I stumbled across this book while browsing through Overdrive and knew that I was going to read it someday because it’s related to the World of Genji project I’m doing. I kind of put it off for a few weeks because it looked a bit intimidating, but I told Pan Pan about it and basically guilted myself into reading this.

And it is such an informative book! I read through it twice – once to get a feel of a thing and once for notes – and I still think that there’s a lot I’m missing. To sum the book briefly, it looks at the history of beauty in China and Japan through the centuries by examining artistic and literary portrayals of beautiful women.

I ended up with twelve pages of notes, so this is obviously full of content. I really appreciated that the author referred to so many pictures and writings because it made it a bit easier to understand what was going on. Some interesting points I picked up include:

• “Whether or not people of a different race appear beautiful is less a matter of judgement based on looks and styles than a product of one’s evaluation of that race’s culture.” – I agree! We think that beauty is universal, but that’s a pretty recent development (probably due to the Internet spreading one dominant form of culture)
• The purpose of makeup is, “while anticipating society’s aesthetic eye, to show oneself according to its taste or expectation. Thus, makeup becomes meaningful only within a community.” – This also made sense. A lot of makeup trends are popular within a subculture, or perhaps to deliberately show non-affiliation of a particular group.
• Japanese standards of beauty are a bit more complicated to discern because they had two types of writing – Chinese writing which was heavily influenced by Chinese turns of phrase regarding beauty, and Japanese narrative (e.g. The Tale of Genji) which had less of such constraints. That said, Chinese culture was huge during the Heian era, with scenes depicting Chinese culture drawn on screens so everyone would have some level of familiarity, and thus be influenced, by Chinese standards of beauty.
• Bo Juyi has a poem where he mentions a type of crying makeup, which reminds me a bit of igari makeup, where you emphasis puffy red eyes, although in this case, to suggest a hangover. But it does draw on traditions where being sick was associated with being beautiful, which just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun.

In terms of credentials, the author Cho Kyo (張競) was born in China and moved to Japan. He’s currently teaching comparative culture and the history East Asian cultural exchange at Meiji University (according to his specialist topic, 専攻分野, in his page), so I think that he has solid credentials to talk about the history of beauty in both countries.

All that said, this book is definitely very academic in tone. Not only is there a lot of information, the writing style also leans towards the academic. That makes it a little hard to read at times, but it is definitely rewarding if you’re interested in this topic.

Overall, I found this to be a fascinating book. While I don’t think it’s a general introduction to the history of beauty standards in China and Japan (I’ve heard a few lectures on the topic which really helped when reading), it’s something you should definitely check out if you have a general idea of how beauty has been viewed in China and Japan and want to find out more.

Featured Image: Photo by Sam Beasley on Unsplash