Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/118

JAPAN painted their cheeks, and blackened their teeth to achieve the likeness.

It was in this period that the habit of shaving the crown of the head came into vogue. The statement does not apply to persons adopting the priesthood and receiving the tonsure as a mark of their retirement from secular life, but to the people at large. Court nobles and civil officials, however, did not in this epoch adopt the crown-shaving habit. They wore their hair long, and gathered it in a bunch with the ends evenly clipped,—the "tea-switch style," as they called it, because of its resemblance to the bamboo mixer used for stirring the powdered-tea beverage. This queue was bound with a strand of twisted paper, the colour of the paper being determined by the rank of the wearer. The Shōgun wore a vermilion strand; nobles and officials entitled to enter the audience hall in the Palace, employed purple, and officials not possessing that privilege, white. It was the military men that inaugurated the custom of shaving the crown, not for the sake of appearance, but because the weight and heat of the helmet suggested removal of the hair. At first they confined themselves to thinning the hair over the temples and tasselling the portion of it that remained. Next they shaved the crown, and, when not in armour, wore false hair arranged so as to hang in short locks over the forehead. Then, finally, the bald crown came to be an honoured mark of the soldier, and was 92