Making a Haori and a rant about the beauty of Transitioning

Good Sunday good folk! 

I am currently taking a break as quite a lot has happened recently which I am still waiting to pass for the time being. So I decided to finish a project that has sat in my project box for a while and make a haori from deadstock fabric. Have you seen how nice this deadstock fabric is though!?

 

Taken by myself (2022) Kaguyas Chest

The sleeves are 75 finished, I'm still trying to get the configuration right with the rest of my torso, which is proving a bit of a pain given that all I have leftover is around 30cm of the right fabric. For anyone interested this took 2 old dresses to make  and looks almost more of a Dochugi length than a Haori, but the fabric is really adorable so it's fine.

Im planning to embroider the back, but Im still looking for the right motifs. They'll be drawn from the history of British and Japanese inter-cultural history. I think theyll include:

• Chalkboard with Poole Gakuin written in English
• Frank Morley Fletcher Painting
• Hiking stick
• Yokohama Bluff
• A Donation Pot
• Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation (1894)
• Kimono Cabinet (1901)
• Sadayakkos Hamlet flower crown (1903)
• Noh mask
• Invitation to Lady Arnolds Afternoon Tea
• A cat
• Japan in Pictures (1904)
• Kwaidan Cover Art (1904)
• Cover of the  Daehan Maeil Sinbo (1904)
• A Wedding Ring
• Citron fruit
• Ama and Jewel Tsuba from Japanese Treasure Tales (1906)
• A collection of books in a series
• A brown Mingei pot
• A crane
• A letter addressed to Ozaki
• An illustrators pen
• Sculptors carving tools
• A newspaper
• Budokwai Logo
• Jujitsu uniform
• An Umbrella
• A paper parasol
• A watercolour by Kokki Miyake
• Prints by Kamisaka Sekka
• Beginning of Lady Reading (1906) by Ishibashi Kazunori
• A love letter to Hart-Synnot (1906)
• Yoshio Markino print (1907)
• Renee Viviens hat
• 2cnd place ribbon for the Surrey Brooklands motor race (1907)
• Drooping Wisteria
• Sansoms rounded glasses
• Aesthetic Hand fan
• Ticker tape machine
• Japan British Exhibition Postcard (1910)
• Edith Margaret Garruds Hat from the Sketch (1910)
• Red Bridges
• Most Honourable Order of the Bath medallion
• Stone lantern
• Kakemono
• Bamboo garden feature
• Haikara-san
• Taihaku blossom
• Fossils
• Tomimoto Kenkichi pottery
• Bernard Leach pottery
• Clotted cream knife
• Ryuson Chuzo Matsuyama print
• Pottery shard from the Jomon period with label 'to Scotland'
• Butterflies from China, Japan Corea (1912)
• Wilson Kabu and Kamidana
• Titanic Letterhead (1914)
• A spoiled Buddha (1919)
• Blue Hakama
• Kawai Kanjiro pottery
• Thomas Baty's wig
• Charles William Bartlett print
• Male ballet uniform
• Moga
• 73 Harcourt Terraces Conservatory
• Sempills Plane
• A bottle of Nikka Whisky 
• Sen Yans Devotion (1924)
• Scotch JMT-3100
• An Omelette on a book
• Design plans for the Yamato (1937)
• Upturned hat and a sign reading 'Prime Minister’s son – penniless'

Cerasus Lannesiana 'Taihaku' Ingram (2011, CC3.0) Arashiyama

Transitory Beauty Rant 

These will follow the Heian practice (if I recall correctly) of omitting human figures due to the aesthetic sensibilities of Japanese Buddhism. The train of though runs that to live as a Buddha, we must end our relation with Dukkha. And to end dukkha, the spiritual practitioner must relinquish their desires related to Dukkha. Their fleshy meat vessels known as bodies had to be cleansed so to speak of the mortal desire for vanity and covetousness, as these were material pursuits which was taught in Buddism to bring longterm pain, or Dukkha as these things did not allow the practicer to find the non-self. Thus the reduction of coveting and vanity or consumerism would help to end Dukkha and to attain nirvana. This of course comes from Mujyou, the knowledge that all things will disintegrate eventually. It was the acceptance of this fact and how to respond aesthetically which 'cultivated' aesthetics spent and spend their time pondering over.

This need to sever Dukkha and cultivate beauty developed into part of Mono-no-aware, which led to the popularization of the omittance of the human body, as the human body was full of dukkha, and nobody wants to wear Dukkha, so Dukkha related things were a no-no. This notion of worldly and unworldly beauty, in the pursuit of the realisation of ones part in nature as a non-self, is why Kimono often have very few humans on them. Lady Ise and pals had an appreciation that the fleshy meat vessel is finite, and that cultivated beauty is to be found in the passage of time, and thus you end up with motifs of objects from stories; ie Genji-Mon[1]; rather than reminders of Dukkha. Wholesome tales of non-self and relinquishing Dukka in other words. You may also want to see the post on how it became acceptable for the development of the Bijin figure. 

These two academic theories (on mortality and the pursuit of beauty) came about from the Japanese reaction to the role the human form played in Buddhist art and through Buddhist frameworks. It works under Mono-no-aware in the understanding of the relation of the body to its place as and in nature. In the Heian era, it was said the body must strive to have control over worldly desires for nirvana attainment, and by the Edo period that the body was part of life anyway and thus its pursuit as a beautiful aesthetic was simply another work towards understanding acceptance of the human condition. 

TLDR: Essentially, it is the transformative understanding of how the body fits into the natural world and how non-self is attained. It is the use of objects to draw attention to the emotion of these tales which the Heian mono-no-aware evokes which I rather more appreciate than the later Edo justification of Ukiyo-E, which whilst I get is part of the human condition is a bit of a copout for me considering it didnt even come close to Rationalist thinking as in the Occident that the Body was simply divine or almighty anyway and lowering beauty to simply base desires of lust and gluttony. Which yes there are many kinds of romantic and erotic love, but it never really leads to an exploration of platonic vs erotic vs aromanticism or any other form which love takes, and so for me is a rather boring academic framework. Even the Greeks and Romans the stuffy old men had greater vocabularies than just 'I like to watch patriarchy unfold on LGBTQIA narratives', looking at Ihara Saikaku here as well. Rant completamented.

Bibliography

[1] See patterns #3

[2] Are some of these references exceptionally vague and only a nod to if you know you know. Yep. 445 years. 169 years. Just a small difference of 276 years Mr Long. 100 years for Mr Loti.

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