Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/167

 Japan with all the best products of Asiatic skill, were deemed too costly for purposes of personal adornment. This extravagant tendency received its first impulse in the middle of the seventh century when, as part of the reforms and re-organisations consequent on the abolition of the patriarchal system and the assumption of administrative autonomy by the Emperor, the custom of employing hats to distinguish official grades was imported from China. The designing of these hats constituted quite a legislative occupation, and the story of the changes they underwent is bewildering. One excellent sovereign seems to have been reduced to a state of despairing recklessness by sumptuary problems, for he issued a decree declaring that everybody might wear anything he pleased. Other monarchs, however, grappled with the question, and it was not until the beginning of the eighth century, just before the commencement of the Nara epoch, that the many-hued hats of China were exchanged for a sober head-gear of uniform colour—silk gauze covered with black lacquer—better adapted to the artistic instincts of the Japanese. It must not be imagined that these finally evolved hats were intended to discharge any head-covering function; they were as innocent of such purpose as is the extravagant head-gear of fashionable ladies in the fin-du-siècle Occident. The hat, supposed to have the shape of a