色の白いは七難隠す
Whilst the emergence of mass marketed skin lightening products was an early 20th-century phenomenon, the Japanese desire for blemish-free fair skin is as old as the hills.
In other words, whiteness has been an aesthetic ideal for many centuries. In the Nara period (710-794), for example, women belonging to the upper class would powder their faces with oshiri to look more beautiful.
There's even a word for this: bihaku.
And there's also an ancient proverb which promises that women with less than perfect features can still look good providing they're pale enough: iro no shiroi wa shichinan kakusu ('white skin covers the seven flaws').
It's important to note, however, that for the Japanese, whiteness signifies holiness as well as beauty. And so the Japanese woman's preference for fair skin is not the result of western imperialism; it emerges from within Japanese culture - or, if you prefer, Japanese racism - itself.
That the Japanese regard their whiteness of skin as uniquely different from that of other peoples, is made clear by the writer Jun'ichirō Tanizaki in the following astonishing passages:
"From ancient times we have considered white skin more elegant, more beautiful than dark skin, and yet somehow this whiteness of ours differs from that of the white races. Taken individually, there are Japanese who are whiter than Westerners and Westerners who are darker than Japanese, but their whiteness and darkness is not the same. [...] For the Japanese complexion, no matter how white, is tinged by a slight cloudiness." [1]
Thus it is that Japanese women resorted to cosmetics:
"Every bit of exposed flesh - even their backs and arms - they covered with a thick coat of white. Still they could not efface the darkness that lay below their skin. It was as plainly visible as dirt at the bottom of a pool of pure water. Between the fingers, around the nostils, on the nape of the neck, along the spine - about these places especially dark, almost dirty, shadows gathered. But the skin of the Westerners, even those of a darker complexion, had a limpid glow. Nowhere were they tainted [...] From the tops of their heads to the tips of their fingers the whiteness was pure and unadulterated. Thus it is that when one of us goes among a group of Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper. The sight offends even our own eyes and leaves none too pleasant a feeling." [2]
Tanizaki concludes that rather than become self-loathing and ashamed of their impurity, the Japanese chose to display the cloudiness of their skin to their best advantage and sink themselves into the shadows, with whom they develop a profound and complex relationship:
"If whiteness was to be indispensible to supreme beauty, then for us there was no other way, nor do I find this objectionable. The white races are fair-haired, but our hair is dark; so nature taught us the laws of darkness, which we instinctively used to turn a yellow skin white." [3]
And nothing makes the whiteness of a Japanese woman's face look whiter than supernatural green lips and black teeth:
"I know of nothing whiter than the face of a young girl in the wavering shadow of a lantern, her teeth now and then as she smiles shining a lacquered black through lips like elfin fire. It is whiter than the whitest white woman I can imagine. The whiteness of the white woman is clear, tangible, familiar, it is not this other-worldly whiteness." [4]
Notes
[1] Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker, (Leete's Island Books, 1977), pp. 31-32.
[2] Ibid., p. 32. Tanizaki, rather controversially, then adds a statement which might be seen to justify white racism:
"We can appreciate, then, the psychology that in the past caused the white races to reject the coloured races. A sensitive white person could not but be upset by the shadow that one or two coloured persons cast over a social gathering."
Of course, this remark appears in the context of a book written in praise of shadows.
[3] Ibid., p. 33.
[4] Ibid., pp. 33-34. Readers interested in knowing more about the Japanese penchant for green lips and black teeth should see the first part of this post: click here.
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