Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/169

 the rank—purple, Indian red, crimson, cherry-red, blue, mulberry, leaf-green, grass-green, and so on, in fixed gradation. Unclassed officials and commoners had to wear yellow, and servants were clothed in black. Any departure from these rules in the sense of trespassing upon the costume of a higher rank, exposed the delinquent to severe punishment. Even the number of knots on the strings of an amulet-bag was a matter of regulation, and a high official, when in full dress, carried in his hand a flat piece of ivory, fourteen or fifteen inches long, in imitation of the tablets used by Chinese statesmen for writing orders or reports.

Ladies, too, were denied the privilege of choosing fashions for themselves. It has already been shown that, in very early times, both men and women wore strings of beads on their necks, arms, and legs, and there is evidence that each sex used to fasten spring-flowers or autumn sprays in the hair by way of ornament. Why and when these customs were abandoned there is nothing to show, but it is certain that, in the Nara epoch, ladies were required to use ornaments of gold, silver, or jade for their heads, and that these ornaments generally took the shape of the natural objects for which they were substituted, though sometimes forms from the Chinese grammar of art were chosen,—as highly conventionalised dragons and clouds, tortoises and waves, or Dogs of Fo and peonies. Legislators had fur