Japanese women's legs telltale signs of differing walks of life
Friday, 10-Oct-2003 5:00AM PDT
Story from AFP / Raphaelle Marcadal
Copyright 2003 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
TOKYO, Oct 10 (AFP) - The sight of pigeon-toed, bow-legged young Japanese women, with a stomping, unsteady gait due to their high-heels, is arguably one of the first things about the country that strikes foreign visitors.
But Japanese women's legs testify to cultural, historical and fashion codes behind the cliche, as illustrated by an exhibition by a French photographer devoted to the subject.
"When you take photos of someone standing up, your eye is drawn to the fashion and you don't notice the postures," said Claude Estebe, an associate researcher at Tokyo's Teikyo University who created the exhibition.
"In Japan, there is total control of the upper part of the body, the face and hands, but there is a subconscious relaxation of the lower half. The legs really speak to you," said Estebe, 44, who describes himself as a photo-historian.
All candid shots snatched mainly in Tokyo, Estebe's pictures attempt to show the "cultural permanence" of Japanese women's postures, among which the pigeon-toed "uchimata" is most commonly seen on the nation's streets.
"In France, when a child walks with its feet turned inwards, it is systematically corrected, but in Japan, society encourages women to perpetuate this infantile posture," Estebe told AFP, adding that "in all of Asia, only Japanese women walk like that".
Traditional Japanese paintings of the 1930s celebrated "uchimata", elevating it to the height of elegance.
Kimono makers also recommend the "uchimata" gait because "its shows off the garment to better effect," said Francois Lachaud, a researcher at the Ecole francaise de l'Extreme-Orient (EFEO - French School of Far East Studies) in Kyoto.
Asked which image, in her opinion, was most representative of Japanese women, Naoko Arisama who teaches design at Tokyo's Sugino Fashion University, pointed to a photograph of a young woman kneeling down with the lower half of her legs bent back against the outside of her thighs.
"This "pettanko" way of kneeling is typically Japanese," she said.
Japanese have a wealth of precise expressions to describe either standing or seated posture, underlying the significance attached to deportment.
"Ganimata" describes feet splayed outward like the hands of a clock at 10 minutes to 2:00, while "yanki" is shorthand for a laid-back or slouching posture adopted by many young Japanese.
The traditional, formal way for women to kneel on tatami straw floors -- which, if practised from a young age causes bow-leggedness -- is known as "seiza suwari". Scuffing the sole of one's shoes on the ground while walking is "suriashi."
"Everything goes so fast in Japan: fashions change every three months but people's physical attitudes have remained virtually the same for centuries," said Estebe, who has published books of photography on geishas and the last of the samurai.
"Slenderness is also something which has hardly changed in the traditional Japanese concept of beauty," Lachaud said, as opposed to China where a degree of "plumpness" in a woman used to be more highly prized.
The way of emphasizing such traditionally valued attributes has changed beyond recognition, however.
Today adolescent Japanese girls wear their school skirts as short as possible and their knee-length white socks concertinaed down around their ankles to make their legs appear longer and more slender "like American girls' legs", the Asahi weekly magazine noted. --
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