Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/123

 Head-gear took various forms,—some quaint and ungraceful, some simple and pretty. Women, when they went abroad, wore a large hat like an inverted bowl; and when they rode on horseback they suspended from the rim of this hat a curtain from three to four feet long, or threw over the crown drapery that reached to the shoulders on either side and to the elbows behind. A much more picturesque fashion was to draw the outer garment, hoodlike, over the head, leaving the face alone exposed. A hood independent of the garment was also worn, and in cold weather, or when concealment was desirable, this hood could be made to envelop the face so that the eyes only remained visible. Men, too, adopted this fashion at times. In the streets of Kyōtō there might also be observed girls wearing pyramidal caps about eighteen inches high, looking like large spirals of horizontally twisted linen. These were the Phrynes of the time. The official head-gear for men continued to be a black-lacquered cap, bound on the top of the head—which it made no pretence of fitting—and shaped like a legless and armless easy-chair with or without a jug-handle excrescence pendent to the shoulders behind. Another less ceremonious and commoner shape resembled a small cone with its base elongated behind; and the most aristocratic form of all, that worn by the Shōgun imself, may be compared to an Occidental gentleman's "bell-topper," elongated, deprived