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Hair tangle
Jul. 1st, 2007 11:31 pmAs part of my usual instead-of-packing flurry of behavior just before vacation, I started to try to assemble information about traditional Japanese hairstyles.
There is *way* too much information about traditional Japanese hairstyles. I quickly gave up trying to take notes and have simply been assembling a local textfile of pasted text and the URLs they came from. I'm starting to think that at some point, the only way to be able to deal with everything is to jot things down on index cards while finding some way to multiply index them either alphabetically, by historical period, or by general subtype-- according to one source, all ten zillion women's hairstyles fell into one of three different general types: the shimada, a divided chignon worn by unmarried women; the marumage (aka katsuyama), a single undivided chignon worn by married women; and the hyogo, which divided the hair into two symmetrical, freestanding lobes that resemble a pair of wings.
However, this leaves out another general class of styles where the hair was allowed to hang down, whether in the long Heian waterfall or in Taisho schoolgirls' pairs of braids. There were also some early-Tokugawa styles with stiff elevated loops, which look like something Queen Amidala might wear, but it's possible that those qualify as hyogo depending on the exact definition.
Gaaaaah.
There is *way* too much information about traditional Japanese hairstyles. I quickly gave up trying to take notes and have simply been assembling a local textfile of pasted text and the URLs they came from. I'm starting to think that at some point, the only way to be able to deal with everything is to jot things down on index cards while finding some way to multiply index them either alphabetically, by historical period, or by general subtype-- according to one source, all ten zillion women's hairstyles fell into one of three different general types: the shimada, a divided chignon worn by unmarried women; the marumage (aka katsuyama), a single undivided chignon worn by married women; and the hyogo, which divided the hair into two symmetrical, freestanding lobes that resemble a pair of wings.
However, this leaves out another general class of styles where the hair was allowed to hang down, whether in the long Heian waterfall or in Taisho schoolgirls' pairs of braids. There were also some early-Tokugawa styles with stiff elevated loops, which look like something Queen Amidala might wear, but it's possible that those qualify as hyogo depending on the exact definition.
Gaaaaah.