Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/122

 Towards the close of the sixteenth century girls began to tie several plies of silk cord round the waist, knotting it in graceful loops behind, and letting the ends hang low. This was the obi in embryo. Not until comparatively recent times, however, did aristocratic ladies overcome their objection to converting the girdle into a conspicuous article of apparel. In fact, up to the end of the Military epoch, namely, the close of the sixteenth century, the girdle gave no earnest of the wealth of care and taste ultimately lavished on it.

Perhaps the most noteworthy innovation of the epoch was the kami-shimo ("upper and lower"); a very simple costume, consisting of an upper garment without sleeves or plaits—a kind of square-shouldered waistcoat—and a lower in the form of straight-legged, vertically plaited trousers, having a broad waistband attached. The end of the kami was confined within the waistband of the shimo, and the two, worn above the ordinary costume, produced a marked effect of decorous stiffness and primness. They ultimately became the costume of ceremony for all men of the official and military classes. When Japan was re-opened to foreign intercourse in the nineteenth century, the kami-shimo with its pointed shoulders and divided-skirt trousers, seemed to be in almost universal use, and the aspect that its wearers presented was not unlike that of a butterfly with extended wings and an abnormally long body.