual wear, denim shorts were popular year round. In the mid to late 70s, when American boys started
wearing short basketball and soccer type shorts, Japanese boys for the
first time followed the American fashion. These athletic shorts were
strictly casual wear and often paired with long striped tube socks, as
was true in the States.
Movies can be a good reflection of contemporary fashion trends. One especially important series of films made beginning in 1969 was the Tora-san films. They chronicled the trials and tribulations of a Japanese family over time. One Japanese reader tells us that the boys pictured in the various films wear long pants much more than was common at the time. He does remember one film in which the boy who attends a non uniform school wears long pants in the winter, short pants with kneesocks in the spring, ankle socks during the early summer, and tank tops in August when it becomes really hot.
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