Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/117

 MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE

MILITARY EPOCH (Continued)

URNING to the costumes of the era, we find conservatism and change side by side. One of the vagaries of fashion was a rule that the skirt of an official's upper garment should be long in proportion to his rank. In the middle of the thirteenth century it was considered de rigueur that a minister of State should have an eight-foot train; a senior councillor, seven feet; a junior councillor, six feet ; and so on down to officials lower than the fourth grade who had to content themselves with four feet. At the zenith of this fashion a prime minister might be seen dragging after him a train twelve feet long and managing it with grace and address acquired by arduous practice. Military men, however, did not obey this monstrous custom, prototype of the modern Occidental Drawing-room. The Court nobles and civil officials enjoyed a monopoly of it,—the men who, deeming themselves best attired when they resembled women most closely, shaved their eyebrows, 91